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 But the machine was all of thirty years out of date.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.