Screaming Science Fiction

“She shook her head. ‘But this isn’t imagination. It really happened. Go on, look at it.’ As she leaned to look at the book with me her zipper slipped an inch or two more. But like a fool I didn’t look, except at the book. Well, mainly at the book.

“It was a picture of the bloody deck of a fishing boat. One of the fishermen had driven a long knife or machete through the head of a shark, almost nailing it to the deck, and another was slicing off its dorsal fin. There was a big basket full of fins to one side of the picture….

“And Laurilu said, ‘It was the fins, Mike. They only wanted the fins…to make soup! The rest of the fish got tossed back in the ocean, and as often as not alive! Before that it was the whales, those huge great beasts, cut up alive for their livers, their oils. And those beautiful jungle cats—skinned for their furs. Ecology? On planet Earth? It was us, we murdered the home world, Mike! And we did it despite the warnings of real ecologists, like the man who wrote this book.’

“‘Laurilu—’ I began, without knowing how to continue. But as her arms crept round my neck it appeared that as suddenly as that her entire attitude had changed, and cutting me off before I could find any soothing or conciliatory words she went on:

“‘Yet now—now like some kind of fantastic psychoanalyst or layer-on-of-hands—it seems that you’ve solved my problem, Mike! In giving me hope, you may even have cured me. It was the waste that was becoming my obsession, but now I see that it was just a part of everything that the human race does. Moreover, I think I know how to handle it now.’

“‘And can you also see,’ I said, taking her zipper all the way down, ‘that we’ve simply got to make the best of what we’ve got? Get as much out of our short little lives as we can, while our hearts are still hammering and our blood still coursing? We—and now I mean you and me—we have to live our lives to the full, Laurilu, snatching at every opportunity we’re given just as often and, er, as naturally as possible.’

“‘Yes, I see that,’ she answered, shrugging out of her uniform and assisting me with mine. ‘And now maybe I’ll be able to sleep without dreaming those dreams.’ She began to bite my ear.

“‘Dreams?’ I repeated her, purely for the sake of something to say as we got down to business. ‘About sharks, you mean?’

“‘Well, that’s one of them,’ she answered between bites. ‘I see them in my dream: unable to swim, dying and rotting away in their own environment, and not knowing how or why it happened.’

“‘Exactly!’ I told her. ‘Not knowing how or why: non-sentient. And the reason the fishermen threw them back was so they’d go toward feeding other fishes, and them to feeding us. The sea was like—I don’t know—like a big compost heap. The fishermen couldn’t take those carcasses back to land where they’d rot and stink the place up, so they simply returned them to the sea where they had caught them, toppled them overboard into the big watery compost heap.’ Our bodies were working in perfect unison now, becoming slippery as the temperature rose.

“‘But there are other dreams,’ she said, clawing at me spastically.

“‘Oh, really? And what are they about, Laurilu?’

“‘Well, there’s one that’s been bothering me quite a lot.’

“‘And which one’s that?’ Actually, at that point in time, I couldn’t have cared less.

“‘The one where I look at the stars flickering by, and then look at the ship’s engines, and find myself thinking that if we had never discovered the grav-drive, worlds like Ophiuchus VIII would be safe forever. But no, we’ll soon be taking all of this knowledge, everything we’ve learned, back home with us. And me, I myself—Laurilu Nagula, Second Engineer—I’ll be in large part responsible for bringing the Starspike Explorer home again in one…one piece.’ She had gone quiet and thoughtful again, and had almost stopped moving under me.

“‘But of course you will!’ I groaned. ‘And I’ll be responsible for what I do, and likewise the rest of the crew: everyone responsible for the things they do.’ Utter gibberish!

“‘But now—’ she came alive again, her hips powering, ‘why, now I know my duty to…to everything! I know what I must do, Mike! You’ve helped me to realize that. But Mike?’

“‘Yes?’ I panted.

“‘Please don’t impregnate me.’

“‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told her. ‘Low sperm count. And anyway the radiation in your engine room will take care of what few tadpoles might manage to squirm through.’

“‘My engine room, yes,’ she whispered. ‘It would seem to be the answer to everything.’

“‘I’m glad I’ve been able to help you,’ I told her. ‘As for my feasibility report: well, you’ve also helped me. I can probably write it up from our conversation alone—without all the gloomy bits, of course.’

“‘Do you think we can do this more often?’ she said, sounding as sexy as anything I ever heard before, her need as strong as mine.

“‘Often as you like,’ I answered, my head beginning to buzz.

“‘And on the way home, too?’

“‘Absolutely!’ (But wait a minute! Wasn’t she beginning to sound just a little too serious?) ‘Er, before we’ve been reassigned, split up, sent in our different directions, do you mean? Which of course we’re almost certain to be.’

“‘Something like that,’ she said, her nails digging in just one last time. ‘Before we…before we’re split up and sent in our many different directions, yes.’ But it was all babble now, meaningless babble as the sugar boiled over and began its melt-down onto our singing, soaring brains.

“Then, in a little while and after we had recovered, we did it again. Only this time without speaking. And I was especially satisfied because I’d not only had it out with Laurilu but off with her, too….”

VIII

NOTE:—On 12 Sept. 2405, having returned from exploring Ophiuchus VIII, and while attempting a landing at the Darkside Luna Base, Starside Explorer suffered a catastrophic failure of its engines. There were no survivors of the crash. While culpability—if such exists—is yet to be properly established, the ship’s log and all shipboard books and documents have been recovered to Space Central, there to be studied, catalogued, and retained in the library’s “restricted” archives until suitable excerpts can be released for general perusal and information….

IX

SESSION ELEVEN.

(Eleventh Week)

Subject: James Goodwin,

former crew member United Earth Station IV.

NOTE:— The fitting of Goodwin’s prosthetic, just eight days ago, has had something of the desired effect. His spirits appear to have been substantially elevated and he is now far more positively receptive in respect of casual conversation.

As a direct result of Goodwin’s massive loss of muscular tissue and skeletal support, however, his prosthetic adjunct—a device fashioned in an atmosphere of the utmost urgency—is of an unconventional, indeed unique design. An adaptation of a small power-loader’s tractor, and equipped with a neural interface, a certain element of the grotesque was obviously unavoidable. Goodwin is aware that a lightweight and more esthetically pleasing model is currently under construction.

However, while Goodwin makes excellent physical progress by virtue of his renewed mobility and rapid mastery of his adjunct, his aversion to hypodermics and similarly sharp implements—symptomatic as it is of his extremely deep-seated psychosis—continues to be of great concern. And since the psychoactive drug Exaxavin is best delivered intravenously, it has now become necessary to introduce mild sedatives into his food as a means of premedication.

In general:

It appears that I was correct in my optimism regards ex-shuttle pilot Goodwin’s prosthetic: the positive affect it might have on his well-being. We can now be fairly certain that in large part it was his loss of mobility—the sheer fact of his hospitalization and protracted recuperation, resulting in what must have seemed to someone of Goodwin’s previous astronavigational skills, his agility, spatial coordination, and employment on the permanently low gravity United Earth Station IV, an interminable and claustrophobic confinement—it was that rather than his actual, physical truncation that was aggravating his mental condition and further delaying his recovery.

Therefore and in conclusion, I insist that the following transcript be read in the light of all the above information, and hasten to point out that despite the unsatisfactory culmination of the interview definite progress is being made as I probe ever more deeply into Goodwin’s psychosis.

SPECIFICS: the following interview was recorded in Goodwin’s quarters with the subject in a state of hypnotic regression, having reacted positively to an injection of fifteen milligrams of the drug Exaxavin. His trunk was upright in the upper frame of the prosthetic, giving him a standing elevation perhaps seven inches taller than my own. I therefore carried out the interview standing, the better to observe his expressions and speak to him “face to face,” as it were.

Interrogating Officer:

Dr. Gardner L. Spatzer,

Space Central, Arizona.

3rd Nov. 2407.

RECORDED INTERVIEW

Dr. S: “Jim, do you remember where you were when last you heard my voice?”

Goodwin, without hesitation: “Sure. I was trying to look in through the window of this alien ship or probe, whatever it was. Couldn’t see a thing—the glitter was blinding—which was odd because the sun was on the other side. Like it wasn’t reflected light.”

NOTE:— At this point during the previous interview, Goodwin had showed considerable irritability and signs of recovery from a seven milligram dose of Exaxavin. He was therefore instructed to sleep; and shortly, upon displaying normal REM, was awakened and the interview terminated.

CONTINUATION

Dr. S: “Well, that’s where you are right now, trying to look in through the alien vessel’s window. Can you see anything?”

Goodwin: “Nope, I’m still dazzled. But here comes Rafferty, so if I just give her a little room…there we go. She’s something else, Susannah Rafferty: a really sweet thing. Damn it to hell, these pressure suits really piss me off! ‘Hey, Sue—how come we never get this close aboard the UES, in atmosphere?’”

Dr. S: “And does she answer?”

Goodwin: “Yeah—something about regulations. And now she’s got her flashlight ready. Maybe if we both shine our torches at this thing together the light will cancel out the dazzle. Okay, here we go. ‘Lights, action, camera…eh?’”

Dr. S: “Jim? Are you okay? What’s happening now?”

Goodwin, after a long pause: “Blinded! I’m blind as a fucking bat! And scared shitless! Weightless, too, but it’s a different kind of weightlessness. And now…now I think I can see something. Yes, I believe I can see…something?”

Dr. S: “But where are you? What do you see?”

Goodwin: “This can’t be real. I mean, I have to be dreaming this. I’m…I’m looking down on the universe—on everything—and its spinning like a top! It’s like a globe of the Earth, except it’s the whole damn universe…spinning. Whoah!”

Dr. S: “Jim, what is it?”

Goodwin: “Now it’s stopped spinning and I think…I think I’m on the other side of…of the universe? And the light…there’s that brilliant light again! A single flash of light…and now…the darkness returns. Utterly empty darkness; emptier than the void. I feel…nothing, no sensation whatsoever, it’s like sleeping without dreaming, without even being asleep! Hard to explain or describe…”

Dr. S: “And the darkness? How long does this darkness last? Do you remember, Jim? Are you conscious in the darkness?”

Goodwin: “No idea. Weightless. Timeless. Totally lacking in any and all kinds of sensation. It’s like…like I’m paralyzed in everything but my thoughts. I’m trying to call out to Sue…but it doesn’t work. Nothing is working except my mind. And I’m thinking: maybe I’m badly hurt, in a sick-bay bed on UES IV. Some kind of trauma. But now—now, all of a sudden—all of a s-s-sudden….”

Dr. S: “Be calm now, Jim. It’s okay. Everything is okay. So then, are you emerging from the darkness? Is that what’s happening?”

Goodwin, becoming very agitated: “I…I think so. But…but I don’t want to! And…and I’m not going to! I won’t! So you can forget it, and I’ll just stay right here in…in the d-d-dark.”

Dr. S: “But Jim, I—”

Goodwin, arms and hands twitching, fists knotting, perspiration forming on forehead: “The darkness…is clearing. But I can’t let it! Because I know…I know what’s there behind it! I know…know…no…no…n-n-oooooo! Get the fuck away from me!”

Dr. S: “Jim! Listen to my voice now—”

Goodwin: his voice rising to another terrified shriek: “No, no, no, noooooooooo!”

(At this point Goodwin’s arms began flailing, his hand inadvertently activating the neural interface switch situated on the console to his right. In short, as his tractor undercarriage hummed into life, he became somnambulistically mobile and commenced jerking to and fro, trundling forward, and advancing upon me however involuntarily. Goodwin was not threatening me; on the contrary, he was trying to escape from a resurgent situation. )

Dr. S, in a louder tone of voice but as calmly and steadily as possible in the circumstances: “James Goodwin, the next time you hear me say ‘stop,’ you will at once disconnect your neural interface and fall peacefully asleep!”

Goodwin, beginning to froth at the mouth and swaying in his frame as his prosthetic lurched forward: “Ach-ach-arrrggghhh!”

And finally Dr. S: “STOP!”

Session ends.

X

NO DUFF MSG!

URGENT! URGENT! URGENT!

On this day, 12th Nov 2407, at 2244 Hrs, Cmdr. Abel Berresford, Darkside Luna Base, requests immediate voice contact with Cmdr. Space Central, AZ.

“Abel? This is Frankie Zazarro. What the hell is happening up there? Man, I was at Liz’s birthday party, and if this is one of your practical…. Are you talking over the top of me?”

“Frankie, shut up and listen! I’m really sorry about Liz’s party but we have an anomaly. In fact we have five of them. My meteor cannons are locked on them right now and I need to know what to do. I mean, hell, I know what to do but SOPs won’t let me, not without your say-so.”

“An ‘anomaly’? Five anomalies? You mean like Anomaly 13?”

“Exactly like that, Frankie! Now let me tell you about it. All nine hundred of us, we’re situated in our three interconnected crater domes in a rough triangle of some five acres…but you already know all that; you were the Officer Commanding up here way before me! I’m just putting you in the picture, is all. Anyway, these things appeared out of nowhere maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes ago. They’re something like a mile away, in the hills to the north and on the plain in the south, completely encircling the base. And they just sit there like small silver pyramids. They’re not doing anything, but their pattern—the way we’re surrounded—I mean, this has got to be about us! And Frankie, I don’t like it at all.”

“Abel, General Sellway and my security people are on their way into HQ right now. And meanwhile I’m told we can’t get you on screen. Now why the hell is that?”

“Because our comsats are down, that’s why.”

“Down?”

“Either taken out or blocked in some way. Never mind visuals, you wouldn’t be getting voice if not for our surface cable to Earthside! But these things are like sitting ducks, Frankie! And with our cannons…you just say the word and this time we won’t simply be firing at chunks of space rock!”

“Abel, listen: you’ll do no such thing! Don’t even shine a light on those pyramids! You’re not the only one with SOPs, you know. Mine are pretty much like yours and while we’ve been talking I’ve glanced through them. Know what happened the last time someone flashed a light at one of those things?”

“Yes, I know. Anomaly 13. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of flashlights, Frankie. I was thinking in terms of guns that fire so fast and hard they can vaporize incoming meteorites!”

“Abel, hold it a minute. The General is here, and he’s been listening in.”

“Abel, Gordon Sellway here. When our security people get in we’ll look at our options. There’s too much history—too much of a situation here—for any one man’s decision. Do you copy?”

“Shit! I copy, but it looks like one of my gunners doesn’t!”

“What?”

“Some trigger-happy jerk has just opened up! Ah! That 1ight…leaping from one pyramid to the next…reaching up like a wall of brilliant white fire, and…. “ (Transmission ends.)

XI

“Ahem! Voice record of Dr. G. L. Spatzer, at—ummm, let’s see—0845 hours on the 13th of November, 2407:

“Just had a call from James Goodwin. He’s coming to see me. Puzzling—in fact amazing! Until recently I was the one man he least wanted anything to do with! But bad timing, because right now the HQ is a madhouse—and I don’t just mean the psychiatric ward! All of the top brass, the military and their minions, and droves of civil servants rushing to and fro; I daren’t step out in the corridor for fear of getting trampled underfoot!

“Understandable in the current circumstances, I suppose. Apparently some idiot paparazzi hack was tuned in on an insecure Earth/Darkside Luna conversation last night and patched it through as an ‘exclusive’ to his patron news channel…since when it’s spread like wildfire!

“This morning it’s on the airwaves, the TV screens, and in the papers all over the planet! Two shuttles on course for the moon from UES II, grav-drive Spirit of Space inbound from the asteroid belt, and the untried gunship Sir Galahad ordered up into Earth orbit. I didn’t catch it all: something about ‘anomalies’—like Jim Goodwin’s, I wonder?—and a total Darkside-Luna shutdown. Space Central working desperately hard, even too hard, to put it about that it’s some kind of ‘freak power failure’ and nothing to be concerned about. Frankly I can’t see it. If it’s nothing to be concerned about, why is this place in an uproar?

“I can hear Goodwin come purring down the corridor…I’ll leave the recorder running. Maybe he’ll have something interesting for me. High time, too! I admit I’m beginning to despair of ever getting through to him….”

(The hiss of pneumatic doors opening and the deep-throated purr of a powerful electric motor. Dr. Spatzer’s voice warning, “Mind your head, Jim!” And a high-pitched whine quickly fading into silence as the motor shuts down.)

Goodwin’s voice: “Surprise, surprise, Doc!”

Dr. S: “Good morning, Jim. You seem in fine spirits!”

