“Hurt,” said the other lizard. “Hurt. Kill. Kill.”
Carson understood. He took the flint knife from his belt and killed the tortured creature. The live lizard scurried off.
Carson turned back to the barrier. He leaned his hands and head against it and watched the Roller, far back, working on the new catapult.
“I could get that far,” he thought, “if I could get through. If I could get through, I might win yet. It looks weak, too. I might—”
And then there was another reaction of hopelessness, when pain sapped his will and he wished that he were dead, envying the lizard he’d just killed. It didn’t have to live on and suffer.
He was pushing on the barrier with the flat of his hands when he noticed his arms, how thin and scrawny they were. He must really have been here a long time, for days, to get as thin as that.
For a while he was almost hysterical again, and then came a time of deep calm and thought.
The lizard he had just killed had crossed the barrier, still alive. It had come from the Roller’s side; the Roller had pulled off its legs and then tossed it contemptuously at him and it had come through the barrier.
It hadn’t been dead, merely unconscious. A live lizard couldn’t go through the barrier, but an unconscious one could. The barrier was not a barrier, then, to living flesh, but to conscious flesh. It was a mental protection, a mental hazard.
With that thought, Carson started crawling along the barrier to make his last desperate gamble, a hope so forlorn that only a dying man would have dared try it.