The spray-on gloves from Abercrombie Station (1952) by Jack Vance, The hinged mittens (for space suits) from The Bluff of the Hawk (1932) by Anthony Gilmore, Dick.Ĭompare, if you like, these almost entirely dissimilar items: The sandtrout adjusted to the living glove of childhood play, but thinner and more sensitive as he lured it into the role of a skin symbiont.Ĭompare to the equally unlikely poison-bearing invisible glove from Lies, Inc. There celia locked and they became a single membrane which enclosed him to the elbow. Contact ignited a frenzied squirming in the creatures. He located another, placed it over the first one. Ledo felt the sandtrout growth in, spreading itself over more and more of his hand, reaching up his arm. No other human has ever lived before and reasoned in such a condition. No sandtrout had ever before in counter to hand such as this one, every cell supersaturated with space. He felt the sandtrout becoming thin, covering more and more of his hand. The sandtrout squirm down his hand, elongating, stretching. With the fellows you could join body to body, locking one on another by the course interlacings of extruded celia until the whole became one large sack-organism enclosing the water. It had no head, no extremities, no eyes, yet it could find water unerringly. He explored it's outline with his free hand roughly diamond shaped. The creature didn't try to invade him, but moved eagerly onto his flash. Ledo groped on the sand with his right hand until his fingers and countered the leathery skin of a sandtrout. The spice sue them until they were dumped into the death still.

Sooner or later, the glove with slip off into the sand, there to be lifted into a space fiber basket. Traces of blood in the skin's capillaries could be sensed by the creatures, but something mingled with the bloods water repelled them. If one held a sandtrout in the hand, smoothing it over your skin, it formed a living glove. Another of the unique creations of Frank Herbert.

Sand trout