Goodwin: “Cheerful, you mean? In a way, I suppose. Not much good feeling down; not any longer, anyway. Fact is I’m ready to talk—about everything. I’ve remembered everything, Doc—and it’s stopped hurting!”

Dr. S, indeed sounding surprised, and perhaps not a little alarmed: “Stopped hurting? But how can that be, Jim? The drugs? I mean even the best painkillers can’t—”

Goodwin: “No, it’s not my backside, what little is left of it; I’m talking about my head! I can think it through now without it shuts me down every time.”

Dr. S: “And you believe you can talk about it? About, well, everything, did you say?”

Goodwin, most eagerly: “That’s right. It was the library—the archives, all the restricted stuff that I’ve been reading—and then to top it off this morning’s news. That’s what finally did the trick. You see Doc, until now I couldn’t figure it out. But now…now I’m pretty sure I know what it was all about.”

Dr. S: “The archives? Ah, yes! You’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the library, haven’t you? Your newfound freedom and unrestricted access? We’ve tried to make everything as easy and as normal as possible for you. Not everyone has that kind of access to the archives. As for this morning’s news: do you mean the problem on Darkside?”

Goodwin: “That’s what I mean all right—but it isn’t just Darkside Base that’s got a problem, Doc. No, not at all. So, do you want to hear about it—about everything?”

Dr. S, cautiously: “An unscheduled session, you mean? Right here in my office?”

Goodwin: “Relax, Doc. I’m not going to bite you. That’s all over and done with now. Fact is, everything is done with now. I just thought you’d like to know about it before…well before they get here, is all. Then you can make up your mind like I’ve made up mine.”

Dr. S, warily: “But you know, Jim, that’s a rather peculiar smile you’re wearing. Also…well, you’re not making too much sense either. I mean, we’ve had our little problems, and—”

Goodwin: “I know, and I’m sorry. But I’m okay now, I assure you. And to tell the truth, I don’t think there’s too much time left. But if you’re really not interested, well—”

Dr. S, with a wry chuckle: “Hmmm! So then, maybe you’re the real psychiatrist here, eh? But okay, I’m hooked, and of course I’ll listen to you. So go ahead, explain away. Tell me about…everything.”

Goodwin: “It’s a long story but I’ll cut it short as I can. The reason I wasn’t able to do it before was because I couldn’t understand how anyone—how any intelligent thing, or things—could be so terrifyingly, cold-bloodedly, calculatingly merciless. Nothing in my experience, in the skies, on the earth or in the oceans has ever come anywhere near it for what I took to be sheer unfeeling cruelty. But it happened to me, and it happened to poor Sue Rafferty. And it was so horrifically unnatural that my mind was shutting down every time I started to think back on it.

“Okay, let me get started:

“That flash of light from the anomaly had KO’d me, knocked me out cold. Sue too, as it later turned out. So it seems more than likely I dreamed that stuff about looking down on the universe…it’s something I’m not sure about. I mean, how could I possibly have done something as weird as that? But one thing is for sure: I felt that I’d been moved—conveyed, transported—oh, a very, very long way. It was just a feeling I had, that distance was somehow meaningless now….

“Anyway, Sue was awake first.

“I came to when I heard her calling out to me. We were in a couple of purplish-blue bubbles with semi-opaque walls; she was next door, standing with her hands spread on the adjoining wall and looking through at me. The walls distorted things; they had these ripples of blue light moving over them. Whatever was outside our rooms—more of these bubbles, with vague shapes moving around inside them—it all seemed to melt away into a hazy distance. I was on my back, on a flat, circular table with five thin legs. When I stood up I could see a similar table in Sue’s bubble. We were both stark naked; our pressure suits and clothing lay in twin heaps against the walls of our respective bubbles, in fact our cells.

“Once I was on my feet, I felt heavy; Earth-heavy, which I wasn’t used to. I went toward Sue, touched the wall. It gave a little under my hand but finally resisted me. A force-field of some sort; it had to be. We were naked as babes, as I’ve said, but in this situation…well hell, that didn’t matter at all.

Sue’s voice was faint, as if she was in another room—which of course she was—but I know you get my meaning.

“‘Jim, where are we?’ she said. I could tell she was scared witless. For all that it was warm she stood there shivering but without making a move to cover her parts. Hey, who am I to talk about being scared? I was naked too and I hadn’t given a single thought to putting some clothes on. I tried to speak to Sue but when she saw my lips moving she shook her head, said, ‘No!’ And finally it dawned on me that she wasn’t just speaking but shouting at me!

“So I shouted back and she heard me. ‘Clothes,’ I told her, and I made for my stuff where it was heaped against the wall. I figured that being clothed would at least provide us with something of dignity. But:

“‘No!’ Sue shouted again as I reached for my drawers.

“And bang—I was zapped! There was some kind of isolation field around my clothing. It hummed and sparked, made traceries of fire and knocked me off my feet. Damn, that stung! It numbed me from my fingertips to my armpits! But at least I knew why Sue was naked now, and why I was going to stay that way, too….

“Time passed, quite a bit of time. We got sore throats from shouting at each other, asking pointless questions. And finally we slept…

“When I woke up again, that was when the horror started.

“It was Sue’s screams that woke me. And believe me, she was screaming! Coming loud and clear even through the bubble walls, it drilled into my nerves, shook me awake and tumbled me off my table bed so that I hit the floor in a heap. And I hobbled over to the wall and looked in on her cell.

“In there with Sue were three of the vague shapes we’d seen before in the bubble rooms outside our own. But they weren’t so vague now. As a kid I had been fascinated by all kinds of rocks from fossils to meteorites. It was a sure bet I would be either a paleontologist or a spaceman; and we know how that worked out. But looking at these creatures in Sue’s cell, I suddenly remembered my favorite fossil, the one I prized over all the others in my small collection: a trilobite some five inches long, nose to tail. Except these things had too many lobes—four in fact—and they were ten feet long; six-feet of it on the deck, held up by God knows how many crab legs, and the front lobe upright, standing four foot tall, with six many-jointed, armlike appendages, three to a side, and swiveling crab eyes on stalks under a chitin cowl. They were as shiny black as my fossil and scurried when they moved, their many legs seeming to flicker, shifting them to, fro, sideways, backwards, mobile as hell and a lot more nightmarish! Picture clever cockroach-crabs, with upright, mantis-like front ends—you’ll know what I was looking at. But as for what they were doing to Sue…

“Two of them held her pinned down on the table; it’s possible they’d come upon her while she was asleep, or I would have heard her screaming before I did. Anyway, they’d put some kind of clamps on her ankles and wrists, an adhesive material, as I later discovered, which stuck to the table and held her fairly motionless. And then…and th-th-then….”

Dr. S, concernedly: “Jim, if you want to stop now…”

Goodwin, after clearing his throat: “No, it’s okay. I’ll be okay now. Where was I? Oh, yeah:

“So the third member of this trio, he wheeled in a machine. But first he stepped out through the wall, as easy as you like, then returned pushing this machine that floated some six inches off the floor. And by the way, that floor was made of some sort of tough rubber, crisscrossed with thin strips of white metal.

“Anyway, this machine is all glass and silver metal. A very intricate thing…and God, a very devilish one, too! A screen appeared on the joining wall—the wall between Sue’s cell and mine—which was just as clear on my side as it must have been on hers. And when these things had positioned this bloody awful machine beside Sue’s table, they swung certain of its extensible adjuncts out over her body. One of these was quite obviously some kind of X-ray camera, because a full-size picture of Sue’s innards appeared on the screen. Her outline and all of her organs were clearly visible: her heart hammering like mad, stomach heaving, lungs fluttering…she was panting. And yet she kept on screaming, cursing and yelling at these bastards, too, until one of them brought what I figured to be a remote control device over to the wall, looked at the screen, and b-b-began to operate the thing…which operated the machine at Sue’s table.

“And on the screen I saw the machine extend a fork-tongued probe of shining silver metal down into poor Sue’s mouth! Stabbing through into the back of her neck, it straddled her spinal column and pinned her head to the table. A trickle of blood appeared on the table where twin prongs had poked through the skin at the back of her neck.

“But the terrible thing is, she was still conscious! All of Sue’s organs were still working: her heart pounding, her bowels churning. If she could have gone on screaming, she’d still have been doing that, too! But as it was it was me—I was doing the screaming now—hammering on that soft, impenetrable wall, trying to dig my hands into it, then stepping back and hurling myself at it without doing any good at all; until finally my legs turned to jelly. I flopped to the floor then and just sat there watching the rest of it—unable to drag my eyes away—watching not only the blurred, indefinite activity of the horseshoe-crab aliens at Sue’s table but also the hideous reality of what they were doing on the crystal-clear wall-screen: her suffering as the roach-like bastard with the remote continued to ogle the screen while proceeding with her t-t-torture!

“And Doc, you can quit your squirming about, and don’t even think about stopping me! Not one single fucking word, you hear? I’ll be just fine once I’ve got all of this shit out of me. And since it’s what you’ve been working at for a couple months now, you should just sit there and fucking enjoy it—okay?

“Well, okay then….

“Sue was still jerking about on her table—or her operating table, as I now thought of it—and that wasn’t good enough for the aliens, who weren’t nearly finished with her. Down came another spindly instrument from the machine: this time a hypodermic of yellow liquid, which stabbed deeply, brutally into her belly. And on the screen I watched the stuff spread through her system.

“Then…she went totally crazy! Her body throbbed, vibrated, went into spasms. God only knows what they’d put into her, but if it was meant to quieten her down…well Christ, surely there were easier ways to knock someone out! Unless they didn’t give a damn. And in fact it was as simple as that: they really didn’t give a damn! But in the end, as a result of the hellish agony it was causing her, she did go under. And me, when Sue’s body went slack, I thanked God—even though I thought she must be dead—still I thanked Him that she wasn’t any longer suffering like that. But no, they didn’t want her dead, just quiet so they could get on with it. And when I saw how she was still alive, still breathing, and her heart fluttering but no longer threatening to burst, I thanked God again—just for a moment gave thanks—and in the next moment cursed Him! I cursed Him that He was allowing this to happen; cursed God and everything in God’s entire fucking universe!

“For now another tool descended on Sue from the machine. A hollow glass drill, it chewed through her skull and passed maybe a quarter-inch into the front of her brain, where it paused to vacuum up some clear liquid and a little grey tissue; which was when I threw up.

“But for all that I was sick I just couldn’t turn away; it was like I was hypnotized; I simply had to know! And I saw them take samples of Sue’s liver, her kidneys and lungs, even marrow from her bones; but never enough to kill her, not yet. And each time the machine bit into her, its tools would burn bright with some weird energy, cauterizing the wound. And my teeth were beginning to hurt, aching from the way I was grinding them. And I reckon it’s that, Doc—what they did to Sue and would later do to me—that brought on my problem with needles and sharp instruments. Can you b-blame me? Well can you, eh?

“But you know, as bad as I felt about Sue I was more scared for myself. I mean, she had been the first, but when would they start on me? What does that make me, some kind of lousy coward? Well let me tell you, Doc, while there isn’t a man in the world I would ever run away from, there isn’t anyone on any world who wouldn’t want to escape from the horror of the notion that he’d be next under that machine on one of those t-tables!

“Anyway, let me get on….

“Finally, dissolving Sue’s clamps, the bugs turned off the wall-screen, took their God-awful machine and samples and left. With the screen gone there was no way to know if Sue was living or dead. And then, mentally and physically exhausted—because Sue and me, we hadn’t had a bite to eat nor even a sip of water since we were taken—I fell asleep again…but on the floor and against the wall, not on my table! And though I nightmared, still I somehow managed to sleep—

“—Until I sensed movement and started awake!

“One of the bugs was just leaving, passing out through the wall as if it was mist. There was a bowl of pale blue liquid on the table, along with a carrot-like root with purple skin and a tuft of blue-green leaves. I took the smallest sip of the liquid and it was…well, water! The tuber had a bitter taste but it stayed down. After finishing off the tuber and drinking some of the water I went to look through the wall into Sue’s bubble. She just lay on her table, completely motionless. And still not knowing if she was alive or dead—full to the brim with horror and despair—once again I dropped off to sleep—

“—And again sensed movement!

“It was Sue, staggering here and there as she made her way over to the wall. I could scarcely believe she was on her feet! But as she reached the wall she just slid down it, went to her knees with her pale face and one shoulder leaning against it.

“‘Jim, they…they….’ Her voice was so weak and gasping, I had to put my ear to the wall in order to hear it. ‘They hurt me, Jim.’

“‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I saw it all. Oh God, I’m so sorry, kid! But look over there, on the floor there. The water is safe and that carrot thing is edible. You have to eat; you’ve got to survive, got to keep going, Sue.’ That’s what I told her, but I really don’t know why. It was bullshit, that’s all.

“She crawled away, went and ate, then curled herself into a small round ball under her table and went to sleep. And despite that I repeatedly told myself to stay awake and keep watch over her, finally I too fell asleep again. Maybe it was something in the water they’d given us, some kind of drug. But so what? Even if I had stayed awake, what then? I wasn’t able to help myself, let alone Sue….

“…There was movement! Starting awake, I saw that the b-b-bugs were back in Sue’s bubble room again. So was their torture machine, and the screen was back up on the wall. Oh, God! Oh my good God! I shouldn’t have cursed Him so! Because…because—

“—Because I could see it was going to be the same all over again—but I could never have foreseen that it was going to be even worse!

“The alien operating the remote was ogling the screen with his knobby crab eyes, and the hellish machine was letting down a vibrating tool toward Sue where she was clamped to her table. Awake, aware, she was much too weak to struggle or even scream, but it didn’t stop her from trying. Very faintly, I could hear the croaking sounds she made, the gurgling when her mouth dribbled foam and her panting blew bubbles in it.

“They hadn’t needed to nail her head down this time, so she was able to turn it, her eyes bulging as she watched the vibrating tool descending toward her shoulder. It was a cutting instrument of some kind, its sharp edge an almost invisible blur as it came down on her right arm an inch below where it joined her shoulder. And zzzzztttt, it was through her arm—I mean right through it—before the blood could even begin to spurt! But I saw the look on Sue’s face, the way her eyes popped out further yet, and knew that she couldn’t believe it any more than I did. It had to be a nightmare!

“Then the blood spurted, and we both knew it wasn’t a nightmare. And as they cauterized her stump Sue passed out, but this time I didn’t thank God because I’d tried it once and it hadn’t worked. And while I had no idea what would happen next, still I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

“And I was right.

“By then I’d lost my voice…you yell and scream for long enough, loud enough, and that happens. And there I was kneeling at the wall, sobbing like a little kid, watching as they turned Sue face down and cut her again: her entire left leg this time, buttock and all right down to the gleaming pink bones. From the hip at the top to the coccyx at the bottom, then up round Sue’s bush and back to the hip, they’d cut her. And at a stroke—or more properly at a slice and a bloody scoop, but in any case as quickly as that—what had been beautiful was hideously ugly.

“Once again they cauterized that crimson flood; and on the wall-screen before they switched it off and left with her amputated limbs, I saw but could scarcely believe that even now her heart was beating, however unevenly. And I know that you’ll forgive me, Doc, if I tell you that by then I was wishing it would stop. I wanted it done with—wanted her dead—because I knew that Sue would want it, too….

“Time passed…

“I have some vague recollections of partial consciousness, of being awake again, if only for a hazy moment or two, and of seeing renewed roach activity in Sue’s bubble. But as for what was happening in there: this time I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t bear to; I convinced myself that it was all a bad dream that I could simply turn away from, and lapsed into a period of delirious praying, raving, cursing and what have you.

“Just as well, I suppose, because when I came out of it and looked at her—and was actually able to understand what I was looking at—I saw that they’d taken her other leg, too. There was only half a woman on that table now. But…what the hell? They’d returned Sue’s arm! Limp and white as a piece of marble, it was just lying there beside her trunk, along with some other bits and pieces that I believed I recognized as the s-s-samples that they’d taken earlier.

“It was all there on the table in Sue’s bubble room: everything that had been a beautiful girl; well, except her legs and butt. And nothing of beauty left any more, only a lifeless grey mutilated trunk with slack breasts, a dead face and glazed fish eyes. But at least she was dead now, and I was able to speak to God again and thank him sincerely this time.

“Oddly enough, I was able to laugh a little, too. In fact I laughed quite a lot. I laughed so hard it hurt my ribs and then I knew I had to stop. So what do you reckon, Doc? I was maybe a little crazy? Maybe even now, just a touch crazy? But it’s okay, Doc, it’s okay. In fact my state of mind is the very last thing you need to worry about, because I can see everything perfectly clearly now….

