Arena Read online

  Arena

  by

  Fredric Brown

  Carson opened his eyes, and found himself looking upwards into a flickering blue dimness.

  It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and then pushed himself up to a sitting position.

  'I'm crazy,' he thought. 'Crazy — or dead — or something.' The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn't any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn't the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area — somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldn't see to the top of it.

  He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down on to his bare leg. Bare?

  He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue with sand wherever sand had touched it. Elsewhere his body was white.

  He thought: then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I'd be blue also. But I'm white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand: there isn't any blue sand. There isn't any place like this place I'm in.

  Sweat was running down in his eyes. It was hot, hotter than hell. Only hell — the hell of the ancients — was supposed to be red and not blue.

  But if this place wasn't hell, what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this wasn't Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from ... From?

  It came back to him then, where he'd been: in the little one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto, scouting a scant million miles to one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array there to intercept the Outsiders.

  That sudden strident ringing of the alarm bell when the rival scouter — the Outsider ship — had come within range of his detectors!

  No one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like, or from what far galaxy they came, other than that it was in the general direction of the Pleiades.

  First, there had been sporadic raids on Earth colonies and outposts; isolated battles between Earth patrols and small groups of Outsider spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never resulting in the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a raided colony ever survived to describe the Outsiders who had left the ships, if indeed they had left them.

  Not too serious a menace, at first, for the raids had not been numerous or destructive. And individually, the ships had proved slightly inferior in armament to the best of Earth's fighters, although somewhat superior in speed and maneuvrability. A sufficient edge in speed, in fact, to give the Outsiders their choice of running or fighting, unless surrounded.

  Nevertheless, Earth had prepared for serious trouble, building the mightiest armada of all time. It had been waiting now, that armada, for a long time. Now the showdown was coming.

  Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of a mighty fleet of the Outsiders. Those scouts had never come back, but their radiotronic messages had. And now Earth's armada, all ten thousand ships and half-million fighting spacemen, was out there, outside Pluto's orbit, waiting to intercept and battle to the death.

  And an even battle it was going to be, judging by the advance reports of the men of the far picket line who had given their lives to report — before they had died — on the size and strength of the alien fleet.

  Anybody's battle, with the mastery of the solar system hanging in the balance, on an even chance. A last and only chance, for Earth and all her colonies lay at the utter mercy of the Outsiders if they ran that gauntlet — Oh yes. Bob Carson remembered now. He remembered that strident bell and his leap for the control panel. His frenzied fumbling as he strapped himself into the seat. The dot in the visiplate that grew larger. The dryness of his mouth. The awful knowledge that this was it for him, at least, although the main fleets were still out of range of one another.

  This, his first taste of battle! Within three seconds or less he'd be victorious, or a charred cinder. One hit completely took care of a lightly armed and armoured one-man craft like a scouter.

  Frantically — as his lips shaped the word 'One' — he worked at the controls to keep that growing dot centred on the crossed spiderwebs of the visiplate. His hands doing that, while his right foot hovered over the pedal that would fire the bolt. The single bolt of concentrated hell that had to hit — or else. There wouldn't be time for any second shot.

  'Two.' He didn't know he'd said that, either. The dot in the visiplate wasn't a dot now. Only a few thousand miles away, it showed up in the magnification of the plate as though it were only a few hundred yards off. It was a fast little scouter, about the size of his.

  An alien ship, all right!

  'Thr — ' His foot touched the bolt-release pedal.

  And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the crosshairs. Carson punched keys frantically, to follow.

  For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung after it, he saw it again, diving straight towards the ground.

  The ground?

  It was an optical illusion of some sort. It had to be: that planet — or whatever it was — that now covered the visiplate couldn't be there. Couldn't possibly! There wasn't any planet nearer than Neptune three billion miles away — with Pluto on the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.

  His detectors! They hadn't shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions, and still didn't.

  It couldn't be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.

  In his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot the Outsider ship. He fired the front breaking rockets, and even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, fired full right for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and held them down, knowing that he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that sudden would black him out for a moment.

  It did black him out.

  And that was all. Now he was sitting in hot blue sand, stark naked but otherwise unhurt. No sign of his spaceship and — for that matter — no sign of space. That curve overhead wasn't a sky, whatever else it was.

  He scrambled to his feet.

  Gravity seemed a little more than Earth-normal. Not much more.

  Flat sand stretching away, a few scrawny bushes in clumps here and there. The bushes were blue, too, but in varying shades, some lighter than the blue of the sand, some darker.

