“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.
“One of them,” he gasped finally, his eyes full of pleading. “You’ll give me—I’ll buy—just one of them…?”
But Gaddy shook his head. “The gloves are mine, kid. I earned them. And anyway, you couldn’t stand it. The only time I don’t hurt is when I take them off and climb into bed. And then I dream I’m hurting.”
“But you can stand it. So why not me?”
“We’re not built the same,” said Gaddy. “And anyway, I’ve got used to it—almost.”
“But—”
“I’m taking you in,” Gaddy cut him off. “The police will have to figure out what’s to be done with you. And afterwards…they can do wonderful things these days, Pavanaz. You’ll have hands again. Clumsy, maybe, but hands. Of sorts….”
Halfway across the bridge it all came crashing down on Pav. His dream blew itself away in his head. You can’t be a champion and win a million with plastic fingers that don’t feel anything. He turned abruptly and faced Gaddy, and without emotion said: “Frurk you.” And he lifted his arms high and brought his screws crashing down on the hardwood handrail.
Hot blood splashed scarlet where altered flesh split open; and before Gaddy could do anything to stop it, if he wanted to, Pav flopped over the rail and down into the water. He surfaced once and screamed high and thin, went down in crimson foam and didn’t surface again. And Gaddy turned away….
Drop a bent pin in the water on Shankov’s and you’ll pull out a fish. Put something edible on the hook…and the water boils.
Big “C”
Also written in 1988, “Big ‘C’ ” appeared two years later in a TOR Books anthology of stories written “after” the Old Gent of Providence, titled
Lovecraft’s Legacy
. In this tale our protagonist not only boldly goes but he also makes it back in one piece… albeit in one big and very terrifying piece.
Now say, do you remember how H. P. Lovecraft’s
Color Out of Space
changed everything it touched? Of course you do, and I’ll say no more….
Two thousand thirteen and the exploration of space—by men, not robot spaceships—was well underway. Men had built Moonbase, landed on Mars, were now looking towards Titan, though that was still some way ahead. But then, from a Darkside observatory, Luna II was discovered half a million miles out: a black rock two hundred yards long and eighty through, tumbling dizzily end over end around the Earth, too small to occlude stars for more than a blip, too dark to have been (previously) anything but the tiniest sunspot on the surface of Sol. But interesting anyway “because it was there,” and also and especially because on those rare occasions when it lined itself up with the full moon, that would be when Earth’s lunatics gave full vent. Lunatics of all persuasions, whether they were in madhouses or White Houses, asylums or the army, refuges or radiation shelters, surgeries or silos.