“So where was I? Oh yes:

“And then…and then—

“—Finally they came for me, and it was my t-t-turn.”

Dr. S, urgently: “Jim, we…well we sort of know the rest of it, don’t we? So if you want to stop now—”

Goodwin, his voice grating: “No, you don’t know the rest of it. No, I don’t want to stop now! I want you to know everything about these fucking monsters so you’ll finally know what’s coming! And it’s not just them who are the monsters; we’ve been the monsters, too. But that was in our time—when we were the dominant species—and now it’s their time. I want you to understand how it works, that’s all, want you to make the connection on your own if you haven’t already done so. The fish fights the hook, Doc. The tree fern hurls its javelins, and even the lowly bramble has its thorns.”

Dr. S, baffled: “Fish? Brambles? Tree ferns? Fighting?”

Goodwin, as if uninterrupted: “Well, and so did I: I fought back. But when it comes down to survival, when it’s the hunter-gatherer—whether he’s a man-like ape with a club or an alien with superior technology—when it’s him against whatever else is out there and he’s hungry…then it’s always the dominant, more advanced guy who wins. Don’t you see that?”

Dr. S, very concerned now: “Jim, you’re not making too much sense. And I really do know the rest of it. Those terrible creatures were experimenting on you, seeing just how much it would take to kill you. Why, just looking at you I can see…I mean it’s pretty obvious…God, I didn’t mean to say any of that!”

Goodwin, cutting in, quite obviously abstracted but calmer now: “Oh yes, I fought back. They weren’t going to slice up my kidneys, my liver and brain—weren’t going to suck out my bone marrow and cut off my arms—not without a fight, they weren’t! But as it worked out those things weren’t what they were after. They’d found what they’d been looking for in Sue; they weren’t any longer interested in what they’d already rejected, only in what they’d kept and what I had still got.

“And now it was my turn, and they came for me: the three of them, their torture machine, their wall screen monitor and all. But I was waiting for them.

“The first one in—the moment he came skittering through that wall—I was up off the floor, launching myself at him. I hadn’t been drinking their drugged water; I was weak and dehydrated, but I was desperate too and full of fury! That first one in, I grabbed at his most vulnerable parts: his slimy, swiveling eyes-stalks under their blue chitin cowl. And how I yanked on them, hauling on them just as hard as I could!

“And oh, I hurt him—did I ever hurt the bastard! Stinking blue goo spurted from the sockets where I’d almost wrenched his stalks out, and all the while he was hissing and whistling like steam from a pressure cooker. Damn, but I really hurt that ugly fuck! Oh, yes. Yes I did…

“And then he and his pals hurt me.

“Cattle prods? I thank God I never worked on a ranch in the days before we synthesized beef! And as for tasers: you think I could be a cop and use one of those things? Not likely, not any more…not even if I had my legs…and not even if we stood a chance of winning this one. Because now I know what ‘hurting’ means.

“I suffered, Doc. I mean I really suffered. They shocked me and shocked me, needled me and needled me. They didn’t need to, because I was down on the floor, writhing around in agony after the first prod. But they did it anyway, because I’d hurt one of theirs. So in a way I suppose they’re pretty much like us: they don’t turn the other cheek. Or if they do, it’s only to cut and cauterize, ha-fucking-ha!”

Dr. S, consolingly yet very nervously: “Oh, Jim…Jim…Jim!”

Goodwin, his motorized adjunct whining into life, the sound of his tractor in motion: “So you see, Doc, you knew the how of it and the what of it, but you didn’t know the why. And to tell the truth neither did I till I got mobile again and was able to visit the restricted archives and read the documents we rescued from the wreck of the Starspike Explorer. I had friends on that ship or I wouldn’t have bothered, wouldn’t have been interested. But as it works out…well the way I see it, what was written in those documents was very relevant. In fact it explained just about everything that I’ve been trying to explain to you.”

Dr. S, warningly: “Don’t get too close to that window, Jim! You’re doing great with those controls but you haven’t got them down pat just yet and we’re nine stories high up here!”

Goodwin: “I just want to look out, that’s all. Look out on what I used to look down on from the shuttles and UES IV. Used to, yes, but look at me now. Earthbound—stone cold sober and yet ‘legless,’ ha-fucking-ha!—nine stories up at Space Central HQ, looking out over the entire complex. I can’t see nearly as far as I used to, Doc, not even from up here, but since reading those Starspike Explorer documents I sure understand a hell of a lot more! Have you read that stuff, Doc?”

Dr. S: “Why, yes, as a matter of fact. The investigation is ongoing and has been for a long time, but I was called in from the beginning to do a psychological study, a posthumous assessment of…of—”

Goodwin: “—Of a certain female crew member? Namely Laurilu Nagula? Oh, I can understand that well enough. But can’t you see the relevance, I mean aside from just the psychology? Can’t you see the parallels, the analogy?”

Dr. S, wonderingly: “Parallels? Analogy?”

Goodwin, thoughtfully: “Well, maybe not. Because it doesn’t—or didn’t—apply to you. But it certainly applies to me. I think that if you can find the time, assuming we’re to be given enough time, maybe you should read those papers again, Doc. And especially Laurilu’s concerns about all the waste, how much she hated it.” (Goodwin’s laughter.) “Well, me too, Laurilu! But on a far more personal level, right?”

Dr. S: “Jim, I—”

Goodwin: “Read what she wrote, and what she said to Michael Gilchrist, the ship’s so-called ‘exobioecologist,’ that time in her bunk; what she said about the shark fishermen. And not only that but what he said about them: how they threw back what they didn’t want, just tossed them back alive or dead, back into, or maybe I should say onto—”

Dr. S, faintly: “Back onto the…the…oh my God!”

Goodwin: “Now you’re getting it! Now you’re seeing it, Doc! It’s our position in the universal food chain, that’s all. What a tree fern is to us—”

Dr. S: “—We are to…to…?”

Goodwin: “Exactly! Except with us there’s this problem with the waste, that’s all. Makes you wonder what the French do with all those soft little bodies, now doesn’t it?”

Dr. S, weakly, wonderingly: “The French?”

Goodwin: “Sure. I mean, they know the parts that suit their taste buds, but what do they do with the bits that don’t, eh?”

Dr. S: “The bits that don’t? You mean the rest of the f-f-f—for God’s sake!”

Goodwin: “Just one more thing before I go, Doc. How many of these prosthetics is the Corps working on? I mean apart from my new, lightweight model—which I’m sure I won’t be needing.”

Dr. S, dazedly: “How m-many?”

Goodwin, revving his motor: “Because if you want my advice, Doc, I reckon you need to be building those things on an automated production line or lines, and that you should get them up and running just as soon as possible.”

Dr. S: “Jim, what are you saying? What are you d-doing?”

Goodwin: “Goodbye, Doc. It’s me for the compost heap, while there’s still some room on it.”

(The sound of his tractor’s motor revving more yet, then of grinding gears, glass shattering, torn metal, and moments later a jarring near-distant crash.) And finally:

Dr. S, his sobbing voice repeating over and over again: “Oh Jesus! Oh my God! Oh Jesus! Oh my G-g-god…!”

XII

FEASIBILITY REPORT

Sol III Equivalents, Haquar Standard:

Diameter……………1.215 approx.

Day…………..0.922 approx.

Mass……………1.163 approx.

Atmos.……………Acceptable, if a little high in nitrogen, which will be of small consequence once our automated farms and domed processing units are established.

Life:—

A surprising diversity of flora and fauna! The higher or “dominant” lifeforms are bipedal; indeed, their pedal extremities are a delicacy and highly recommended. A shame that the flavor and texture of their vital organs should be unappetizing to Haquarian tastes and even somewhat toxic in concentrated chemical and bacterial content; a great waste. Likewise the trunk, head, and stringy upper appendages: too bony, messy, time-consuming; generally unsatisfactory.

There has been among my team some facetious conjecture that perhaps these creatures have passed too far along the multiversal evolutionary path to be considered mere pabulum, provender, or gourmet pap. Such speculation was put to the test, as usual, by measuring the species’ progress against that of the Haquari.

They have two sexes: an utterly inefficient means of reproduction. Even the most primitive, amoeban lifeforms are capable of fission. Having no telepathic capability, no hive awareness, no Oneness, their principal means of communication is by sounds produced by the expulsion of gases from their mouths; while for mass communication they rely on a system of ponderous electronic transmissions.

With regard to evolution, this species would appear to have reached its peak. In exploration—having no concept of Dimensional Instantaneity—it can never conceivably occupy anything larger than a tiny niche in one small corner of what it unimaginatively perceives as the universe…in other words a single space-time plane of existence with no parallels except in semi-metaphysical theory! As for the IQ of the species: compared with an average Haquari intelligence quotient set at 10, the human score would be 0.0025 approximately. Therefore my assessment—based not only on the degree of Haquari necessity but principally on multiversal levels of progress, intelligence, and achievement—is that this species may only be placed in the ‘non-sentient livestock’ category.

END NOTE:—

With a population in excess of eight billion, Sol III has to be recognized as a major Haquari food source. Automated farming is not only feasible but practical, and in the light of the accelerating decline in sustainable home world resources, I recommend this world’s immediate exploitation. Under modern, managed farming procedures—processing bone as fertilizer and undesirable protein as provender for the livestock, etc.—we should enjoy at least two hundred years usage before the source of this par-ticularly nutritious comestible is exhausted….

This Being the Pronouncement of Ak’n N’Ghar XXVII,

Exobioecologist of Haquar Prime, 2731st Parallel,

on the 7138th Day of the 2nd Haquari Billennium.

Gaddy’s Gloves

This next one was written in the summer of 1988 and appeared in the pamphlet-cum-program book of the World Fantasy Convention when the traveling con came to London in 1991. Since the pamphlet was distributed to attendees only and “Gaddy’s Gloves” wasn’t reprinted, this is virtually an “unknown” Lumley. And of course its “science” element is now dated by virtue of all the incredible advances in communication technology, computer gaming, and like that. In fact, and if memory serves, even back in 1991 the kids were playing some pretty fantastic arcade games! Ah, but there was never a player like Gunner Gaddy….

I

Down in the cargo hold, Grint Pavanaz let himself out of his crate, ate a sandwich and hooked up his ’Vader to the nearest power point. An hour later and halfway through his tenth game, a hatch clanged open and crewmen came clattering with blasters drawn and primed. And they dragged him in front of Captain Cullis. The Captain—bald, fat, red-faced—was more than somewhat peeved and threatened to turn Pavanaz into flotsam. “What if we’d stowed that crate in vacuum?” he snapped through his gash of a mouth.

“You couldn’t.” Pavanaz shrugged. “I paid seven creds for that air-storage sticker.”

“Oh?” Cullis snorted. “And every air-storage sticker gets stored in air, right? Let me tell you something, Puffernuts: sometimes we vacuum all of our crates to kill off the roaches! Especially coming off a swamp like Gizzich IV. And sometimes we irradiate ’em too, and decon before delivery!”

Pavanaz was unrepentant; he shrugged again and said: “Wow!” but very dryly. “You irradiate seeds, yeah? And you vacuum temperate atmosphere tools? Well no wonder your freighters have a better than fifty percent ‘damaged in transit’ record!”

“Twenty-two percent on this ship, Puffernuts!” The Captain was touchy. “Or twenty-two point zero one if we jettison you!”

“Naw.” Pavanaz picked his nose. “See, I dropped a line to Earth to let people know I was coming—and aboard which scow. Also, I researched this bucket. I discovered you run a tight ship, Captain—so no more horror stories about spacing your passengers and such. Hell, you run such a tight ship you even monitor internal power drain! It’s how you found me: the juice my ’Vader was burning.”

“Your what?” the Captain scowled. And Pavanaz explained.

When he was through they went back down to storage and examined his machine. Pavanaz glowed. “She was the latest thing in Ozzie’s Arcade back on Gizzich IV. But at a centricred a shot you could go broke getting yourself a decent score. So I entered Ozzie’s place kind of late one night and sort of, well, rearranged the wiring. Fixing these things was my job, see—or in this case, unfixing them. So Ozzie sent for me the next day and I checked her out, and told him: “No way—she’s a goner—computer’s cracked.” He sold her to me for scrap.

“I put her right, added a few tricks, played till my fingers went flat. It took time, but now I’m the best there is.”

What Pavanaz didn’t say was that Ozzie had called round his place a week later and found him playing the machine. He’d flared up, likewise Pavanaz; somehow the latter’s razor-edged knife had contrived to cut the Arcade King’s throat. Living at the edge of one of Gizzich IV’s biggest swamps, it was no big deal. Ozzie had gone down slow but sure in a mile of mud.

The odds against anyone tagging Grint Pavanaz as a killer were in the seven figures bracket, but he’d panicked anyway. He stole a little money, crated the machine, paid for its passage to Earth, then climbed in the crate with the ’Vader….

The 1st Mate snapped his fingers. “The Game Show!” he said. “The big TV tournament, coming in three months’ time. While they watch, twenty-five billion kids match their skills alongside the best in the Federation.”

Pavanaz grinned, blew on his fingernails and polished them on his shirt.

“Is that what this is about?” said the Captain. “You stowed away to Earth to play games?”

“October, 2482,” said Pavanaz. “Eliminations for a month, the quarter- and semi-finals played off on the 29th, finally the Big Game on the 30th. I shall be there, gentlemen…you are looking at the new champion. A million creds in it, a half-million for the runner-up, and a quarter-million for—”

“We get the picture,” the Captain cut him short. “So you’re that good, eh? Care to show us?”

“Sure,” said Pavanaz. “Want to make a small wager?”

Pavanaz was a skinny twenty-one-year-old. Less meat than a mantis, short-cropped black hair that wouldn’t fall into his eyes when he played, fingers like a pianist, and a razor-honed mind. And a slant to his mouth that told of a special sort of cynicism. A brilliant kid, thought the Captain. Most kids were these days, but all wasted. In all the entire list of charted, settled systems there wasn’t enough real work to go round. Oh, plenty of farming out on the new frontiers, lots of dirty fingernail jobs, but nothing for one like Pavanaz. Except one chance in a million that he’d make a million and retire to one of the resort worlds. Cullis was more or less right, that was all Pavanaz wanted: a million credits, a beach and the latest model ’Vader. The problem was, he didn’t care how he got them. Cullis did care, but he was saving it for later.

Pavanaz climbed into the bouncing, swiveling bucket-seat of his machine and sat there with his eyes closed for a couple of seconds. ’Vaders had been around for five hundred years and more. At first they were expensive toys, then trainers for pilots on Mother Earth, finally trainers for pilots off the Earth. For when men moved out into space and found the Khuum waiting, the ’Vaders had been given a new lease on life; but updated, faster, full of tricks that the kids of the late 20th Century never even dreamed of. Trainers, yes—for the guys who lived through, died in, and at last won the Khuum wars. Since when, what with virtual reality and all, they’d evolved, and evolved, and….

“You gone to sleep, kid?” said the Captain. Pavanaz opened his eyes, switched her on, and showed them who was asleep. They didn’t have the con, but they could look round him and cop some of the excitement. And his game was exciting, indeed inspired, a virtuoso performance. Wraparound 3D made it as close to real as possible, and Pavanaz played it that way: no longer a skinny kid but a fighter pilot out among the stars, on patrol, searching for the enemy.

Out there in deep space his hands, eyes and brain were like parts of the computer he controlled, or half-controlled. No one ever “won” one of these games; the machine won; the idea was to last longer than anyone else and rack up a higher score. For no matter how many of the enemy you destroyed, the computer would conjure up bigger, faster, more powerful Khuum ships. The big ones carried the highest score, but before you could reach them you had to kill off all the small-fry who were trying hard to kill you! So in fact you played yourself, because your skill governed the strength of your opponent: the harder you fought, the greater the machine’s efforts against you.

A fleet of Khuum was out there; they spotted Pavanaz and began to pivot; he was into and through them, killing them off fore and aft, port and starboard. They were no match for him. He looked for bigger fish and found sharks! Behind the scattering fleet, a dozen highly conjectural vessels with all the regular Khuum tricks and then some, turned their needle snouts on him. Pavanaz launched into them, zigzagged to avoid their beams, set his bucket-seat fishtailing. Strapped in, he somehow ignored the motion to concentrate on the game in hand.

