Screaming Science Fiction (22 page)

In the entrance porch he took off his shoes, put on clean cloth shufflers, then crept into the main building. There were only a few internal doors, none locked; inside was as eerie and as quiet as out; security was literally nonexistent. The place was mainly a solarium (synthetic sunlight, which switched itself off nights), and a greenhouse where Gaddy gardened. Exotic plants crept all over the place, not just adding to but mainly being the décor. It was a big house and, Pav supposed, lonely.

He carried a life-seek whose winking red indicator led him to Gaddy’s bedroom, a huge, high-ceilinged, opaque glass-walled room with a big double bed in the middle; and Gaddy was in it, just his hair showing, asleep, dreaming…and moaning. Whatever he was dreaming, it wasn’t good stuff.

Gaddy’s clothes were all over a curving bamboo couch, and his gloves were lying on top of the other things. It was easy as that. Pavanaz took the gloves and tucked them in his shirt.

On his way out he looked into a side room. It had been a games room of sorts, though long out of use. There was a pool table in there, its green baize dark with dust, an antique 20th Century one-armed bandit, a dartsboard rotting in its frame on the wall, and…a ’Vader. But the machine was all of thirty years out of date. This was what Aces must have practiced on when he was kid, and it explained two things: why he was so good, and why he wasn’t good enough.

Pavanaz didn’t bother looking at anything else but picked up his shoes, paddled a quarter-mile off in his skimmer, then fanned it back to Bogside Bassum and the hotel room he’d taken there. After he locked the door, then he took out the gloves. And just looking at them he knew that he was right, that this was where Gaddy got his magic, his unbeatable ’Vader wizardry. The gloves were…they were just…alien!

Pavanaz sat on his bed and looked at them, examined what he could of them, tougher than good quality leather, and grained like leather, too—he’d never seen anything like them. They were long enough to come halfway up a man’s forearms, and they matched the rest of Gaddy’s kit, the leather he’d worn as a Gunner. The aliens had made them that way with their strange science.

That was the gloves on the outside, but inside they were stranger still. Pavanaz shook one and blew into it, and
looked
into it—and saw nothing. It was like space in there, just an empty hole. Even shining a torch inside, there was only darkness. Light didn’t penetrate, nor would they turn inside out. Tug and twist all you like, they’d spring back to their original shape. Pavanaz grinned, because now he was
sure
he had Gaddy’s number. All that remained was to put the gloves on.

Which he did….

What it was he expected to feel would be difficult to say. A quickening of his senses? A tingling in his fingertips presaging reactions fast as lightning? A sudden awareness that the only thing in the universe faster and more adroit and slippery than his hands would be a couple of snakes screwing in hyperspace? Something of all these things, he supposed, but it wasn’t what he got.

He got pain. A burning pain, like his hands were roasting, but slowly.

And as the pain gradually increased, so Pav remembered the lines he’d seen on Gaddy’s face, which he hadn’t supposed to be laughter lines. He went to take the gloves off—and couldn’t!

They wouldn’t peel; there was no rim he could get hold of; his hands were hot as hell in there, and the gloves were sticking like glue! He ran cold water in a bowl; plunged his hands into it. No good. The gloves weren’t hot, they only
felt
hot. Hold them to his face and they were cool. It was his
hands
that were hot, and maybe not even that. It was the pain
itself
that was hot!

Pav almost panicked then, but he remembered who he was and what he’d done, and the stakes he was playing for. This hurting was just part of the process, that was all. That must be right: the pain was the gloves transferring their power to him. It was his initiation. They wouldn’t come off till they were ready to, until he and they went together…hand in glove?

But they
must
come off, eventually, because Gaddy had taken them off. So the frurking things weren’t permanent—were they?
Were
they? But the pain! The godawful, screaming, acid-etched
pain
! His hands felt like they were melting!

