（外文电子版资料）Fredric Brown - Arena.pdfVIP

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, /abclit.html Arena FREDRIC BROWN This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online. 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. Im crazy, he thought. Crazy —or dead —or something. The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasnt any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets. Blue sand under a blue dome that wasnt the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area —somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldnt 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 Id be blue also. But Im white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand: there isnt any blue sand. There isnt any place like this place Im 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 wasnt hell, what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this wasnt Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from ... From? It came back to him then, where hed 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 O