At first surprised, the aliens burst asunder, blew up in mad blasts of light and sound which were real enough to add to the reality, quickly threw up their shields. Pavanaz discharged shield-scramblers, following up with Takka Beams that homed on the scramblers, like iron filings to a magnet. And once through the disrupted alien screens, then they homed in on the ships. Pavanaz sliced through debris aware that the Khuum had regrouped and were hot on his littered trail.

His score mounted on the monitor; he dripped sweat till his clothes stuck to him; his hands moved like crazed spiders over the controls. The din of exploding ships was deafening as their beams crept ever closer. Pavanaz’s score went up and the computer compensated. A Khuum battle-cruiser swam into view, and behind it a carrier launching mines and missiles. Pavanaz tripped into hyperspace, burned the cruiser with his exhaust, threw all power to his screens and deflected the carrier’s hypermissiles. He tripped back into normal space and found his screen full of heavy metal! The carrier was dead ahead! No one had ever taken out a carrier before!

Pavanaz hit all of his firing buttons simultaneously and chewed a passage right through the carrier’s belly. All around him, white and yellow light blazed like the heart of hell; his earphones were full of the scream of metal warping out of existence; disintegrating debris blinded him…so that he didn’t even see the whirling, buckled girder that smashed his cockpit and ended the game….

His bucket-seat stopped gyrating; Pavanaz hung limp, drenched over the controls; the scoreboard was alive with flashing lights, and his score was 4,202,786.

“Phew!” said the 1st Mate. “Here, let me try.”

“You?” Pavanaz got down, steadied himself against a bulkhead. “You have hands like…like plates of meat!”

“Kid,” the 1st Mate glowered, “I was doing it for real when you were navigating a hole in your Ma’s tights!” He got aboard, switched on, lasted seventeen point three seconds before being blown to hell. His score was 21,002. Which didn’t say much for his war stories. The others didn’t do nearly so well, and Captain Cullis got the lowest score of all. Pavanaz sniggered somewhat, which wasn’t a good move.

“Pav,” said the Captain, “I think you could win.”

“Tell me about it,” said Pavanaz.

“But you won’t, ’cos you’re not going to Earth. Not on my ‘scow,’ anyway.”

Pavanaz looked uneasy, said, “You don’t scare me, Captain. I checked you out. You’ve made a round trip, visited a dozen worlds, picked up cargoes all destined for Earth. Your ETA is end of August, which gives me a month to enter the competition and catch up on current innovations. So…you must mean you’ll hand me over, charge me with being a stowaway. And you know what next? It will take at least three months to bring me to trial, and by then I’ll be the champion. Runner-up at worst. All the worlds love a winner, and you can buy an awful lot of freedom with half a million creds!”

“That’s your other big problem,” Captain Cullis told him. “Next to being full of shit, you don’t listen too good. Let’s try it again. I said: you’re–not–going–to–Earth.”

Pavanaz’s upper lip twitched. “I don’t follow you.”

“Exactly: you won’t follow me. Not from Shankov’s World!”

Shankov’s World, reputed to be one of the wettest planets in the Federation! It lay close by, along the route home. Pavanaz licked suddenly dry lips, shook his head, said, “Eh? But you’re fully loaded. Your manifesto doesn’t say anything about picking stuff up on Shankov’s World.”

“Who mentioned cargo?” The 1st Mate was all wide-eyed innocence.

Pavanaz glanced slack-jawed at him, then back at the Captain who told him: “You may know your fighters and your Khuum, and all the rest of the computer-generated junk in there.” He sneered at the invader. “But you’re not too hot on these big haulers, are you.” It was a statement not a question.

“Shankov’s?” Pavanaz shook his head again, a little desperately now. “Why would you want to put me down on…” The truth hit him like a thunderbolt. “Fuel!”

The 1st Mate nodded. “Show us a computer that can generate that stuff, you won’t need to play in the games tournament!”

“Meanwhile.” The captain grinned. “We’re just a day out from Shankov’s—and you’re in the brig!” As Pavanaz was led stumbling away, he added: “And kid—I hope you like rain….”

II

Pavanaz didn’t like rain.

Shankov’s World was nine-tenths water. Its sun spent its time sucking water up from one half of the planet and dumping it on the other. When it wasn’t raining it was misty, and vice versa. The other thing Shankov’s World had lots of was lowlife. And fish. Drop a bent pin in the water on Shankov’s, you’d pull out a fish. Put a small piece of something edible on the hook, the water would boil!

Because the living was easy, Shankov’s attracted bums and riffraff. The rich riffraff had greenhouses with solariums and swimming pools and rarely came out, and the bums lived how they could. The young of both sets frequented the area in the vicinity of the spaceport, where “the action” was, and a good many of them played ’Vaders. Pavanaz wasn’t through yet. There were kids here with creds, and his face wasn’t known like back on Gizzich IV. Customs passed him as Human; he paid Visitor’s Tax and a returnable import fee on his ’Vader, borrowed a fork-lift to carry the machine out of the spaceport to the doors of the nearest arcade: “Fat Bill’s Place.” Oh, Shankov’s was real class!

Fat Bill was a blob about sixty-two inches in all directions; he wheezed as Pavanaz and a handful of splashers-by half-dragged, half-carried the ’Vader into an empty corner in the arcade’s front hall. And he waited patiently while Pavanaz used the edges of his hands to squeegee the water out of his shirt and pants. It was “summer” and the rain was warm.

“I’m Bill,” he wheezed when Pav was done. “You should buy yourself a plastimac, Mac.”

“I’m Grint Pavanaz,” said Pavanaz. “And I will.”

“S’funny,” said Fat Bill, scratching his head. “I don’t recall ordering this baby.”

“You didn’t,” Pavanaz informed. “She’s mine.”

Fat Bill narrowed his eyes a little. “In my arcade?”

“Just until I can catch a ship out of here,” said Pavanaz.

Fat Bill’s eyes narrowed more yet. “See,” he said, “I don’t see much in that for me. I mean, there’s a warehouse next door where you can stable this beast. So why clutter up my place, eh?”

“I can explain,” said Pavanaz.

“Make it good,” Fat Bill told him “and fast, before this ’Vader of yours gets headed for one big oxidization problem.” He inclined his head towards the door.

Pavanaz stripped the plastic off his machine in front of a mainly disinterested crowd. They pulled faces at it and moved away. Nothing new here. Pav looked at Fat Bill. “I can pay you three creds a day just to keep her here.”

Fat Bill nodded. “That might be OK—except I like the kids to play my machines, you know? It’s my living.”

“That’s good,” Pavanaz agreed, forking out three credits. “No one plays this one but me. I’ve got the key.” He checked there was no one within earshot. “Listen, this could be good for both of us.”

Fat Bill stepped closer. “Keep talking,” he said.

Pavanaz took out a square of soft cloth with a trace of machine oil, commenced wiping down the ’Vader, removing every last trace of moisture. “See,” he said, “nobody—but nobody—plays these things like I do. So…I wager my game against your top scorers. I bet my money against theirs. And I give ’em good odds. When they lose, we split sixty-forty on each days’ take.”

“You’re short on shekel, right?”

“I need a stake to get to Earth, that’s all.”

“And you’re better than the kids who come in here?”

“Better believe it.”

“Look—Pasternak?—maybe you haven’t noticed, but Shankov’s World is wet. No outdoor sports here, ’cept fishing. The kids round here; they’re experts. You never seen such players!”

“Except on the Games Shows,” said Pavanaz.

“Ah!” The other’s piggy eyes opened wide. “So that’s it!” He laughed out loud, finished up coughing. Bill’s condition and Shankov’s climate didn’t work. “Don’t kill me,” he said. “Every kid who ever thought he could play is putting his mother on the streets to buy a ticket to Earth. What makes you so special?”

Pavanaz scowled. “OK, I’ll show you. Do you have anyone in here right now who can actually play these things?”

Fat Bill looked at him sideways. “In the back,” he finally said. “The ’Vaders are in the back. On Shankov’s we keep as far out of the rain as possible. Centricred machines out front, big stuff in the back. You want players? I’ll show you players.”

Pavanaz followed him into the arcade, through opaque glass humidity doors. And Fat Bill showed him the players.

Pav watched awhile. A couple of the kids were OK, that’s all. Gizzich had guys who could eat the best of these, and Pavanaz had eaten all of them! He told Fat Bill: “Bear with me,” and yelled, “Five gets you fifteen I’m the best there is!”

A crewcut runt who looked much like Pavanaz (except his expression was mainly innocent), turned from the game he was watching and glanced at Pav. The player, the runt, and a crowd of local kids that had been watching cursed loud and vicious as he was blown to bits by the Khuum. He leapt out of the bucket and tore through the spectators, intent on Pavanaz’s throat.

“Was that you yelling?” he snarled, his face purple. “You put me off, ruined my game, you sonofa—”

“Hold it, Kem,” said the one with the crewcut, getting between them. He was fast and moved like silk, and Pavanaz recognized someone who would be a good player. Also someone with authority—among the ’Vader-addicts, anyway.

“What?” Kem was outraged. He was twice as big as the runt but held back. “Aces, this guy cost me a big score! For no good reason he comes in here mouthing off, I’m distracted, and—”

“I saw all that,” said Aces. “Also that you were about to be blown sky-high. So he put you off a little—maybe. So what? Didn’t you hear what the man said? He said five gets you fifteen he’s the best.”

Kem looked past Aces at Pavanaz. “Shit,” he said, “this beanpole doesn’t look like he ever had fifteen!”

Pavanaz waved a wad at them. “I have it,” he said; “and a lot more. But I’m greedy and you suckers are in here spending money that could be mine. So can you play or can’t you? I mean, if you don’t want to try me out—hell, there are other arcades where I won’t be wasting my talent!” He offered them his best come-and-get-it sneer, and began to turn away. But Aces caught his sleeve and stopped him.

Pavanaz looked at the hand on his arm until it was taken away, then said: “Yeah?”

“Kem could probably take you,” said Aces, all soft-voiced. “And if he can’t, I sure as hell can.”

So you’re the big cat around here, are you? But out loud Pav said, “Zat right, Kem? You play good? You can borrow five to go after my fifteen?”

“I don’t borrow shit!” Kem slapped a five into Aces’ open hand. Aces held out his hand to Pav, who stuck three fives in it. “What’s your name, anyway, beanpole?” Kem scowled. “I like to know whose money I’m spending.”

“Name’s Grint Pavanaz,” said Pav, “but you can call me The Man.” Kem’s score was still lit up on the ’Vader screen. Nine hundred and eighty-seven thousand was OK—but only just. Pavanaz knew he could beat it without even trying, but he wouldn’t.

“Checking my score?” Kem grinned. “Starting to feel warm?” But then he snarled again: “Remember, it would have been a lot higher if you hadn’t bust in here mouthing off!”

“That was when you were playing for laughs,” Pav told him. “Anybody can make a score when there’s nothing riding. But now it’s for money, which is different.” He bowed sarcastically and offered Kem the bucket-seat. “You want to show me what you’re made of?”

“Brother—Pfefferminz?—do you have things to learn!” Kem grinned and climbed into the bucket, paid for the game, scored almost one and a quarter million before being scrambled. But he was an amateur like the rest of them. They didn’t live it, that was their trouble. And this time Pav wouldn’t either.

He got into the seat, let her roll and was taken out with a score of seven hundred and sixty thousand. Kem was jubilant. He laughed at Pav and yelled, “Hey, you got any more of the green stuff you want to give away?”

The crowd hee-heed and hoo-hooed. Pav scowled. “So you were lucky. Hell, it was the first time I played this model!”

“Excuses, excuses!” Kem snorted, laughing nasally.

Pavanaz scowled harder, yanked out his wad. “Laughing boy,” he said, “I got eighty-seven here, all I’m holding. My eight-seven against yours—or is that too rich for you?”

Aces stood to one side, arms folded on his chest. Not as innocent as he looked, he believed he’d seen all this before. Heard about it, anyway. His eyes narrowed where they followed Pav’s every move. Kem, on the other hand: he obviously wasn’t thinking straight—or maybe he was bloated with success.

Eighty-seven creds! Kem’s mouth formed a silent “O.” He counted thirty-one out of his pocket, plus the twenty Aces was holding. “Fifty-one,” he said, biting his lip. “I’m looking for thirty-six more. Anyone want to double his money, fast?”

“I’m with you, Kem!” A shriveled kid with specs pushed his way forward. He counted out thirty-six into Kem’s sweaty paw.

Which was when Aces cut in. “You sure you want to do this?”

Kem grinned. “Are you kidding? This is candy!”

“I’d say it was hard shekel,” Aces retorted. “But—” and he shrugged, “—it’s your ass.”

Kem still couldn’t see it. “Hell, no! It’s his ass, Aces!”

The opponents handed over their cash to Fat Bill, who just happened to be standing there. And Pav told Kem: “Your turn in the hot seat, I believe?”

Kem clocked a million six hundred and forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-one—and Pav took it exactly nine higher to a million six hundred and fifty thousand. This time Kem had sweated, but Pav wasn’t even mildly fazed.

As he got down from the bucket Kem looked at his score, shook his head, and staggered away through the crowd to throw up in a corner. Fat Bill stood them with his bottom jaw flapping and the money flapping in his hand—until Pavanaz snatched it from him. And: “That’s all, folks,” Pav grinned.

“Not so fast, hotshot,” said Aces, having moved in close. “You knew you could beat him. It was robbery.”

“Now you’re really joking,” Pav sneered. “Is it illegal to bet on a sure thing? Or are you saying he was the best you have to offer, and you don’t much cotton to a new champ? Sure it was robbery. Like he said: candy from a baby! So unless the rest of you kids have business with me, I’ll just—”

“My turn,” Aces cut in. “I can’t fly as high as you, Paraquat, but I’ve got fifty—if you’d care to go for it…?”

Pavanaz looking like he might accept, narrowed his eyes, then said: “Naw, who needs it?”

“You’re backing off? Backing down?” Aces’ face was blank.

Pavanaz shook his head. “Lessons from me are expensive,” he said. “Fifty—” he shrugged “who needs it?”

Aces nodded sourly. “You played Kem when all he had was five. What’s wrong, Paraquat? Nerve gone?”

“I’d seen Kem’s game.” Pav grinned. “He looked easy to me.” His words sounded loose but he’d chosen them with care.

“You only play the easy ones?” Aces spoke quietly but his words held a sneer. The sort that said: brother, you are real chickenshit! The crowd held its breath.

Pavanaz made himself go white. He’d had the practice; it wasn’t hard. “Find another twenty-five—make it seventy-five—” he snapped, “you’ve got yourself a game!”

The rest of the gang forked out and again the stake went to Fat Bill. And Bill was grinning now. He liked Pavanaz a lot.

Five minutes later it was all over; Pavanaz had a pocketful of creds; the kids followed him as he went back out through the humidity doors to his ’Vader. When they got there he turned and said: “Listen, chumps. This one is mine and it makes those antiques in back look like so much scrap. But this is a nasty big old planet for nice expensive metal like this, which is why the Fat Man is going to find me a nice dry room all my own to keep her in. If you guys are good, I might let you watch me practice with this baby. And if you’re especially good—you could even get to play a game or two yourselves! So tell me, am I good to you or am I good to you.”

“Shaganass,” said Aces, now recovered. “I just can’t hate someone who plays like you do. But I can’t admire you either. So let’s just say I’m coldly indifferent.”

“What you mean is,” said Pavanaz, “that you’d like to try out my ’Vader, right? Live and let live? Forgive and forget?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Aces. “In fact I’d like to see you get your ass best! But I’m not the one who can do it to you, so in fact I’m not going to have anything to do with you. ’Cos you just don’t smell right. Look after yourself, Parrotsquat.” And he turned on his heel and left.

But the rest of them were putty in Pav’s hands. He played for them; they oohed and aahed! He let them play, watched as they got blasted all over space. He was light-years ahead of them. Any fool could see that….

An hour later and it was time to close the place up. Pavanaz enlisted the aid of his worshippers to drag his ’Vader into a room Fat Bill was only too pleased to clear out for him, and before they left he said to them:

“Guys, I have an idea which I think you’ll like. Kem, you’ll like it best of all. A lot of you lost money tonight, creds you loaned to Aces and Kem here. Now I’m going to give you a chance to get those creds back.”

“Big deal!” somebody groaned. “Pavanaz, we couldn’t beat you in a thousand years! Win our money back? That’s not the funniest thing you ever said.”

“I didn’t say ‘win’ it back,” Pav sighed. “Who mentioned miracles? So why don’t we talk about earning it back, eh?”

“Earn it back?” (This from Kem, who was learning caution.) “You mean we should work for you?”

