It was horribly, unbearably hot.
He limped up to the barrier, felt to make sure that it was still there. It was. He stood watching the Roller for a while; it was keeping a safe distance from the barrier, out of effective stone-throwing range. It was moving around back there, doing something. He couldn’t tell what it was doing.
Once it stopped moving, came a little closer, and seemed to concentrate its attention on him. Again Carson had to fight off a wave of nausea. He threw a stone at it; the Roller retreated and went back to whatever it had been doing before.
At least he could make it keep its distance. And, he thought bitterly, a lot of good that did him. Just the same, he spent the next hour or two gathering stones of suitable size for throwing, and making several piles of them near his side of the barrier.
His throat burned now. It was difficult for him to think about anything except water. But he had to think about other things: about getting through that barrier, under or over it, getting at that red sphere and killing it before this place of heat and thirst killed him.
The barrier went to the wall upon either side, but how high, and how far under the sand?
For a moment, Carson’s mind was too fuzzy to think out how he could find out either of those things. Idly, sitting there in the hot sand—and he didn’t remember sitting down—he watched a blue lizard crawl from the shelter of one bush to the shelter of another.
From under the second bush, it looked out at him.
Carson grinned at it, recalling the old story of the desert-colonists on Mars, taken from an older story of Earth—‘Pretty soon you get so lonesome you find yourself talking to the lizards, and then not so long after that you find the lizards talking back to you…”
He should have been concentrating, of course, on how to kill the Roller, but instead he grinned at the lizard and said, “Hello, there.”