SOLVED. Adult SciFi, Short Story, read in 80s-90s, another planet, artificial flesh, confrontation, hero hides in dust-filled sinkhole, which area dangerous- one can get lost in there forever, wins but sustains burns. [s]

[Gena]

This must be a golden-age SF short story. I read it as a kid, translated into Russian, probably later 80s or early 90s but the story must be older than that. I remember that some kind of personal confrontation happens on a different planet. The distinctive landscape feature are these big dust-filled sinkholes, in which a person could fall in and get lost forever.

For some reason, the hero, and, possibly others, are using plastic flesh or some kind of artificial flesh - I don't remember if this is for impersonating others or for some other reason.

In the end the hero wins. He uses the sinkhole to hide in. He is badly burned.

The ending is something along the lines, "He gathered all pain from all over his body mentally into a single point, then lifted that point of the body. When they found him, half of his face was horribly burned. The other half was smiling blissfully."

[Genesistrine]

I think this is one of the episodes in Joe Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered - it's a fixup of a set of short stories. But I can't find my copy to check right now.

Ed: yes. it's the first part, To Fit The Crime - here's a list of where it's been published separately: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...

The last line is:

Thirty years of medical practice couldn’t have prepared the doctor for the sight of a critically injured man sitting in front of a pool of dried and putrifying blood and gore, half his face a burned and running ruin, and the other half smiling beatifically.

And he does the pain thing a few paragraphs before:

Still crouched over Kindle’s body, he closed his eyes and repeated over and over the mnemonic that, from his hypno-training, isolated the pain and squeezed it into a smaller and smaller space. When it was a tiny pinprick as hot as the interior of a star, he pushed it just a millimeter outside of his skin and held it there. Very carefully he sat down and slowly released for use those parts of his mind that weren’t occupied with keeping the pain outside.

[Gena]

Yes! That looks right, thank you!