The Collection by Fredric Brown Read Free Book Online

had probably drawn the same
deduction about the nature of the barrier that he had. But it would come
cautiously; he would have a little time —He struck himself.
     
     
    ***
     
    Pain brought him back to consciousness, a sudden, sharp pain
in his hip that was different from the pain in his head and leg. He had,
thinking things out before he had struck himself, anticipated that very pain,
even hoped for it, and had steeled himself against awakening with a sudden
movement.
    He opened his eyes just a slit, and saw that he had guessed
rightly. The Roller was coming closer. It was twenty feet away; the pain that
had awakened him was the stone it had tossed to see whether he was alive or
dead. He lay still. It came closer, fifteen feet away, and stopped again.
Carson scarcely breathed.
    As nearly as possible, he was keeping his mind a blank, lest
its telepathic ability detect consciousness in him. And with his mind blanked
out that way, the impact of its thoughts upon his mind was shattering.
    He felt sheer horror at the alienness, the differentness of those thoughts, conveying things that he felt but could not understand
or express, because no terrestrial language had words, no terrestrial brain had
images to fit them. The mind of a spider, he thought, or the mind of a praying
mantis or a Martian sand-serpent, raised to intelligence and put in telepathic rapport with human minds, would be a homely familiar thing, compared to this.
    He understood now that the Entity had been right: Man or
Roller, the universe was not a place that could hold them both.
    Closer. Carson waited until it was only feet away, until its
clawed tentacles reached out....
    Oblivious to agony now, he sat up, raised and flung the
harpoon with all the strength that remained to him. As the Roller, deeply
stabbed by the harpoon, rolled away, Carson tried to get to his feet to run
after it. He couldn’t do that; he fell, but kept crawling.
    It reached the end of the rope, and he was jerked forward by
the pull on his wrist. It dragged him a few feet and then stopped. Carson kept
going, pulling himself towards it hand over hand along the rope. It stopped
there, tentacles trying in vain to pull out the harpoon. It seemed to shudder
and quiver, and then realized that it couldn’t get away, for it rolled back
towards him, clawed tentacles reaching out.
    Stone knife in hand, he met it. He stabbed, again and again,
while those horrid claws ripped skin and flesh and muscle from his body.
    He stabbed and slashed, and at last it was still.
     
     
    ***
     
    A bell was ringing, and it took him a while after he’d
opened his eyes to tell where he was and what it was. He was strapped into the
seat of his scouter, and the visiplate before him showed only empty space. No
Outsider ship and no impossible planet.
    The bell was the communications plate signal; someone wanted
him to switch power into the receiver. Purely reflex action enabled him to
reach forward and throw the lever.
    The face of Brander, captain of the Magellan, mother-ship
of his group of scouters, flashed into the screen. His face was pale and his
black eyes glowing with excitement.
    ‘Magellan to Carson,’ he snapped. ‘Come on in. The
fight’s over. We’ve won!’
    The screen went blank; Brander would be signalling the other
scouters of his command.
    Slowly, Carson set the controls for the return. Slowly,
unbelievingly, he unstrapped himself from the seat and went back to get a drink
at the cold-water tank. For some reason, he was unbelievably thirsty. He drank
six glasses.
    He leaned there against the wall, trying to think.
    Had it happened? He was in good health, sound,
uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his throat hadn’t
been dry.
    He pulled up his trouser leg and looked at the calf. There
was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed scar; it hadn’t been there
before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and saw that his chest and
abdomen were criss-crossed with