Pavanaz shrugged. “You can call it that if you like. Me, I’d call it easy money. I mean, there are other arcades on this morass, right? Other ‘champions’? So go on out there and bring ’em back alive! Bring ’em here, to me. Guys long on creds and short on talent—by my standards. And that covers everybody, you dig?”

“This is easy money?” someone piped up. “You rip ’em off, and we get beaten up? Easy money for who—Grint Pavanaz?”

Again Pavanaz sighed. “All you got right was my name,” he said. “Look, why should they take it out on you? You think I want you to lie? Like you should tell them there’s this nut called Pavanaz who’s loaded and an easy mark for anyone with one good eye and a steady hand? Hell, no! Tell ’em the truth and nothing but—that I’m the best there is. That way, who could resist coming to see for himself? Could you? And for every hundred I take off one of these suckers, it’s ten creds to the guy who reeled him in. Now tell me, is that easy money or isn’t it?”

With which, no one could find anything to disagree.

III

It happened like Pavanaz figured: customers were shy; and business quiet—for forty-eight hours. Then word got out and the punters came in. At first from arcades on the spaceport perimeter, then from Guni, the supply town, eventually from halfway across Shankov’s as Pavanaz’s legend spread. By night five, his take was approaching four thousand credits and all debts paid, however grudgingly.

For this he’d had to lose the occasional game (the little ones, to give the punters heart) and the rest of the time he’d played as only Grint Pavanaz could, but not once extending himself too far. It was all good practice for the tournament.

Fat Bill was happy; Pav’s pals were happy, including Kem; happiest of all was Pavanaz himself. A packet for Earth was due in a fortnight, and he’d made the down payment on a ticket for himself and a crate for his ’Vader. He needed another grand to buy his passage outright and give him floating creds to spare.

But the next day takings were down, and the day after that they fell away entirely. By the next morning Pavanaz was back to playing two credit games with the local talent, and already he suspected he wasn’t going to make it. Only eleven days left and hopes rapidly fading, Pavanaz despaired. He’d been a shade too good, too greedy, too soon. That’s what was wrong.

Noon of that same day, after Fat Bill went out for lunch, who should walk in but Aces with…somebody. Pavanaz knew he was somebody as soon as he saw him.

He was cleaning his ’Vader when the two came over. He heard Aces’ sneakers on the tiled floor, but not the footsteps of the other. This one walked like a cat, looked like one, too. But an old cat, a mouser out of time. To Pav, anyone over thirty-five was ancient—history, almost—and this guy was ten plus beyond that. He looked like…a relic from the Khuum wars? In that last observation, Pavanaz couldn’t be more accurate if he tried. Indeed Hal Gaddy was a relic from the Khuum wars.

“Aces,” Pavanaz nodded, casually. “And…friend?”

“Pavanaz,” said Aces, short on greetings, “this is Gaddy. He’d like to see you play. If he’s impressed, maybe he’ll let you try to take some money off him.”

“Gee, I’m honored!” said Pavanaz.

“You should be,” the newcomer growled, like gravel sliding down a chute. And Pavanaz looked at him more closely.

Hal Gaddy was five-seven in his high-heeled boots, weighed maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and was tanned a permanent brown to match his trappings. While his jacket and trousers were of a fine, thin leather, his leather gloves looked almst painted on his hands. But inside those gloves Gaddy’s hands themselves were trembling where they hung loosely, yet awkwardly, at his sides.

Gaddy’s forearm under rolled-up sleeves were deeply scarred; likewise his face, which was equipped with eyes that were piercing blue and looked like cold moons rising behind the hollow crags of his weathered cheeks. His mouth was straight, but a small piece of his upper lip was missing on the left, letting an eye-tooth show through like naked bone. The many lines etched into his skin around his eyes and mouth could be from laughter or pain, Pav wasn’t sure. He suspected, though, that Gaddy hadn’t laughed in a long time.

“See,” said Pavanaz after a moment, “it’s a game of skill. Good eyes, hands, nerves, and an ability to anticipate bordering on the supernatural—that’s all it takes. Over twenty-two or three and you’re slowing down, twenty-five and you’re plodding, more than that and you’re in reverse. I see that back on Earth a sixteen-year-old black kid has run the first three-minutes-forty mile! Why don’t you go in for athletics, Mr. Gaddy? I mean, your chances would be a lot better.”

“Stow the mister,” said Gaddy. “Call me Gunner.”

Pavanaz knew what that meant and for a moment felt a genuine thrill. Gunner! If so, Gaddy was a fighter pilot from the Khuum wars. Or…he was a fake, a bum living someone else’s legend for whatever crumbs got thrown his way. But the Khuum had pulled out a quarter-century ago, so it was just possible. Just, because surviving Gunners from that mess were so few you could count them on one hand with several fingers missing. So Pav had always understood it.

“The real thing, eh?” he said, finally nodding, but knowingly, cynically. “Maybe. Or…just another stowaway?”

“Stowaway?” Gaddy lifted an eyebrow.

“Sure.” Pavanaz shrugged. “On Gizzich I knew a couple of ‘Gunners.’ One was a cook retired off cruisers, and the other was a colorblind son of a no-account prospector from Faggul V. But they’d read the manuals and you couldn’t fault ’em—until they climbed into a bucket. Gunners? Naw! Just stowaways hitching a ride on a legend.”

“Pavanaz, you’re a—” Aces started forward, his jaw jutting.

“It’s OK, son,” said Gaddy, his chipped lip lifting a little. And to Pav: “I’d heard you had lots of mouth, Pavanaz, so that kind of garbage doesn’t worry me. What? I should lose my cool just before a game?”

Pavanaz scowled. “Who said you were going to get one?”

Gaddy took out a five-credit note and waved it under Pav’s nose. “This says so,” he said. “Also the fact that you’re dying to know. ’Cos if I’m the real thing, you’re not going to meet another one in a long, long time.”

“Hah!” Pavanaz snorted. “I should play for fives? Against grandfathers? For the thrill of gutting a tired old Gunner? If you’re for real?”

“The word is,” Aces grated, still sizzling, “you’re down to playing for twos, hotshot.”

“Well—” Pavanaz started, paused, and eventually continued, “—see, it’s like this: the twos are for amusement. But five on a grudge is cheap and nasty. I mean, it would be a grudge game, right, Aces old buddy? You brought this guy in here to wipe the floor with me, to see me sweat for a miserable five, right? I’m not amused, and I’m not desperate either. But for fifty…?”

“Now that’s greedy,” said Gaddy, shaking his head. “That’s a lot of credits. You’re expensive, Pavanaz…but,” he sighed and shrugged, “I’ll go along with it—if you play first. See, it’s rumored your ’Vader has a couple of embellishments, stuff the other machines don’t have? And lord knows you’ve had plenty of practice, right? It seems only fair I should get to see what I’m up against.”

“Like in the Khuum wars?” Pav made a gawping, idiot face. “They’d show you their hardware before a dogfight, right?” He laughed at Aces’ raging expression, then sobered. “Fair enough. I go first and we play for fifty. And good ol’ Aces here can hold the pot.” He handed over his money and Gaddy matched it. And without more ado Pavanaz got aboard and opened her up.

He played hard but not too hard and clocked three million. But to do it he had to show almost everything the machine had. Gaddy knew what he was up against…from the machine if not from its owner. But Pav figured it like this: If Gaddy was the real thing and if he still had it, then maybe—just maybe—he could win. And of course he’d want to do it again. Except next time it would be for real money and Pavanaz would really play. And if Gaddy was a fraud…well maybe he’d come back for more anyway, especially if his score wasn’t too far behind.

But it seemed that Gaddy was indeed faking it: he scored close to three million but not close enough, and Pavanaz pocketed the kitty. Glancing at Gaddy out of the corner of his eye, he could see how choked he was. “If you can’t stand losing,” said Pavanaz, “then you really shouldn’t gamble.”

“Yeah?” Gaddy grunted. “Maybe. But for all your newfangled gewgaws, hell, I nearly had you!”

“Nearly doesn’t cut it,” said Pav.

At that Gaddy’s lips tightened. “We go again!” he snapped, and Pavanaz got the feeling that even though this was what he’d intended, still it was a rerun of something or other.

“Oh yeah?” he said, playing it like always yet feeling it was playing him. “You can afford three hundred, can you, Gaddy? ’Cos that’s what this one will cost you…three hundred minimum! Take it or leave it.”

Gaddy took out a tight little roll and opened it up. Just three notes in there, but they were all Big Ones. Bigger than hundreds, certainly. Three grand, which he handed to Aces for safekeeping. And as the notes passed before Pav’s eyes, Gaddy made sure he saw the zeroes. “Just to get the adrenalin flowing,” he growled. “Can you afford it, Pavanaz?”

Pav’s eyes bugged and he breathed a small sigh. It was all there: his ticket to Earth, his gateway to a pad on a beach on one of the resort worlds! Three thousand credits, the key to a million more! And this tired old man hadn’t even seen him play yet. Not really play!

He counted his cash into Aces’ hand, ventilated and hyperventilated his lungs, climbed yet again into the bucket. And as he switched her on, too late to stop and think again, suddenly he remembered something he’d said or thought: that Gaddy hadn’t seen him play yet. But the fact was that he hadn’t seen Gaddy play, either. The old guy had scored nearly three million, and never a drop of sweat. As for his shaky old hands: once they’d settled to the machine’s controls, there hadn’t been a single shake in ’em!

But too late because Pavanaz was into the game. And with three thousand credits and his entire future riding on it, he couldn’t worry about anything now except survival—his survival, out among the cold, impersonal stars. And Pav played like never before, played it for real and for true and for life and for death, and for all of his past and all of his future, the future he’d killed for and would kill for again if necessary. Except it wasn’t necessary, for he need only win this game.

And at seven million one thousand nine hundred and sixty, a shatter-beam found him and shivered his ship to shards. Pav, too, the way he slumped there in the bucket when it was over.

As they lifted him down, he groaned: “No need to play it off if you don’t want to, old-timer. Let’s face it, it would only be embarrassing. Aces, give me my money.”

But Gaddy only told him, “Son, that was a good game and twenty-seven years ago we might have had a use for someone like you. Except you wouldn’t have been interested because you’re only interested in you. As for giving you the money: the eggs aren’t hatched yet, Pavanaz.” And then he played.

But where Pavanaz had only played for real, Gunner Gaddy played for real.

27102 Gunner Gaddy H, he’d been, “Khuum-Killer” to his friends, the young men who joined up and went out into space, and often as not didn’t come back. Brief friends, anyway. But Gaddy had kept on coming back, so that he’d have been a legend if there’d been anyone keeping count of his missions. But when the going got rough even the Brass went out, and most of them didn’t come back either. And the new Brass didn’t know Gaddy at all: he was just another kid who killed Khuum and was destined to get killed himself, like all the rest.

Khuum-Killer Gaddy, he’d been then…and still was!

The patterns their ships made in space were familiar to Gaddy as the lines on his hands had…had used to be. That was before the aliens who saved his life gave him his gloves. Since then there’d been no lines on his hands at all, and when he took the gloves off….

But this wasn’t the time or place to let that surface again. This was Khuum-killing time, and they knew he was there and were taking up defensive positions as he swept in towards them. No game, this, not for Gaddy, just a replay from life, a rerun of the only thing that had ever brought his mind fully alive and set the adrenalin in his blood to full flow. And yet not really a replay, either, for now his ship was that much more sophisticated and his weaponry so much more devastating. While the Khuum…why, they were just the same old bad old Khuum as always!

In a move the ’Vader didn’t know it possessed, Gaddy spun his fighter end over end, howling through the Khuum ranks in a Catherine wheel of destruction, his fingers—no, his gloves—a blur of fluttering motion on the firing studs. Spinning like that, it appeared the Khuum were everywhere, and not a one of them who passed his crosshairs came out the other side! Then he was through them, killing his spin, sensing them reforming behind him, and tripping into hyperspace before they could fix their Warpers on him.

Back there in normal space they burned in his exhaust; but Gaddy was out of hyperspace just as quickly as in, looping back on himself, coming down on them where the dumb bastards opened up on his afterimage. They never knew what hit them, vaporizing all around him as he worked all his studs at once!

But so many Khuum fighters? What the hell?—they must be riding shotgun on something big, something huge! It was the ’Vader compensating, except Gaddy wasn’t thinking ’Vader but death to the Khuum. The machine had never experienced so much computerized destruction so fast, and it was answering Gaddy the only way it could: by speeding up the game and bringing forward The End that much faster. And to do so it was sticking up the Big Stuff on the screen, the invincible stuff, the stuff that carried the highest scores.

But…something big, Gaddy thought. Something huge! And yes, there it was!

Cutting in his visiblizers, Gaddy saw its dull metallic gleam for a moment where the object furrowed space behind its No-see screens, false stars sliding along its vast hull stem to stern to make him think it was empty space. A battle-station!—a mother!—launching carriers and tiny Khuum-manned suicide darts; and the carriers launching cruisers, mines, missiles; and the cruisers lining up their entropy torps; and the darts intent on death and glory, but mainly intent on nailing Gaddy. And all this hardware firming into reality as it came screaming out from under the battle-station’s No-sees.

The battle-station was impregnable to anything Gaddy had, but he knew how to get it. The station was about to launch its last carrier; Gaddy must get the carrier before it cleared the launch-tubes and threw up its screens. Twisting and writhing like light-speed snakes of green fire, the Takka-beams leaped the light-seconds to their target. Programmed to follow the beams, the Warp-torp zigzagged around and through everything the frantic Khuum tossed at it. The Takkas found the carrier, and a micro-second later so did the torp. The carrier, still sliding out of the battle-station’s belly, warped out of existence like a small sun gone nova. And the battle-station had no option but to go nova with it!

“Got you, you bastard!” Gaddy tried to scream, nothing coming out but a choking cough, his throat was that dry. But strange, because he did hear screams. Except…they weren’t his.

“No—no—no!” Pavanaz danced beside the ’Vader like some demented puppet-master’s doll, clawed at the jiving bucket-seat and leaped up alongside, to wrench Gaddy’s hands—no Gaddy’s gloves—from the controls.

Gaddy was about to trip into hyperspace; with no one at the controls his ship tore into the battle-station’s planet-wide fireball. Khuum disruptors followed it; stripped down its armor to an eggshell that withered in the nuclear furnace….

“No!” Pavanaz sobbed again, trying to drag Gaddy out of the bucket. “You’ve killed it! Jesus, you’ve killed it!” He didn’t mean the battle-station.

“Killed it?” Gaddy got his straps loose, fell out of the seat, somehow managed to land on his feet. And again: “Killed it?” he said. He was still reeling a little, not yet back on solid ground. Snarling, Pavanaz grabbed his throat. And Aces hit him from the side, a blow that crushed his ear and deafened him on that side for two hours. But it also knocked him loose from Gunner Gaddy.

“His machine!” Aces said then, gasping, pointing at the ’Vader. While on the floor Pavanaz rocked and cried.

His ’Vader, yes, which he’d programmed to cave in if anyone took it over twenty million—because he’d known that no one could ever take it over twenty million. No one human, anyway. Unless it was him. But Gaddy had, and in so doing he’d killed it.

Twenty mill? The score, while it lasted, stood at twenty-five million and odds! The battle-station alone had been worth half of that! But who was counting? Pavanaz knew it would have been more if he hadn’t interrupted the game. Not much more, because once past the Big Twenty and the self-destructs had started to cut in, systematically junking the whole machine. And right now the ’Vader’s complex guts were going up in gray, stinking smoke and blue electrical fire, and the machine sputtered and sparked where she sat atop her own internal funeral pyre.

“Gaddy,” said Aces, awed. “You…you’ve bust it!”

And because Pavanaz couldn’t hear what Aces said, he couldn’t contradict him—couldn’t tell him that this had been his target, his impossible dream. Because he had known that if there ever came a time when he could clock twenty million, by then he’d be worth that much and it just wouldn’t matter. But right now it mattered a lot. The ’Vader dying there was taking his whole world, his universe with it.

Pavanaz watched it go, then crawled into a corner and did a Kem job all over Fat Bill’s not-so-immaculately-clean floor….

IV

When fat Bill sloshed back to the arcade after lunch he found his private door open and Grint Pavanaz sitting (or slumped) behind his desk, head thrown back and feet propped up on the imitation mahogany. He saw Pavanaz, then the door of the wall safe where it, too, stood open. For a fat man, Bill could move fast when he had to; his tiny electric stunner was dwarfed by his pudgy fist in less time than it takes to tell. “What…?” he wheezed then, his piggy gaze transferring from Pavanaz to the safe and back again. “What…?”