  Out from under the nearest bush ran a little thing that was like a lizard, except that it had more than four legs. It was blue, too. Bright blue. It saw him and ran back again under the bush.

  He looked up again, trying to decide what was overhead. It wasn't exactly a roof, but it was dome-shaped. It flickered and was hard to look at. But definitely, it curved down to the ground, to the blue sand, all around him.

  He wasn't far from being under the centre of the dome. At a guess, it was a hundred yards to the nearest wall, if it was a wall. It was as though a blue hemisphere of something about two hundred and fifty yards in circumference was inverted over the flat expanse of the sand.

  And everything blue, except one object. Over near a far curving wall there was a red object. Roughly spherical, it seemed to be about a yard in diameter. Too far for him to see clearly through the flickering blueness.

  But, unaccountably, he shuddered.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead, or tried to, with the back of his hand.

  Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked towards that red thing?

  A dream? No, one didn't go to sleep and dream in the midst of a battle in space.<
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  Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn't be a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red horror.

  Then he heard the voice.

  Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from nowhere or everywhere.

  'Through spaces and dimensions wandering,' rang the words in his mind, 'and in this space and this time, I find two peoples about to exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfill its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I say this must not happen.'

  'Who ... what are you?' Carson didn't say it aloud, but the question formed itself in his brain.

  'You would not understand completely. I am — 'There was a pause as though the voice sought — in Carson's brain — for a word that wasn't there, a word he didn't know. 'I am the end of evolution of a race so old the time cannot be expressed in words that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal.

  'An entity such as your primitive race might become' — again the groping for a word — 'time from now. So might the race you call, in your mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must survive. One must progress and evolve.'

  'One?' thought Carson. 'Mine or...

  'It is in my power to stop the war, to send the Outsiders back to their galaxy. But they would return, or your race would sooner or later follow them there. Only by remaining in this space and time to intervene constantly could I prevent them from destroying one another, and I cannot remain.

  'So I shall intervene now. I shall destroy one fleet completely without loss to the other. One civilization shall thus survive.'

  Nightmare. This had to be nightmare, Carson thought. But he knew it wasn't.

  It was too mad, too impossible, to be anything but real.

  He didn't dare ask the question — which? But his thoughts asked it for him.

  'The stronger shall survive,' said the voice. 'That I cannot — and would not — change. I merely intervene to make it a complete victory, not' — groping again — 'not Pyrrhic victory to a broken race.

  'From the outskirts of the not-yet battle I plucked two individuals, you and an Outsider. I see from your mind that, in your early history of nationalisms, battles between champions to decide issues between races were not unknown.

  'You and your opponent are here pitted against one another, naked and unarmed, under conditions equally unfamiliar to you both, equally unpleasant to you both. There is no time limit, for here there is no time. The survivor is the champion of his race. That race survives.'

  'But — ' Carson's protest was too inarticulate for expression, but the voice answered it.

  'It is fair. The conditions are such that the accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier. You will understand. Brain-power and courage will be more important than strength. Most especially courage, which is the will to survive.'

  'But while this goes on, the fleets will — '

  'No, you are in another space, another time. For as long as you are here, time stands still in the universe you know. I see you wonder whether this place is real. It is, and it is not. As I — to your limited understanding — am and am not real. My existence is mental and not physical. You saw me as a planet; it could have been as a dust-mote or a sun.

  'But to you this place is now real. What you suffer here will be real. And if you die here,your death will be real. If you die,your failure will be the end of your race. That is enough for you to know.'

  And then the voice was gone.

  Again he was alone, but not alone. For as Carson looked up, he saw that the red thing, the sphere of horror that he now knew was the Outsider, was rolling towards him.

  Rolling.

  It seemed to have no legs or arms that he could see, no features. It rolled across the sand with the fluid quickness of a drop of mercury. And before it, in some manner he could not understand, came a wave of nauseating hatred.

  Carson looked about him frantically. A stone, lying in the sand a few feet away, was the nearest thing to a weapon. It wasn't large, but it had sharp edges, like a slab of flint. It looked a bit like blue flint.

  He picked it up, and crouched to receive the attack. It was coming fast, faster than he could run.

  No time to think out how he was going to fight it; how anyway could he plan to battle a creature whose strength, whose characteristics, whose method of fighting he did not know? Rolling so fast, it looked more than ever like a perfect sphere.

  Ten yards away. Five. And then it stopped.

  Rather, it was stopped. Abruptly the near side of it flattened as though it had run up against an invisible wall. It bounced, actually bounced back.

  Then it rolled forward again, but more cautiously. It stopped again, at the same place. it tried again, a few yards to one side.

