The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I’m not a bit brave when things like my life are at stake.

Lili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushed her down again and quietly said, “Where is it?” and then hauled off and slapped her across the face. What got me was the matter-of-fact way Kaby did it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or even deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something nasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach.

Lili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but she didn’t look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili’s pearl necklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls went bouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down Lili’s gray silk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lili started to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illy had come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with the job Kaby was doing.

“Listen, slut,” she said, “we have no time. You have a healing room in this place. I can work the things.”

“Here it comes,” I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything, on top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personally stylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn’t going to be allowed to blow up peacefully. They weren’t satisfied with an A-bomb. They had to write my private hell into the script.

“There is a thing called an Invertor,” Kaby said exactly as I’d known she would, but as I didn’t really hear it just then⁠—a mental split I’ll explain in a moment. “It opens you up so they can cure your insides without cutting your skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the big parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin⁠—your eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it⁠—becoming the lining of a little hole that’s half-filled with your hair.

“Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do to them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the healer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about fifty heartbeats. We’ll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the sleepy air. Now will you talk?”

I hadn’t been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I’d have gone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or learn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing around with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful.

I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of Inversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that his tentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had looked at him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to me by squeaking, “Don’t mind me, I’m just sensitive. Get on with the girl. Make her tell.”

Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant thinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball sculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a faint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and touched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powdered glass. I tipped up the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn’t marred at all, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as ever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in the floor by something even harder.

That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a real idea in his pickled brain when he’d been pushing the thing at all of us and trying to tell us something. He hadn’t managed to say anything then, but he had earlier when he’d been going to tell us what to do about the bomb, and maybe there was a connection.

I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got “Inversh⁠ ⁠… bosh⁠ ⁠…” Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or otherwise.

So I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got “glovsh” and then I grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched the pieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel.

It all hung on that black right-hand hussar’s glove Lili had produced for Bruce. Only she couldn’t have found it in Stores, because we’d searched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn’t been any gloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been. Also, Bruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had been through the whole Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been only the two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off the bar⁠—those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he’d brought from outside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him.

So a left-hand glove had disappeared⁠—the last I’d seen of it, Lili had been putting it on her tray⁠—and a right-hand glove had appeared. Which could only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove into an identical right. She couldn’t have done it by turning it inside out the ordinary way, because the lining was different.

But as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary way to turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had to put them on the Invertor in Surgery and flick the switch for full