Finally Pavanaz looked at him. “Yes,” he said listlessly. “What, what.” And: “Don’t panic, Bilbo, I didn’t take anything. I was going to, but…it was depression, that’s all. By the time I had the safe open, I could see how stupid it would be.”

Fat Bill gawped, closed his mouth and snapped the fingers of his free hand. Being fat and wet, the sound was more a plop than a snap. “Aces and Gaddy!” he said. “I saw them down the street. When the rain started up, they took a cab. They were here. They took…you?”

Pavanaz’s face was all twisted. “Gaddy did,” he said, hurting to admit it. “That stinking rocket-jockey! But…I don’t know how, I really don’t know how! There is no one who can take me on—so how come I’m not nearly as good as him? It’s driving me nuts!” Then he scowled. “More to the point, how come you didn’t warn me about him—‘partner’?” He looked accusingly at Bill.

“Tell you about him? Warn you? I ain’t even seen the guy in years!” Fat Bill jutted his wobbly jaw. “He was dead for all I knew! And don’t change the subject. What, you accusing me of stuff, and guilty as all get out? And my safe open?”

“It’s safe,” said Pavanaz humorlessly. And: “You’d better tell me about Gaddy. He has a secret, and I want it. Because if he has it, others might have it too. And I’m not going back to Earth to discover I’m last in line! I was the best, and with whatever it is he’s got I’ll be the best again.”

Fat Bill crossed to his safe. “How much?” he said.

“I told you I didn’t take anything!” Pav snapped. “What, and have you waiting for me at the embarkation with the local cops and a warrant? That’s no way to get to Earth, and it’s sure no way to win a million!”

“How much did they take off you, dummy!” Fat Bill snorted. And Pav didn’t much like being talked to like that, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Fat Bill had just locked he safe and changed the combination when Pavanaz answered: “He took three thousand off me.”

“What!?” The fat man’s jaw fell open. “Three th—”

“Three grand—three biggies,” Pavanaz cut him off. “And I fell for it like it was all new to me. And now I’m mad.”

“But he beat you fair,” said Fat Bill. “Fair’s fair—and our partnership is dissolved. Out,” he jerked his thumb. “And take your debris with you!”

Pavanaz didn’t move. “How’d you like to make two hundred thou?” he said, slowly. “Two hundred grand, all for your fat little self??

“I’m listening,” Fat Bill answered, after a long moment. “But my attention span is shortening by the second.”

“A million’s what I’m set to win on Earth,” said Pavanaz, “and twenty percent of that can be yours—partner?”

“A new partnership?” Fat Bill grimaced. “So soon? And I’m to get two hundred grand out of it? Who do you want killed, Pav?”

“Information,” said Pavanaz, “that’s all I want. And maybe—just maybe—a grubstake to Earth. Hell, you could squeeze it out of what I’ve already earned you!”

Fat Bill scowled. “Last time, I got forty percent.”

“But that was peanuts,” said Pav. “And this is creds!” He capitalized the last word. But as Fat Bill hesitated, he swung his legs down from the desk and stood up. “Why am I wasting my time?” he asked, of no one in particular. “People have seen me play. I can find a backer somewhere else.”

“Hold it!” said Fat Bill as Pavanaz made to leave. “You’ll sign a contract, making me your manager on twenty percent?”

“Damn right!” Pavanaz nodded.

“So, I may be crazy but…let’s work it out,” said the other. When they’d finished doing that, then he began to talk in earnest….

“Gaddy was a ground staff mechanic in the Corps,” (said Fat Bill), “just a kid who patched up fighters when they got shot up. His girl and her folks lived here on Shankov’s—on the other side—in a little mountain township that got more than its fair share of sunlight by virtue of its elevation. It got a lot of exposure to the Khuum, too. The night Gaddy and his girl got married, in one of the cities under the cloud layer, the Khuum took out her village. For no good reason; it wasn’t tactical or in support or anything; just the Khuum being the Khuum. Her folks died. But…it was like they were Gaddy’s folks, too.

“After that Gaddy was changed. He became a Gunner—for the duration. He survived because there was a girl to come back to, and because there were Khuum to keep going after. He led a love-hate life, you know? Out scouting one time, he came across a gaggle of Khuum bandits attacking an alien ship. But I’m talking alien! He’d never seen anything like it before, it was that weird. And no one ever saw anything like it since. It must have been sort of just passing through this sector.

“That alien ship was in a bad way, crippled, its shields going down like dominoes. Gaddy didn’t know if it was friendly or what, but he knew how he felt about the Khuum. He went in, took the bandits by surprise and played all hell with them—which gave the alien ship time to get itself operational again and back in the action. Gaddy’d cut the Khuum pack down to just three when finally one of them got him and burned his fighter. He was cut up and burned, too, but he managed to eject. Spinning in space, he saw the alien ship open up with one godawful weapon that erased those three Khuum fighters like chalk off a blackboard! Then he passed out….

“When he came round he was inside the alien ship and they were working on him, putting him right. He saw the mess he was in—mainly his hands—and passed out again. But they fixed him up with those gloves of his, put him in a life-support pod and dropped him just inside the Corps radius. Our boys picked up the alien ship on their scanners, and when they went for a look-see found Gaddy.

He asked for out and the Corps let him go. Hell, he’d done his bit, and maybe he’d finally figured out just how lucky he’d been. The Khuum were retreating by then, and the sheer science that came out of Gaddy’s alien life-support pod put the finishing touches to it. A year later the war was over, and the Khuum had backed off wherever they’d come from.

“Gaddy came back to Shankov’s; eventually he and his woman had their baby son—Aces. But the girl hadn’t been the same since her folks got theirs. She died young and Gaddy was left on his own with the kid. He raised him, turned him loose when he was seventeen, then dropped out of sight. Sort of retired himself—from everything. That was two or three years ago.

“And that’s about as much as I know. I got it in bits and pieces here and there—with difficulty. See, people respect Gaddy; they let him alone. The way I see what happened here today, Aces was really kissed off and cajoled his father into taking you down a peg.”

Pavanaz nodded sourly. “Not hard to figure,” he said. And then he frowned. “So his hands were burned up, right? And the aliens gave him those gloves?”

“You got it. And he’s never been seen without ’em.”

“Aliens,” said Pav, still frowning, “with weapons and an advanced technology we can’t even guess at. They were passing through and got in trouble; Gaddy pulled their nuts out of the fire; he got burned doing it, so they squared it by…that’s it! They made sure he came out of it better than when he went in!”

“Sure,” Fat Bill shrugged, having figured it out for himself. “Naturally. He has hi-tec fingers.”

“He cheated me!” Pavanaz was furious.

“Hell, no,” said Fat Bill. “You ever done target shooting? You can’t disqualify a man just because he’s better equipped!”

“The way I see it he cheated,” Pav insisted. “Where does he live?”

“Now wait!” Fat Bill was alarmed. “Twenty percent of murder I can do without!”

“I don’t want his life,” Pavanaz snorted (though he really wouldn’t mind, if he could do it smart), “I want his skill, his edge. Shit, the war’s over! He doesn’t need it—but I do!”

“Let it be, kid,” said Fat Bill. “He’s outgunned you once. Gaddy’s no fool.”

“Does he live with Aces?”

Fat Bill shook his head. “Like I told you, they parted company when Aces got himself a job here in the spaceport. The kid lives right here, but Gaddy lives way out. On his own. He was a one-woman guy.”

“Where?” Pavanaz demanded.

And sighing, Fat Bill told him. Hell, it was Pav’s neck.

After the Khuum wars, the Corps had taken care of its men. It could afford to; not too many had come through it. Also, Gaddy must have picked up a disability pension. (The thought of that almost made Pavanaz scream!)

Property hadn’t been so expensive then; not on a swamp like Shankov’s, which made Gizzich IV seem positively dry! Gaddy had bought himself a house surrounded by waterways. Not for security (after the Khuum, what was there to feel insecure about?), just for peace of mind. He hadn’t wanted hassle, and the only people he’d needed were his people. After his wife died he’d lived with Aces, and now he was on his own.

Following Fat Bill’s directions, Pav had covered the eight hundred miles to Gaddy’s locality by jet-boat and steam-paddle, taking two days and a night to get there. Arriving in the local town on the evening of the second day, he’d hired a fan-driven swamp-skimmer (he was an off-worlder, here for the fishing). As darkness came down, he’d located Gaddy’s address. Then, putting out a dummy fishing line, he’d slept on board the skimmer for a few hours, coming awake at 2:00 a.m. in the morning. It was eerily quiet and all Gaddy’s lights were out.

There was a wooden bridge over the canal to the house, but Pav didn’t want to take the chance someone would see him crossing. So he wrapped the skimmer’s breakdown oars and paddled silently across, then moored his boat in the mangroves on the rim of Gaddy’s property. Pav was equipped for a break-in but it wasn’t necessary—the place was wide open.

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.

“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.

Men had known for a long time that the moon controlled the tides—and possibly the fluids in men’s brains?—and it was interesting now to note that Luna II appeared to compound the offence. It seemed reasonable to suppose that we had finally discovered the reason for Man’s homicidal tendencies, his immemorial hostility to Man.

Two thousand fifteen and a joint mission—American, Russian, British—went to take a look; they circled Luna II at a “safe” distance for twelve hours, took pictures, made recordings, measured radiation levels. When they came back, within a month of their return, one of the two Americans (the most outspoken one) went mad, one of the two Russians (the introverted one) set fire to himself, and the two British members remained phlegmatic, naturally.

One year later in August 2016, an Anglo-French expedition set out to double-check the findings of the first mission: i.e., to see if there were indeed “peculiar radiations” being emitted by Luna II. It was a four-man team; they were all volunteers and wore lead baffles of various thicknesses in their helmets. And afterwards, the ones with the least lead were discovered to be more prone to mental fluctuations. But…the “radiations,” or whatever, couldn’t be measured by any of Man’s instruments. What was required was a special sort of volunteer, someone actually to land on Luna II and dig around a little, and do some work right there on top of—whatever it was.

Where to land wasn’t a problem: with a rotation period of one minute, Luna II’s equatorial tips were moving about as fast as a man could run, but at its “poles” the planetoid was turning in a very gentle circle. And that’s where Benjamin “Smiler” Williams set down. He had wanted to do the job and was the obvious choice. He was a Brit riding an American rocket paid for by the French and Russians. (Everybody had wanted to be in on it.) And of course he was a hero. And he was dying of cancer.

Smiler drilled holes in Luna II, set off small explosions in the holes, collected dust and debris and exhaust gasses from the explosions, slid his baffles aside and exposed his brain to whatever, walked around quite a bit and sat down and thought things, and sometimes just sat. And all in all he was there long enough to see the Earth turn one complete circle on her axis—following which he went home. First to Moonbase, finally to Earth. Went home to die—after they’d checked him out, of course.

But that was six years ago and he still hadn’t died (though God knows we’d tried the best we could to kill him) and now I was on my way to pay him a visit. On my way through him, traveling into him, journeying to his very heart. The heart and mind—the living, thinking organism, the control centre, as it were—deep within the body of what the world now called Big “C.” July 2024, and Smiler Williams had asked for a visitor. I was it, and as I drove in I went over everything that had led up to this moment. It was as good a way as any to keep from looking at the “landscape” outside the car. This was Florida and it was the middle of the month, but I wasn’t using the air-conditioning and in fact I’d even turned up the heater a little—because it was cool out there. As cool as driving down a country lane in Devon, with the trees arching their green canopy overhead. Except it wasn’t Devon and they weren’t green. And in fact they weren’t even trees….

Those were thoughts I should try to avoid, however, just as I avoided looking at anything except the road unwinding under the wheels of my car; and so I went back again to 2016, when Ben Williams came back from space.

The specialists in London checked Smiler out—his brain, mostly, for they weren’t really interested in his cancer. That was right through him, (with the possible exception of his gray matter), and there was no hope. Try to cut or laser that out of him and there’d be precious little of the man himself left! But after ten days of tests they’d found nothing, and Smiler was getting restless.

“Peter,” he said to me, “I’m short on time and these monkeys are wasting what little I’ve got left! Can’t you get me out of here? There are places I want to go, friends I want to say goodbye to.” But if I make that sound sad or melodramatic, forget it. Smiler wasn’t like that. He’d really earned his nickname, that good old boy, because right through everything he’d kept on smiling like it was painted on his face. Maybe it was his way to keep from crying. Twenty-seven years old just a month ago, and he’d never make twenty-eight. So we’d all reckoned.

Myself, I’d never made it through training, but Smiler had and we’d kept in touch. But just because I couldn’t go into space didn’t mean I couldn’t help others to do it, I’d worked at NASA, and on the European Space Program (ESP), even for a while for the Soviets at Baikonur, when détente had been peaking a periodic up-surge back in 2009 and 2010. So I knew my stuff. And I knew the men who were doing it, landing on Mars and what have you, and the heroes like Smiler Williams. So while Smiler was moderately cool toward the others on the space medicine team—the Frogs, Sovs and even the other Americans—to me he was the same as always. We’d been friends and Smiler had never let down a friend in his life.

And when he’d asked for my help in getting him out of that place, I’d had to go along with him. “Sure, why not?” I’d told him. “Maybe I can speed it up. Have you seen the new Space Center at the Lake? There are a lot of people you used to know there. NASA people. They’d love to see you again, Smiler.”

What I didn’t say was that the Space Center at Lake Okeechobee also housed the finest space medicine team in the world, and that they were longing to get their hands on him. But he was dying and a Brit, and so the British had first claim, so to speak. No one was going to argue the pros and cons about a man on his last legs. And if that makes me sound bad—like maybe I’d gone over to London to snatch him for the home team—I’d better add that there was something else I hadn’t mentioned to him: the Center Research Foundation at Lakeport, right next door. I wanted to wheel him in there so they could take a look at him. Oh, he was a no-hoper, like I’ve said, but….

And maybe he hadn’t quite given up hope himself, either, because when they were finally through with him a few days later he’d agreed to come back here with me. “What the hell,” he’d shrugged. “They have their rocks, dust, gasses, don’t they? Also, they have lots of time. Me, I have to use mine pretty sparingly.” It was starting to get to him.

In the States Smiler got a hero’s welcome, met everybody who was anybody from the President down. But that was time-consuming stuff, so after a few days we moved on down to Florida. First things first: I told him about the Foundation at Lakeport. “So what’s new?” he laughed. “Why’d you think I came with you, Yank?”

They checked him over, smiled and joked with him (which was the only way to play it with Smiler) but right up front shook their heads and told him no, there was nothing they could do. And time was narrowing down.

But it was running out for me, too; and that’s where I had to switch my memories off and come back to the present a while, for I’d reached the first checkpoint. I was driving up from Immokalee, Big “C” Control (“control,” that’s a laugh!) Point Seven, to see Smiler at Lakeport. The barrier was at the La Belle-Clewiston crossroads, and Smiler came up on the air just as I saw it up ahead and started to slow her down a little.

“You’re two minutes early, Peter,” his voice crackled out of the radio at me. “Try to get it right from here on in, OK? Big “C” said ten-thirty a.m. at the La Belle-Clewiston crossroads, and he didn’t mean ten-twenty-eight. You don’t gain anything by being early: he’ll only hold you up down there two minutes longer to put you back on schedule. Do you read me, old friend?”

“I read you, buddy,” I answered, slowing to a halt at the barrier’s massive red-and-white-striped pole where it cut the road in half. “Sorry I’m early; I guess it’s nerves; must have put my foot down a little. Anyway, what’s a couple minutes between friends, eh?”

“Between you and me? Nothing!” Smiler’s voice came back—and with a chuckle in it! I thought: God, that’s courage for you! “But Big ‘C’ likes accuracy, dead reckoning,” he continued. “And come to think of it, so do I! Hell, you wouldn’t try to find me a reentry window a couple of minutes ahead of time, would you? No you wouldn’t.” And then, more quietly: “And remember, Peter, a man can get burned just as easily in here….” But this time there was no chuckle.

“What now?” I sat still, staring straight ahead, aware that the—tunnel?—was closing overhead, that the light was going as Big “C” enclosed me.

“Out,” he answered at once, “so he can take a good look at the car. You know he’s not much for trusting people, Peter.”

I froze, and remained sitting there as rigid as…as the great steel barrier pole right there in front of me. Get out? Big “C” wanted me to get out? But the car was my womb and I wasn’t programmed to be born yet, not until I got to Smiler. And—

“Out!” Smiler’s voice crackled on the air. “He says you’re not moving and it bothers him. So get out now—or would you rather sit tight and have him come in there with you? How do you think you’d like that, Peter: having Big “C” groping around in there with you?”