Pav called the desk to send out for painkillers, and when they came he took three times the recommended dose. The pain eased off…a little, and when he’d stopped shaking and panting and could think straight, he tried once more to take the gloves off. Still they wouldn’t come. He tried tugging at the fingertips, rolling down the cuffs, sliding them off between his thighs—everything. And nothing. They wouldn’t budge.

So…he would have to see what the morning brought. And morning was just three hours away now. Taking a second handful of pills, finally Pavanaz fell into a troubled sleep….

V

Pavanaz dreamed he held his hands up before his face, and the tips of his fingers and thumbs blew off like the lids of tiny volcanoes and shot boiling blood all over him!

He started awake and the pain was back, and he lay in the sweat of his agonized tossing and turning. The pain had probably been there all the time, but like a toothache it wasn’t so bad when you were asleep. Pav swallowed the rest of his pills, got dressed, checked himself out in the mirror. His young face was lined like never before.
God!
he thought,
I’m aging a day in an hour!
Every hour of the pain in his hands.

He examined the gloves. The way his hands felt in there, they should have melted down by now, developed into shapeless blobs. They should be pulsating, and issuing slop from blisters that came bursting right through the alien material. But…they weren’t. Nothing had changed. Pav’s hands in Gaddy’s gloves were the same size and shape as always. Just as dexterous, and just as—

Pavanaz felt his flesh creep, the short hairs at the back of his neck stirring—in awe and wonder as yet. In something of triumph, too, however depleted by the pain. And his eyebrows came together and down in a scowling squint as he gazed at the gloves. Because his hands weren’t “just as” but
more
dexterous! Somehow, he just knew that he could use his fingers, thumbs and hands faster, more cleverly, than ever before. They were more supple, more alive, more…
painful
!

He examined the gloves again. Last night there’d been no cuffs. The material had gripped the skin of his forearm like it was melded to them, without constricting or cutting. Like a wide elastic band, but without restricting his circulation. This morning, there were cuffs, gaps between the material and the flesh of his forearms, forming narrow bells into which his hands disappeared. Pav at once tried to take the gloves off by rolling down the cuffs, but they wouldn’t come. Two inches down towards the wrists, the material was joined to his flesh.

He got his thumbnail in and tried slicing the material from his skin, which only increased the pain. Frustrated beyond endurance, he wrenched at the right-hand glove, bunching its cuff in the curl of the smallest and second fingers of his left hand and trying to tear it free—which really
was
painful! Weakened by the agony welling out of his hands and flooding his mind and body, he staggered back against the bed and fell onto it. And a trickle of red escaped from beneath the cuff of Gaddy’s glove! A few drops from a patch of torn skin, but to Pavanaz it was like his life leaking away. He knew he’d done the damage himself, but still it was as if those frurking gloves were eating him!

At which, something snapped in Pav; not his mind but his resolve. Fear sprang up stronger than ambition, and agony overcame avarice. Only one man could get these terrible gloves off his hands without damaging them, and that was their owner, Gunner Gaddy….

Pav left the hotel, found an all-night store and bought more pills and a gutting knife with an edge keen as a razor, and went right back to Gaddy’s place. In the misty dawn light he tied up his skimmer at the wharf, climbed to the bridge and crossed it. If Gaddy was up he might see him…so what? He was going to wake the bastard anyway. Wake him up, learn the secret of the gloves, slit his throat and sink him deep. The fish would do the rest. But thank God (in whom Pav never had believed)
thank God
he hadn’t killed him last night!

He entered the house as before, put on shufflers, went straight to Gaddy’s bedroom. And there was the man himself: yawning, sitting up in his bed with his hands under the covers, peering all about in the dull dawn glow coming through the glass ceiling. Gaddy saw Pavanaz—and gave a huge start when he recognized the gloves he wore. He seemed to see only the gloves, not the ugly knife Pav carried in the one on the right. Then the startled look left Gaddy’s cat face and he glanced knowingly at his clothes piled on the bamboo couch. Following which he returned his gaze to Pavanaz.

“Something I can do for you, son?” he inquired, softly.

