Screaming Science Fiction Read online

  Sergeant Scott gave a wild shriek as a rushing feeler swept him from the platform and into the soft, hurtling plasticity of the thing—another shriek as he was whisked away into the deep tunnel and down into the bowels of the earth. And seconds later the minute hand of the clock above the empty, shuddering platform clicked down into the vertical position.

  Ten-thirty—and all over Mondon, indeed throughout the length and breadth of Eenland, the lights went out.

  The Man Who Felt Pain

  First published in the excellent Fantasy Tales magazine in the Spring 1989 issue, readers voted this next one the best of the batch. “The Man Who Felt Pain” was written as a direct result of my reading somewhere of the many seriously unpleasant diseases that space-travel could bring about in astronauts. Well naturally, being a writer of horror fiction, I at once recognized a sick but exciting little possibility that I felt I just had to explore, and—

  —But hey, that doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?

  But, you would ask, don’t we all?

  Yes, I would answer, we all feel pain—our own, and perhaps a little of those who are closest to us—but rarely anyone else’s. We don’t physically feel everyone else’s pain. My twin brother, Andrew, felt everyone’s pain, or would have if he’d been able to bear it, but of course he couldn’t and in the end it killed him. Yes, and now it would kill me, too, except I intend to put myself way, way beyond it.

  So what do I mean, he could feel everyone’s pain? Do I mean he was a man of God, who felt for people? A man who agonized over all the world’s strife and turmoil, who felt the folly and frustration of men maiming and killing each other in their petty squabbles and wars? Well, it’s true he did, to a certain extent, but no, that isn’t what I mean.

  I mean that he was the next leap forward in the evolution of the human race. I mean that he was a member of time’s tiny fraternity of genuine geniuses, sui generis in fact, until the day he died. If he had happened on the shores of some primal ocean, then he could have been the Missing Link; or five million years ago he might have been the first ape-man to use a branch to lever rocks down in an avalanche upon his next meal; or a million years later employed fire to cook that meal; or just two million years ago used the first log ‘wheels’ to roll a megalith boulder to and fro across the entrance to his cave. They were all steps forward, and so was Andrew, except he was a leap.

  For if we all felt everyone’s pain, why, then there’d be no more wars or cruelties or hurtfulness of any sort and we could get on with the real business of our being here—which is to question why we’re here, and to care for each other, and to go on…wherever.

  I’ve thought about it a lot up here, where there’s plenty of space and time to think, and my thoughts have been diverse.

  There are these green bushes (I forget their name) which have oval leaves in tight, mathematically precise rows down their stems, and if you hold a burning match under one of them they all close up! And not only on that bush but on every other bush of that species in the vicinity! An intricate trigger mechanism created by Nature—or God, if you’re a believer—and transmitted through sap and fiber, branch, twig, root and perhaps even soil; intricate and yet simple, if you know how. A card up the sleeve of…of a bush?

  In the ocean there are polyps—organisms, occasionally huge, made up of tiny individual units each with lives of their own—which, when the predator fish bites one, the entire colony retracts into the safety of its alveolate rock or anchorage. Nature has allowed each to feel the agony of the others—for self-preservation. But to give such a gift to…a coral? A jellyfish? A polyp? If it could be done for such lowly creatures as these, why then create Man and simply leave him to his own devices? Surely that was to ask for trouble!

  And so Andrew was the next step forward, for when he was born Nature also gave the gift to him. Except that I saw it in action and know that in fact it was a curse.

  Now from up here I look down on the world revolving far below—at the beautiful green and blue planet Earth, which is slowly but surely destroying me—and while I remember almost exactly how it began, I daren’t even think how it will end….

  Our mother was American, our father English, and we were born in August 2027 at Lyon, France, where at that time could be found the Headquarters of ESP, the European Space Program. Our parents worked on the Program: she was and still is a computer technician, and he a PTI and instructor astronaut. He had journeyed into space many times during that decade in which we were born, but was forced to give it up when the technology got beyond him. A pity he never had Mother’s mental wizardry, her computer-oriented brain. Anyway he has a desk job now, from which he’ll retire, but reluctantly, in another five or six years’ time.

  I suppose it was only natural that Andrew and I should want to be astronauts; by the time Dad was finishing up we were already cramming maths and computer studies, aviation and astronautics, space flight subjects across the board. And, like the twins we were—like peas in a pod—we paralleled each other in performance. If I was top of the class one term, Andrew would pip me the next, and vice versa. At nineteen we flew the ESP shuttles (pilot and/or co-pilot, whichever task suited us at the time, or simply as crew-members) and at twenty-one we’d been to Moonbase and back. Always together.