I unfroze, opened the car door. But where was I supposed to—?

“The checkpoint shack,” Smiler told me, as if reading my mind. “There’s nothing of him in there.”

Thank God for that!

I left the car door open—to appease Big “C”? To facilitate his search? To make up for earlier inadequacies? Don’t ask me—and hurried in the deepening gloom to the wooden, chalet-style building at the side of the road. It had been built there maybe four years ago when Big “C” wasn’t so big, but no one had used it in a long time and the door was stuck; I could get the bottom of the door to give a little by leaning my thigh against it, but the top was jammed tight. And somehow I didn’t like to make too much noise.

Standing there with the doorknob clenched tight in my hand, I steeled myself, glanced up at the ceiling being formed of Big “C”’s substance—the moth-eaten holes being bridged by doughy flaps, then sealed as the mass thickened up, shutting out the light—and I thought of myself as becoming a tiny shriveled kernel in his gigantic, leprous walnut. Christ…what a mercy I never suffered from claustrophobia! But then I also thought: to hell with the noise, and put my shoulder to the door to burst it right in.

I left the door vibrating in its frame behind me and went unsteadily, breathlessly, to the big windows. There was a desk there, chairs, a few well-thumbed paperbacks, a Daily Occurrence Book, telephone and scribble pad: everything a quarter-inch thick in dust. But I blew the dust off one of the chairs and sat (which wasn’t a bad idea, my legs were shaking so bad), for now that I’d started in on this thing I knew there’d be no stopping it, and what was going on out there was all part of it. Smiler’s knowledge of cars hadn’t been much to mention; I had to hope that Big “C” was equally ignorant.

And so I sat there trembling by the big windows, looking out at the road and the barrier and the car, and I suppose the idea was that I was going to watch Big “C”’s inspection. I did actually watch the start of it—the tendrils of frothy slop elongating themselves downwards from above and inwards from both sides, closing on the car, entering it; a pseudopod of slime hardening into rubber, pulling loose the weather strip from the boot cover and flattening itself to squeeze inside; another member like a long, flat tapeworm sliding through the gap between the hood and the radiator grille…but that was as much as I could take and I turned my face away.

It’s not so much how Big “C” looks but what he is that does it. It’s knowing, and yet not really knowing, what he is….

So I sweated it there and waited for it to get done, and hoped and prayed that Big “C” would get done and not find anything. And while I waited my mind went back again to that time six years earlier.

The months went by and Smiler weakened a little. He got to spending a lot of his time at Lakeport, which was fine by the space medics at the Lake because they could go and see him any time they wanted and carry on examining and testing him. And at the time I thought they’d actually found something they could do for him, because after a while he really did seem to be improving again. Meanwhile I had my own life to live; I hadn’t seen as much of him as I might like; I’d been busy on the Saturn’s Moons Project.

When I did get to see him almost a year had gone by and he should have been dead. But he wasn’t anything like dead and the boys from Med. were excited about something—had been for months—and Smiler had asked to see me. I was briefed and they told me not to excite him a lot, just treat him like…normal? Now how the hell else would I treat him? I wondered.

It was summer and we met at Clewiston on the Lake, a beach where the sun sparkled on the water and leisure craft came and went, many of them towing their golden, waving water-skiers. Smiler arrived from Lakeport in an ambulance and the boys in white walked him slowly down to the table under a sun umbrella where I was waiting for him. And I saw how big he was under his robe.

I ordered a Coke for myself, and—”Four vodkas and a small tomato juice,” Smiler told me! “An Anemic Mary—in one big glass.”

“Do you have a problem, buddy?” the words escaped me before I could check them.

“Are you kidding?” he said, frowning. But then he saw me ogling his huge drink and grinned. “Eh? The booze? Jesus, no! It’s like rocket fuel to me—keeps me aloft and propels me around and around—but doesn’t make me dizzy!” And then he was serious again. “A pity, really, ’cos there are times when I’d like to get blasted out of my mind.”

“What?” I stared hard at him, wondered what was going on in his head. “Smiler, I—”

“Peter,” he cut me short, “I’m not going to die—not just yet, anyway.”

For a moment I couldn’t take it in, couldn’t believe it. I was that delighted. I knew my bottom jaw must have fallen open, so closed it again. “They’ve come up with something?” I finally blurted it out. “Smiler, you’ve done it—you’ve beaten the Big ‘C’!”

But he wasn’t laughing or even smiling, just sitting there looking at me.

He had been all dark and lean and muscular, Smiler, but was now pale and puffy. Puffy cheeks, puffy bags under his eyes, pale and puffy double chins. And bald (all that shining, jet-black hair gone) and minus his eyebrows: the effect of one treatment or another. His natural teeth were gone, too: calcium deficiency brought on by low grav during too many missions in the space stations, probably aggravated by his complaint. In fact his eyes were really the only things I’d know him by: film-star blue eyes, which had somehow retained their old twinkle.

Though right now, as I’ve said, he wasn’t laughing or even smiling but just sitting there staring at me.

“Big ‘C,’ “ he finally answered me. “Beaten the Big ‘C’….”

And eventually the smile fell from my face, too. “But…isn’t that what you meant?”

“Listen,” he said, suddenly shifting to a higher gear, “I’m short of time. They’re checking me over every couple of hours now, because they’re expecting it to break loose…well, soon. And so they’ll not be too long coming for me, wanting to take me back into that good old ‘controlled environment,’ you know? So now I want to tell you about it—the way I see it, anyway.”

“Tell me about…?”

“About Luna II. Peter, it was Luna II. It wasn’t anything the people at Lakeport have done or the space medicine buffs from the Lake, it was just Luna II. There’s something in Luna II that changes things. That’s its nature: to change things. Sometimes the changes may be radical: it takes a sane man and makes him mad, or turns a peaceful race into a mindless gang of mass murderers, or changes a small planet into a chunk of shiny black slag that we’ve named Luna II. And sometimes it’s sleeping or inert, and then there’s no effect whatever.”

I tried to take all of this in but it was coming too thick and fast. “Eh? Something in Luna II? But don’t we already know about that? That it’s a source of peculiar emanations or whatever?”

“Something like that.” He shrugged helplessly, impatiently. “Maybe. I don’t know. But when I was up there I felt it, and now it’s starting to look like it felt me.”

“It felt you?” Now he really wasn’t making sense, had started to ramble.

“I don’t know”—he shrugged again—”but it could be the answer to Everything—it could be Everything! Maybe there are lots of Luna IIs scattered through the universe, and they all have the power to change things. Like they’re catalysts. They cause mutations—in space, in time. A couple of billion years ago the Earth felt it up there, felt its nearness, its effect. And it took this formless blob of mud hurtling through space and changed it, gave it life, brought microorganisms awake in the soup of its oceans. It’s been changing things ever since—and we’ve called that evolution! Do you see what I mean? It was The Beginning—and it might yet be The End.”

“Smiler, I—”

He caught my arm, gave me what I suspect was the most serious look he’d ever given anyone in his entire life, and said: “Don’t look at me like that, Peter.” And there was just a hint of accusation.

“Was I?”

“Yes, you were!” And then he relaxed and laughed, and just as suddenly became excited. “Man, when something like this happens, you’re bound to ask questions. So I’ve asked myself questions, and the things I’ve told you are the answers. Some of them, anyway. Hell, they may not even be right, but they’re my answers!”

“These are your thoughts, then? Not the boffins’?” This was one of his Brit words I used, from the old days. It meant “experts.”

“Mine,” he said, seeming proud of it, “but grown at least in part from what the boffins have told me.”

“So what has happened?” I asked him, feeling a little exasperated now. “What’s going down, Smiler?”

“Not so much going down,” he shook his head, “as coming out.”

“Coming out?” I waited, not sure whether to smile or frown, not knowing what to do or say.

“Of me.”

And still I waited. It was like a guessing game where I was supposed to come up with some sort of conclusion based on what he’d told me. But I didn’t have any conclusions.

Finally he shrugged yet again, snorted, shook his head, and said: “But you do know about cancer, right? About the Big ‘C’? Well, when I went up to Luna II, it changed my cancer. Oh, I still have it, but it’s not the same any more. It’s a separate thing existing in me, but no longer truly a part of me. It’s in various cavities and tracts, all connected up by threads, living in me like a rat in a system of burrows. Or better, like a hermit crab in a pirated shell. But you know what happens when a hermit crab outgrows its shell? It moves out, finds itself a bigger home. So…this thing in me has tried to vacate—has experimented with the idea, anyway….”

He shuddered, his whole body trembling like jelly.

“Experimented?” It was all I could find to say.

He gulped, nodded, controlled himself. And he sank what was left of his drink before going on. “In the night, a couple of nights ago, it started to eject—from both ends at once—from just about everywhere. Anus, throat, nostrils, you name it. I almost choked to death before they got to me. But by then it had already given up, retreated, retracted itself. And I could breathe again. It was like it…like it hadn’t wanted to kill me.”

I was numb, dumb, couldn’t say anything. The way Smiler told it, it was almost as if he’d credited his cancer with intelligence! But then a white movement caught my eye, and I saw with some relief that it was the boys from the ambulance coming for him. He saw them, too, and clutched my arm. And suddenly fear had made his eyes round in his round face. “Peter….” he said. “Peter….”

“It’s OK,” I grabbed his fist grabbing me. “It’s all right. They have to know what they’re doing. You said it yourself, remember? You’re not going to die.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But will it be worth living?”

And then they came and took him to the ambulance. And for a long time I wondered about that last thing he’d said. But of course in the end it turned out he was right….

The car door slammed and the telephone rang at one and the same time, causing me to start. I looked out through the control shack’s dusty window and saw Big “C” receding from the car. Apparently everything was OK. And when the telephone rang again I picked it up.

“OK, Peter,” Smiler’s voice seemed likewise relieved, “you can come on in now.”

But as well as relieved I was also afraid. Now of all times—when it was inevitable—I was afraid. Afraid for the future the world might never have if I didn’t go in, and for the future I certainly wouldn’t have if I did. Until at last common sense prevailed: what the heck, I had no future anyway!

“Something wrong, old friend?” Smiler’s voice was soft. “Hey, don’t let it get to you. It will be just like the last time you visited me, remember?” His words were careful, innocent yet contrived. And they held a code.

I said “Sure,” put the phone down, left the shack and went to the car. If he was ready for it then so was I. It was ominous out there, in Big “C”’s gloom; getting into the car was like entering the vacant lair of some weird, alien animal. The thing was no longer there, but I knew it had been there. It didn’t smell, but I could smell and taste it anyway. You would think so, the way I avoided breathing.

And so my throat was dry and my chest was tight as I turned the lights on to drive. To drive through Big “C,” to the core which was Ben ‘Smiler’ Williams. And driving I thought:

I’m traveling down a hollow tentacle, proceeding along a pseudopod, venturing in an alien vein. And it can put a stop to me, kill me any time it wants to. By suffocation, strangulation, or simply by laying itself down on me and crushing me. But it won’t because it needs Smiler, needs to appease him, and he has asked to see me.

As he’d said on the telephone, “Just like the last time.” Except we both knew it wouldn’t be like the last time. Not at all….

The last time:

That had been fifteen months ago when we’d agreed on the boundaries. But to continue at that point would be to leave out what happened in between. And I needed to fill it in, if only to fix my mind on something and so occupy my time for the rest of the journey. It isn’t good for your nerves, to drive down a midmorning road in near darkness, through a tunnel of living, frothing, cancerous flesh.

A month after I’d seen Smiler on the beach, Big “C” broke out. Except that’s not exactly how it was. I mean, it wasn’t how you’d expect. What happened was this:

Back in 2002 when we went through a sticky patch with the USSR and there were several (as yet still unsolved) sabotage attempts on some of our missile and space research sites, a number of mobile ICBM and MIRV networks were quickly commissioned and established across the entire USA. Most of these had been quietly decommissioned or mothballed only a year or two later, but not the one covering the Okeechobee region of Florida. That one still existed, with its principal base or railhead at La Belle and arms reaching out as far as Fort Myers in the west, Fort Drum north of the Lake, and Canal Point right on the Lake’s eastern shore. Though still maintained in operational order as a deterrent, the rail network now carried ninety per cent of hardware for the Space Center while its military functions were kept strictly low profile. Or they had been, until that night in late August 2024.

Smiler had a night nurse, but the first thing Big “C” did when he emerged was to kill him. That’s what we later figured, anyway. The second thing that he did was derail a MIRV bogie on its way through Lakeport. I can’t supply details; I only know he did it.

Normally this wouldn’t matter much: seventy-five percent of the runs were dummies anyway. But this one was the real thing, one of the two or three times a year when the warheads were in position. And it looked like something had got broken in the derailment, because all of the alarms were going off at once!

The place was evacuated. Lakeport, Venus, Clewiston—all the towns around Lake Okeechobee—the whole shoot. Even the Okeechobee Space Center itself, though not in its entirety; a skeleton crew stayed on there; likewise at the La Belle silos. A decon team was made ready to go in and tidy things up…except that didn’t happen. For through all of this activity, Smiler (or rather, Big “C”) had somehow contrived to be forgotten and left behind. And what did happen was that Smiler got on the telephone to Okeechobee and told them to hold off. No one was to move. Nothing was to happen.

“You’d better listen and listen good,” he’d said. “Big ‘C’ has six MIRVs, each one with eight bombs aboard. And he’s got five of them lined up on Washington, London, Tokyo, Berlin and Moscow, though not necessarily in that order. That’s forty nukes for five of the world’s greatest capitals and major cities within radii of two hundred miles. That’s a holocaust, a nuclear winter, the New Dark Age. As for the sixth MIRV: that one’s airborne right now! But it won’t hurt because he hasn’t programmed detonation instructions. It’s just a sign to let you all know that he’s not kidding and can do what he says he can do.”

The MIRV split up north of Jacksonville; bombs came down harmlessly in the sea off Wilmington, Cape Fear, Georgetown, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Cape Canaveral and Palm Beach. After that…while no one was quite sure just exactly who Big ‘C’ was, certainly they all knew he had them by the short and curlies.

Of course, that was when the “news” broke about Smiler’s cancer, the fact that it was different. And the cancer experts from the Lakeport Center, and the space medics, too, arrived at the same conclusion: that somehow alien “radiations” or emanations had changed Smiler’s cancer into Big “C.” The Lakeport doctors and scientists had intended that when it vacated Smiler they’d kill it, but now Big “C” was threatening to kill us, indeed the world. It was then that I remembered how Smiler had credited the thing with intelligence, and now it appeared he’d been right.

So…maybe the problem could have been cleared up right there and then. But at what cost? Big “C” had demonstrated that he knew his way around our weaponry, so if he was going to die why not take us with him? Nevertheless, it’s a fact that there were some itchy fingers among the military brass right about that time.

Naturally, we had to let Moscow, London and all the other target areas in on it, and their reaction was about what was expected:

“For God’s sake—placate the thing! Do as it tells you—whatever it tells you!” And the Sovs said: “If you let anything come out of Florida heading for Moscow, comrades, that’s war!”

And then, of course, there was Smiler himself. Big “C” had Smiler in there—a hero, and one of the greatest of all time. So the hotheads cooled down pretty quickly, and for some little time there was a lot of hard, cold, calculated thinking going on as the odds were weighed. But always it came out in Big “C”’s favor. Oh, Smiler and his offspring were only a small percentage of life on Earth, right enough, and we could stand their loss…but what if we attacked and this monstrous growth actually did press the button before we nailed him? Could he, for instance, monitor incoming hardware from space? No, for he was at Lakeport and the radar and satellite monitoring equipment was at La Belle. So maybe we could get him in a preemptive strike! A lot of fingernails were chewed. But:

Smiler’s next message came out of La Belle, before anybody could make any silly decisions. “Forget it,” he warned us. “He’s several jumps ahead of you. He made me drive him down here, to La Belle. And this is the deal: Big ‘C’ doesn’t want to harm anyone—but neither does he want to be harmed. Here at La Belle he’s got the whole world laid out on his screens—his screens, have you got that? The La Belle ground staff—that brave handful of guys who stayed on—they’re…finished. They opposed him. So don’t go making the same mistake. All of this is Big “C”’s now. He’s watching everything from space, on radar…all the skills we had in those areas are now his. And he’s nervous because he knows we kill things that frighten us, and he supposes that he frightens us. So the minute our defense satellites stop cooperating—the very minute he stops receiving information from his radar or pictures from space—he presses the button. And you’d better believe there’s stuff here at La Belle that makes that derailed junk at Lakeport look like Chinese firecrackers!” And of course we knew there was.