“You can tell me about these,” Pavanaz answered, holding up his gloved hands. Then he switched on the lamps and flooded the room with sunlight, and moved closer to the bed. “And you can do it quick before I pin you to that bedhead!” Now Gaddy saw the knife, or at least acknowledged it.

“Murder?” he said.

“Only if I have to,” Pavanaz lied through his teeth—and moaned through them too, as the pain started up again. Moaned like Gaddy had been moaning during his bad dream last night.

“You don’t look too well, son,” said Gaddy, in a voice that really couldn’t care less.

But the pain had subsided a little and Pav spun the knife in the air in a blur of sharp steel, and caught it expertly by the tip of its scalloped blade. “What the gloves did for you,” he said, “they’re doing it now for me. I could take off one of your ears from here, or punch a slot through one of your eyes, before you even registered that I’d moved.”

“Are the gloves hurting you?” said Gaddy.

“Don’t you just know it!” Pav grated. “So you can start by telling me why, and how long before it stops.”

“I take it you know how I got them?” Gaddy sat up.

Pavanaz nodded, stepped closer to the bed. “I know how,” he said. “Quit stalling. I asked you why they hurt, and when do they stop?”

Suddenly Gaddy’s expression was sour. “Aliens fixed me up with those gloves,” he said. “An alien medic gave them to me, ’cos they were the best he could do in the short time he had. I’ve thought about it a lot. Maybe those guys don’t feel pain like we do. I mean, why would they save my life, and leave me in agony the rest of my days? So maybe pain isn’t the same to them. Or…perhaps their flesh is different, compatible with that sort of surgery.”

“Surgery?” Pav shook his head a little, to chase the pain away. “You’re losing me. Are you telling me these things
never
stop hurting? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Oh, you can stop them hurting,” Gaddy answered. “Sure you can! That’s as easy as taking them off.”

“That was my next question,” Pav sighed his relief, “just how do I take them off?”

But Gaddy’s face was suddenly white. Distantly, he said: “I remember when I had the same problem. But in your case…I’m not sure. I can only imagine they’d work the same for you as for me.”

“And how’s that?” Pavanaz demanded.

And Gaddy shrugged, grimaced, and lifted his arms out from under the covers, to show Pavanaz how.

Pav’s brain searched for words but nothing came out of his wide-open mouth. He half-sat, half-collapsed onto the bed and looked at Gaddy’s hands, or what he had where hands should be: corkscrews of white flesh with blue veins showing through, ending in blunt points where sculpted bone had closed off the marrow cores!
Gaddy’s “hands” had screw threads!

“J…J…
Jesus!
” Pavanaz gasped then, letting his knife fall from nerveless (and what else?) fingers.

“You unscrew them,” said Gaddy. “Left-hand thread….”

“But—” Pavanaz gulped, gazing wide-eyed, morbidly at the gloves on his hands. “But…your hands were ruined, and mine are good, whole.”

“You’re sure about that?” said Gaddy, logically. “Maybe the gloves assumed they weren’t. Maybe they needed fixing….”

“Oh, Jesus!—
Jesus!
” Pav gabbled. He gave the right-hand glove a tentative twist—and it turned! And eyes bugging, Pavanaz unscrewed it all the way and let it fall. Even before it hit the covers the glove was just a glove again, limp and flexible and empty. But Pavanaz’s hand wasn’t a hand. It was one of the things Gaddy had—the thing he was now sliding into his glove, which filled out and swiftly screwed itself into place.

If Pavanaz saw any of that it didn’t register; nothing registered but the fact that his good right hand was a screw. And…his left?

Gaddy said: “Here, let me help you.” And he unscrewed the other glove from Pavanaz’s wrist.

Pavanaz looked at both of his screws through eyes that threatened to come right out of his head. He gurgled and gasped and said nothing, and in the silence Gaddy got out of bed and dressed himself. And then Pavanaz’s senses returned to him, at least partially. He lunged for the knife and couldn’t pick it up, couldn’t grab at anything to stop himself flying headlong across the bed. And now, in the absence of pain, his brain was working perfectly again.