d 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
Inversion.

Or you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into a
perfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a right-hand
glove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science
boys call it; I've heard of it being used in surgery on the highly
asymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right hand
to a man who'd lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into an
amputated left.

Ordinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and you
wouldn't think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Place
where the Doc's a drunk and the Surgery hasn't been used for hundreds of
sleeps.

But when you've just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy things
to do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce's extra
left-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got a
right-hand glove to give him.

What Doc had been trying to say with his "Inversh ... bosh ..." was
"Invert the box," meaning we should put the bronze chest through fu