So that was it: stalemate, a Mexican standoff. And there were even groups who got together and declared that Big “C” had a right to live. If the Israelis had been given Israel, (they argued) the Palestinians Beirut and the Aborigines Alice Springs all the way out to Simpson Desert, then why shouldn’t Big “C” have Lake Okeechobee? After all, he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? And all he wanted was to live—wasn’t it?

Well, that was something of what he wanted, anyway. Moisture from the lake, and air to breathe. And Smiler, of course.

And territory. A lot more territory.

Big “C” grew fast. Very fast. The word “big” itself took on soaring new dimensions. In a few years Big “C” was into all the lakeside towns and spreading outwards. He seemed to live on anything, ate everything, and thrived on it. And it was about then that we decided we really ought to negotiate boundaries. Except “negotiate” isn’t the right word.

Smiler asked to see me; I went in; through Smiler Big “C” told me what he wanted by way of land. And he got it. You don’t argue with something that can reduce your planet to radioactive ashes. And now that Big “C” was into all the towns and villages on the Lake, he’d moved his nukes in with him. He hadn’t liked the idea of having all his eggs in one basket, as it were.

But between Big “C”’s emergence from Smiler and my negotiating the boundaries, Christ knows we tried to get him! Frogmen had gone up the Miami, Hillsboro, and St Lucie canals to poison the Lake—and hadn’t come down again. A manmade anthrax variant had been sown in the fields and swamps where he was calculated to be spreading—and he’d just spread right on over it. A fire had started “accidentally” in the long hot summer of 2019, in the dried-out Okaloacoochee Slough, and warmed Big “C”’s hide all the way to the Lake before it died down. But that had been something he couldn’t ignore.

“You must be crazy!” Smiler told us that time. “He’s launched an ICBM to teach you a lesson. At ten megs its the smallest thing he’s got—but still big enough!”

It was big enough for Hawaii, anyway. And so for a while we’d stopped trying to kill him, but we never stopped thinking about it. And someone thought:

If Big “C”’s brain is where Smiler is, and if we can get to that brain…will that stop the whole thing dead?

It was a nice thought. We needed somebody on the inside, but all we had was Smiler. Which brings me back to that time fifteen months ago when I went in to negotiate the new boundaries.

At that time Big “C” was out as far as ten miles from the Lake and expanding rapidly on all fronts. A big round nodule of him extended to cover La Belle, tapering to a tentacle reaching as far as Alva. I’d entered him at Alva as per instructions, where Big “C” had checked the car, then driven on through La Belle on my way to Lakeport, which was now his HQ. And then, as now, I’d passed through the landscape, which he opened for me, driving through his ever-expanding tissues. But I won’t go into that here, nor into my conversation with Smiler. Let it suffice to say that Smiler intimated he would like to die now and it couldn’t come quickly enough, and that before I left I’d passed him a note which read:

Smiler,

The next time someone comes in here he’ll be a volunteer, and he’ll be bringing something with him. A little something for Big “C.” But it’s up to you when that happens, good buddy. You’re the only one who can fix it.

Peter

And then I was out of there. But as he’d glanced at the note there had been a look on Smiler’s face that was hard to gauge. He’d told me that Big “C” only used him as a mouthpiece and as his…host. That the hideous stuff could only instruct him, not read his mind or get into his brain. But as I went to my car that time I could feel Big “C” gathering himself—like a big cat bunching its muscles—and as I actually got into the car something wet, a spot of slime, splashed down on me from overhead! Jesus! It was like the bastard was drooling on me!

“Jesus,” yes. Because when I’d passed Smiler that note and he’d looked at me, and we’d come to our unspoken agreement, I hadn’t known that I would be the volunteer! But I was, and for two reasons: my life didn’t matter any more, and Smiler had asked for me—if I was willing. Now that was a funny thing in itself because it meant that he was asking me to die with him. But the thought didn’t dawn on me that maybe he knew something that he shouldn’t know. Nor would it dawn on me until I only had one more mile to go to my destination, Lakeport. When in any case there was no way I could turn back.

As for what that something was: it was the fact that I too was now dying of cancer.

It was diagnosed just a few weeks after I’d been to see him: the fast-moving sort that was spreading through me like a fire. Which was why I said: sure, I’ll come in and see you, Smiler…

Ostensibly I was going in to negotiate the boundaries again. Big “C” had already crossed the old lines and was now out from the lake about forty miles in all directions, taking him to the Atlantic coast in the east and very nearly the Gulf of Mexico in the west. Immokalee had been my starting point, just a mile southwest of where he sprawled over the Slough, and now I was up as far as Palmdale and turning right for Moore Haven and Lakeport. And up to date with my morbid memories, too.

From Palmdale to Lakeport is about twenty-five miles. I drove that narrow strip of road with flaps and hummocks of leprous dough crawling, heaving and tossing on both sides—or clearing from the tarmac before my spinning wheels—while an opaque webbing of alien flesh pulsed and vibrated overhead. It was like driving down the funnel-trap of some cosmic trapdoor spider, or crossing the dry bed of an ocean magically cleared as by Moses and his staff. Except that this sea—this ocean of slime and disease—was its own master and cleared the way itself.

And in my jacket pocket my cigarette lighter, and under its hinged cap the button. And I was dying for a cigarette but couldn’t have one, not just yet. But (or so I kept telling myself, however ridiculously) that was a good thing because they were bad for you!

The bomb was in the hollow front axle of the car, its two halves sitting near the wheels along with the propellant charges. When those charges detonated they’d drive two loads of hell into calamitous collision right there in the middle of the axle, creating critical mass and instant oblivion for anything in the immediate vicinity. I was driving a very special car: a kamikaze nuke. And ground zero was going to be Big “C”’s brain and my old pal Smiler. And myself, of course.

The miles were passing very quickly now, seeming to speed up right along with my heartbeat, I guessed I could do it even before I got there if I wanted to, blow the bastard to hell. But I wasn’t going to give him even a split second’s warning, because it was possible that was all he needed. No, I was going to park this heap right up his nose. Almost total disintegration for a radius of three or four miles when it went. For me, for Smiler, but especially for Big “C.” Instantaneous, so that he wouldn’t even have time to twitch.

And with this picture in mind I was through Moore Haven and Lakeport was up ahead, and I thought: We’ve got him! Just two or three more miles and I can let ’er rip any time! And it’s goodbye Big “C.” But I wouldn’t do it because I wanted to see Smiler one last time. It was him and me together. I could smile right back at him (would I be able to? God, I hoped so!) as I pressed the button.

And it was then, with only a mile to go to Lakeport, that I remembered what Smiler had said the last time he asked for a visitor. He’d said: Someone should come and see me soon, to talk about boundaries if for nothing else. I think maybe Peter Lancing…if he’s willing.”

The “if for nothing else” was his way of saying: “OK, bring it on in.” And the rest of it….

The way I saw it, it could be read two ways. That “if he’s willing” bit could be a warning, meaning: “Of course, this is really a job for a volunteer.” Or he could simply have been saying good-bye to me, by mentioning my name in his final communication. But…maybe it could be read a third way, too. Except that would mean that he knew I had cancer, and that therefore I probably would be willing.

And I remembered that blob of goo, that sweat or spittle of Big “C,” which had splashed on me when I was last in here….

Thought processes, and while they were taking place the mile was covered and I was in. It had been made simple: Big “C” had left only one road open, the one that led to the grounds of the Cancer Research Foundation. Some irony, that this should be Big “C”’s HQ! But yes, just looking at the place I knew that it was.

It was…wet-looking, glistening, alive. Weakened light filtered down through the layers of fretted, fretting webs of mucus and froth and foaming flesh overhead, and the Foundation complex itself looked like a gigantic, suppurating mass of decaying brick and concrete. Tentacles of filth had shattered all the windows outwards, for all the world as if the building’s brain had burst out through its eyes, ears and nostrils. And the whole thing was connected by writhing ropes of webbing to the far greater mass which was Big “C”’s loathsome body.

Jesus! It was gray and green and brown and blue-tinged. In spots it was even bright yellow, red, and splashed with purple. It was Cancer with a capital C—Big “C” himself—and it was alive!

“What are you waiting for, Peter?” Smiler’s voice came out of my radio, and I banged my head on the car roof starting away from it. “Are you coming in, old friend…or what?”

I didn’t have to go in there if I didn’t want to; my lighter was in my pocket; I touched it to make sure. But…I didn’t want to go out alone. I don’t just mean out like out of the car, but out period. And so:

“I’m coming in, Smiler,” I told him.

And somehow I made myself. In front of the main building there’d been lawn cropped close as a crewcut. Now it was just soil crumbling to sand. I walked across it and into the building, just looking straight ahead and nowhere else. Inside…the corridors were clear at least. Big “C” had cleared them for me. But through each door as I passed them I could see him bulking, pile upon pile of him like…like heaped intestines. His brains? God, I hoped so!

Finally, when I was beginning to believe I couldn’t go any further on two feet and would have to crawl—and when I was fighting with myself not to throw up—I found Smiler in his “office”: just a large room with a desk which he sat behind, and a couple of chairs, telephones, radios. And also containing Big “C,” of course. Which is the part I’ve always been reluctant to talk about, but now have to tell just the way it was.

Big “C” was plugged into him, into Smiler. It was grotesque. Smiler sat propped up in his huge chair, and he was like a spider at the center of his web. Except the web wasn’t of silk but of flesh, and it was attached to him. The back of his head was welded to a huge fan-shape of tentacles spreading outwards like some vast ornamental headdress, or like the sprawl of an octopus’s arms; and these cancerous extensions or extrusions were themselves attached to a shuddering bulk that lay behind Smiler’s chair and grew up the walls and out of the windows. The lower part of his body was lost behind the desk, lost in bulging grey sacks and folds and yellow pipes and purplish gelatinous masses of…Christ, of whatever the filthy stuff was! Only his upper body, his arms and hands, face and shoulders were free of the stuff. He was it. It was him—physically, anyway.

No one could have looked at him and felt anything except disgust, or perhaps pity if they’d known him like I had. And if they hadn’t, dread and loathing and…yes, horror. Friendship didn’t come into it; I knew that I wasn’t smiling; I knew that my face must reflect everything I felt.

He nodded the merest twitch of a nod and husked: “Sit down, Peter, before you fall down! Hey, and you think I look bad, right?” Humor! Unbelievable! But his voice was a desiccated whisper, and his grey hands on the desk shook like spindly skating insects resting up after a morning’s hard skimming over a stagnant pond.

I sat down on a dusty chair opposite him, perching myself there, feeling all tight inside from not wanting to breathe the atmosphere, and hypersensitive outside from trying not to touch anything. He noticed and said: “You don’t want to contaminate yourself, right? But isn’t it a bit late for that, Peter?”

From which I could tell that he knew—he did know—and a tingle started in my feet that quickly surged through my entire being. Could he see it in me? Sense it in me? Feel some sort of weird kinship with what was under my skin, burgeoning in me? Or was it worse than that? And right there and then I began to have this feeling that things weren’t going according to plan.

“Smiler,” I managed to get started at the second attempt, “it’s…good to see you again, pal. And I….” And I stopped and just sat there gasping.

“Yes?” he prompted me in a moment. “And you—?”

“Nerves!’ I gasped, forcing a sickly smile, and forced in my turn to take my first deep breath. “Lots of nerves. It was always the same. It’s why I had to stay behind when you and the others went into space.” And I took out my cigarettes, and also took out the lighter from my pocket. I opened the pack and shook out several cigarettes, which fell on the floor, then managed to trap one between my knees and transfer it shakily to my mouth. And I flipped back the top on my lighter.

Smiler’s eyes—the only genuinely mobile parts he had left—went straight to the lighter and he said: “You brought it in, right?” But should he be saying things like that? Out loud, I mean? Couldn’t Big “C” hear him or sense his mood? And it dawned on me just how little we knew about them, about Big “C” and Smiler—as he was now….

Then…Smiler smiled. Except it wasn’t his smile!

Goodbye, everything, I said to myself, pressing the button and holding my thumb down on it. Then releasing it and pressing it again, and again. And finally letting the fucking thing fall from my nerveless fingers when, after two or three more tries, still nothing had happened. Or rather, “nothing” hadn’t happened.

“Peter, old buddy, let me tell you how it is.” Smiler got through to me at last, as the cigarette fell from my trembling lips. “I mean, I suspect you now know how it is, but I’ll tell you anyway. See, Big ‘C’ changes things. Just about anything he wants to change. He was nothing at first, or not very much—just a natural law of change, mutation, entropy if you like. An ‘emanation.’ Or on the other hand I suppose you could say he was everything—like Nature itself. Whichever, when I went up there to Luna II he got into me and changed my cancer into himself, since when he’s become one hell of a lot. We can talk about that in a minute, but first I want to explain about your bomb. Big ‘C’ changed it. He changed the chemical elements of the explosive charges, and to be doubly sure sucked all the fizz out of the fissionable stuff. It was a firework and he dumped it in a bucket of water. So now you can relax. It didn’t go off and it isn’t going to.”

“You…are him!” I knew it instinctively. Now, when it was too late. “But when? And why?”

“When did I stop being Smiler? Not long after that time you met him at the beach. And why the subterfuge? Because you human beings are a jumpy lot. With Smiler to keep you calm, let you think you had an intermediary, it was less likely you’d do something silly. And why should I care that you’d do something silly? Because there’s a lot of life, knowledge, sustenance in this Earth and I didn’t want you killing it off trying to kill me! But now you can’t kill me, because the bigger I’ve got the easier it has become to change things. Missiles? Go ahead and try it. They’ll be dead before they hit me. Why, if I got the idea you were going to try firing a couple, I could even kill them on the ground!

“You see, Peter, I’ve grown too big, too clever, too devious to be afraid any more—of anything. Which is why I have no more secrets, and why there’ll be no more subterfuge. Subterfuge? Not a bit of it. Why, I’m even broadcasting all of this—just so the whole world will know what’s going on! I mean, I want them to know, so no one will make any more silly mistakes. Now, I believe you came in here to talk about boundaries—some limits you want to see on my expansion?”

Somehow, I shook my head. “That’s not why I’m here, Smiler,” I told him, not yet ready to accept that there was nothing of Smiler left in there. “Why I’m here is finished now.”

“Not quite,” he said, but very quietly. “We can get to the boundaries later, but there is something else. Think about it. I mean, why should I want to see you, if there’s nothing else and if I can make any further decisions without outside help?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“See, Smiler has lasted a long time. Him and the frogmen that came to kill me, and a couple of farmers who didn’t get out fast enough when they saw me coming, oh, and a few others. And I’ve been instructed by them. Like I said: I’ve learned how to be devious. And I’ve learned anger, too, though there’s no longer any need for that. No need for any human emotions. But the last time you came to see Smiler—and when you would have plotted with him to kill me—that angered me.”

“And so you gave me my cancer.”

“Yes I did. So that when I needed you, you’d want to be my volunteer. But don’t worry…you’re not going to die, Peter. Well, not physically anyway, and not just yet a while. For just like Smiler here, you’re going to carry on.”

“But no anger, eh? No human emotions? No…revenge? OK, so let me go free to live out what days I’ve got left.”

“No anger, no revenge, no emotions—just need. I can’t let you go! But let me explain myself. Do you know what happens when you find a potato sprouting in your vegetable rack and you plant it in the garden? That’s right, you get lots of new potatoes! Well, I’m something like that. I’m putting out lots of new potatoes, lots of new me. All of the time. And the thing is this: when you dig up those potatoes and your fork goes through the old one, what do you find? Just a wrinkled, pulpy old sack of a thing all ready to collapse in upon itself, with nothing of goodness left in it—pretty much like what’s left of Smiler here. So…if I want to keep growing potatoes, why, I just have to keep planting them! Do you see?”

“Jesus! Jesus!”

“It’s nothing personal, Peter. It’s need, that’s all…No, don’t stand up, just sit there and I’ll do the rest. And you can stop biting down on that clever tooth of yours, because it isn’t poison any more, just salt. And if you don’t like what’s happening to Smiler right now, that’s OK—just turn your face away…

“…There, that was pretty easy, now wasn’t it?

“All you people out there, that’s how it is. So get used to it. As for the new boundaries: there aren’t any.

This is Big “C,” signing off.”