He spoke aloud, knowing that although the words would be meaning-less 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.
There had to be some way of getting through the barrier, or of killing through the barrier.