  Then it rolled forward again, but more cautiously. It stopped again, at the same place. It tried again, a few yards to one side.

  There was a barrier there of some sort. It clicked, then, in Carson's mind, that thought projected by the Entity who had brought them there:

  — accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier.'

  A force-field, of course. Not the Netzian Field, known to Earth science, for that glowed and emitted a crackling sound. This one was invisible, silent.

  It was a wall that ran from side to side of the inverted hemisphere; Carson didn't have to verify that himself. The Roller was doing that, rolling sideways along the barrier, seeking a break in it that wasn't there.

  Carson took half a dozen steps forward, his left hand groping out before him, and touched the barrier. It felt smooth, yielding, like a sheet of rubber rather than like glass, warm to his touch, but no warmer than the sand underfoot. And it was completely invisible, even at close range.

  He dropped the stone and put both hands against it, pushing. It seemed to yield, just a trifle, but no farther than that trifle, even when he pushed with all his weight. It felt like a sheet of rubber backed up by steel. Limited resiliency, and then firm strength.

  He stood on tiptoe and reached as high as he could and the barrier was still there.

  He saw the Roller coming back, having reached one side of the arena. That feeling of nausea hit Carson again, and he stepped back from the barrier as it went by. It didn't stop.

  But did the barrier stop at ground-level? Carson knelt down and burrowed in the sand; it was soft, light, easy to dig in. And two feet down the barrier was still there.

  The Roller was coming back again. Obviously, it couldn't find a way through at either side.

  There must be a way through, Carson thought, or else this duel is meaningless. —

  The Roller was back now, and it stopped just across the barrier, only six feet away. It seemed to be studying him although, for the life of him, Carson couldn't find external evidence of sense organs on the thing. Nothing that looked like eyes or ears, or even a mouth. There was though, he observed, a series of grooves, perhaps a dozen of them altogether, and he saw two tentacles push out from two of the grooves and dip into the sand as though testing its consistency. These were about an inch in diameter and perhaps a foot and a half long.

  The tentacles were retractable into the grooves and were kept there except when in use. They retracted when the thing rolled and seemed to have nothing to do with its method of locomotion; that, as far as Carson could judge, seemed to be accomplished by some shifting — just how he couldn't imagine — of its centre of gravity.

  He shuddered as he looked at the thing. It was alien, horribly different from anything on Earth or any of the life forms found on the other solar planets. Instinctively, he knew its mind was as alien as its body.

  If it could project that almost tangible wave of hatred, perhaps it could read his mind as well, sufficiently for his purpose.
r />   Deliberately, Carson picked up the rock that had been his only weapon, then tossed it down again in a gesture of relinquishment and raised his empty hands, palms up, before him.

  He spoke aloud, knowing that although the words would be meaningless to the creature before him, speaking them would focus his own thoughts more completely upon the message.

  'Can we not have peace between us?' he said, his voice strange in the stillness. 'The Entity who brought us here has told us what must happen if our races fight — extinction of one and weakening and retrogression of the other. The battle between them, said the Entity, depends upon what we do here. Why cannot we agree to an eternal peace — your race to its galaxy, we to ours?'

  Carson blanked out his mind to receive a reply.

  It came, and it staggered him back, physically. He recoiled several steps in sheer horror at the intensity of the lust-to-kill of the red images projected at him. For a moment that seemed eternity he had to struggle against the impact of that hatred, fighting to clear his mind of it and drive out the alien thoughts to which he had given admittance. He wanted to retch.

  His mind cleared slowly. He was breathing hard and he felt weaker, but he could think.

  He stood studying the Roller. It had been motionless during the mental duel it had so nearly won. Now it rolled a few feet to one side, to the nearest of the blue bushes. Three tentacles whipped out of their grooves and began to investigate the bush.

  'O.K.,' Carson said, 'so it's war then.' He managed a grin. 'If I got your answer straight, peace doesn't appeal to you.' And, because he was, after all, a young man and couldn't resist the impulse to be dramatic, he added, 'To the death!'

  But his voice, in that utter silence, sounded silly even to himself. It came to him, then, that this was to the death, not only his own death or that of the red spherical thing which he thought of as the Roller, but death to the entire race of one or the other of them: the end of the human race, if he failed.

  It made him suddenly very humble and very afraid to think that. With a knowledge that was above even faith, he knew that the Entity who had arranged this duel had told the truth about its intentions and its powers. The future of humanity depended upon him. It was an awful thing to realize. He had to concentrate on the situation at hand.