  The trouble started at Cannes, South of France, in the summer of 2049, when we were resting up after a month-long series of shuttle runs to destroy a lot of outdated space debris: sputs and sats and bits of old rockets lodged in their many, often dangerous orbits up there far outside Earth’s envelope. I won’t go into details, for any ten-year-old kid knows them: it was just a matter of giving these odd piles of freewheeling, obsolete junk a little shove in the right direction at the right time, to send them tumbling sadly and yet somehow grandly out and away and down into the hot heart of Sol.

  But we were very young men and space is a lonely place, and so when we had our feet on the ground we liked to look for company. Nothing permanent, for we didn’t lead the sort of life that makes for lasting relation-ships, but if you’re an astronaut and can’t find a little female company on a beach in Cannes…then it has to be time to see a plastic surgeon! On this occasion, however, we were on our own, just lying there on our towels on the beach and absorbing the heat of that especially hot summer, when it happened. I say ‘it,’ for at first we didn’t know what it was. Not for quite some little time, in fact.

  “Aaaah-ow!” said Andrew, abruptly sitting up and rapidly blinking his eyes, staring out across an entirely placid ocean. And though there was a twinge of pain in his voice he wasn’t holding himself; he’d simply gone a little pale and shuddery, as if he had stomach cramp or something.

  “Ow?” I repeated after him, but not quite, because the sound he’d made hadn’t really been repeatable: more an animal cry than a word proper. “You were stung?” He frowned, looked at the sand all about, shook his head. “I…I don’t think so,” he finally, uncertainly, said.

  I looked at him—at the physical fact and presence of my brother—in admiration, which was nice because I was looking at a better-than-mirror image of myself! Andrew, with his mass of gleaming black hair, blue eyes and clean, strong features, and his athlete’s body. How many times had I wondered: do I really look as good as this?

  But…a few minutes later and his stab of unknown pain was forgotten, and a spear-fisherman came out of the sea with a silver-glistening fish, shot through the head, stone dead on his spear. He took off his swimfins and marched proudly off up the beach with his catch. And Andrew’s eyes followed him, still frowning. That was all there was to it, that first time.

  After that the pains came thick and fast: big hurts and small ones, pains that made him burn or ache or sometimes simply cramped him, but occasionally agonies that doubled him over and caused him to throw up on the floor. None of them coming for any good reason that we could think of, and not a one from any visible cause or having any viable cure.

  The Program medics all agreed that ther
e was nothing wrong with Andrew, at least not with his body, and they were the best in the world and should know. But he and I, we knew that there was something desperately wrong with him. He was feeling pain, and feeling it when in fact he was in the peak of condition and nothing, absolutely nothing, should hurt.

  I remember a fight in a night club in Paris; though we weren’t involved personally, still I had to carry Andrew to our car and drive him to a friend’s house. It was as though he was the one who took the hammering—and not a mark on him, and anyway the scrap had taken place on the other side of the room. But he’d certainly jerked upright out of his seat, grunting and yelling and slamming this way and that as the shouting and sounds of fists striking flesh reached us! And he’d just as surely crashed over on to his back on the floor, groggy as a punch-drunk ex-boxer, as the fight came to a close.

  I remember the night in Lyon when he woke up hoarsely screaming his agony and clawing at his face. We were sleeping on the base at the time and there’d been some party or other we hadn’t attended. But I’d heard the crash outside at the same time Andrew started yelling, and when I looked out of the window there was this accident down there, where a once-pretty girl had been tossed through a windscreen on to the hood of a second car, her face shattered and bloody. Andrew sat on his bed and moaned and shuddered and held his face together (which was together, you understand) until an ambulance came and took the injured girl away….

  And that was when it finally began to dawn on us just what was wrong, and what was rapidly getting worse; so that it’s hardly surprising he had his breakdown. He had it because he’d begun to realize that nothing and no one could ever put his problem right, and that from now on he was subject to anyone else’s, everyone else’s, pain.

  For that was the simple fact of it: that he felt pain. From the pinprick stings of small, damaged or dying creatures to the screaming agonies of hideous human death. But once we knew what it was, at least we could tell the doctors.

  It didn’t take them long to check it out, and after they did…I’ve never seen so many intelligent down-to-earth men looking so downright shocked and disbelieving and lost for answers. And lost is the only word for it, for how can you treat someone for the aches and pains and bumps and cuts and bruises of someone else? How can you treat—or begin treating—the agony of a broken leg when the leg plainly isn’t broken?

  Non-addictive painkillers, obviously….

  Oh, really?

  For in fact it did no good to give painkillers to Andrew. The pain wasn’t actually in him: its source or sources were beyond his mind and body; coming from outside of him, there was nothing they could put inside of him that would help. Worse, it didn’t even bring relief when they gave the pills to the ones actually suffering from the pain! They only thought the pain had gone away, because it had been blocked. But the cause of the hurting was still there and Andrew could feel it….

  The thing’s progress was rapid; it precisely paralleled Andrew’s deterioration. Obviously, he wasn’t going out into space any more….

  Or was he?

  Once they’d accepted this new thing—Andrew’s…disease?—the ESP medics were amenable to an idea of mine. And they backed me on it. For seven years we’d been using one-man weather sats for accurate forecast-ing. The robot sats had been fine in their day, but nothing was as clear-sighted as human eyes and nothing so observant as an alert human brain. And what with the extensive damage to the ozone layer—the constant fluctuation of its tears and holes—computer probability was at best mechanical guesswork anyway.

  So—my idea was simple and I don’t think I need to restate it. It would mean Andrew would be completely isolated for two months at a stretch, which isn’t good for anyone, but at least it would give him time to get himself back together again before they brought him down for his periodic visits in hell. And it would also give the medics time to try to find a new angle of approach. Because if this was a disease connected with, or perhaps even springing from, space, then it was something they were going to have to take a crack at.

  It took some haggling (the Program Chiefs like to have one hundred percent fit men up there), but between the medics, myself and my parents we convinced the upper echelon that Andrew should become WWO & A, a World Weather Observer & Adviser. And he and I spent another three months getting him back on his feet again, mentally and physically. Which wasn’t easy.

  It meant spending a lot of time in the loneliest places in the world: in deserts, on frozen ocean strands, in the wilds of Canada and blustery Scottish highlands, finally on the uninhabited beaches of Cyprus, which the deteriorating ozone layer had put paid to as far back as 2006. There weren’t a hell of a lot of Venuses on half-shells floating ashore at Paphos this time around.

  We talked and trained, and Andrew got himself together and faced up to it, and away from all the pains of men he gradually improved and became fit again. But at the same time he’d been growing ever more aware of a very worrying thing: the PE was wearing down. PE was our jargon for the ratio between a person in pain and his distance from Andrew, the receiver. The Proximity Effect. Previously, the source had needed to be pretty close. But now…all the world’s pain, however muted, was getting there, was getting through to him. He felt it like you might hear the sea in a shell: as a distant tumult. A roaring which was gradually creeping up on him.

  Nor was that the whole thing; for he’d also become more sensitive to the agonies of the smaller creatures, whose myriad ravages had grown that much more sharp to him. A huge cloud of desiccated, exhausted migratory butterflies spiraled down out of the aching Mediterranean sky to drown in the tideless sea, and Andrew gaped and gasped and began to turn blue before the last of them had expired. He felt the dull shuddering of the tiny clam devoured by the starfish, and the intolerable burning of the stranded man-o’-war evaporating on the sand. And now he couldn’t get back into space fast enough.

  Except…he never made it.

  It was on every vidscreen in the world and dominated every newscast for a month: the blow-up at Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas.

  There were two launches scheduled for that day. The first was a French relief team going up to Luna Orbital Station, and the second was supposed to be Andrew shuttling up to W-Sat III. But the French team never got off the pad, which meant that Andrew never got on it. We were only a mile away from that mess, waiting out the countdown when it fireballed—and my twin brother felt every poor sod of them frying! If they’d all gone up at once in the bang it would have been bad enough—but three of them, blazing, managed to eject. And Andrew blazed with them.

  The medics took him back then, and called in the shrinks too, and I found myself excluded. Now it had to be up to the specialists, because I couldn’t reach him any more. He’d gone “inside” and wasn’t coming out for a while.

  We were twins and I loved him; I might easily have gone to pieces myself, if the Old Folks had let me. But they didn’t. “You’ve earned a lot of money, son, you and Andrew,” my father told me. “Which is just as well because your brother is going to need it. Oh, I know, there are a lot of good people working on him for free—but there are other specialists who haven’t even seen him yet, and they cost money. Money doesn’t last for ever, Ray—it comes and it goes. If you want to do something for Andrew, want to take care of his future, then the best thing would be to get yourself back into space. Let me and your mother look after this end a while.”

  Andrew’s future! It hadn’t even got through to the Old Folks that he didn’t have one. It was something they couldn’t allow themselves to believe, and so they didn’t. But at least their advice was good and kept me together. I went back into space, and up there where I could look down and see everything clearly (so clearly that I used to believe it allowed me to think more clearly, too) I’d sometimes wonder: why him and not me? We’re twins, so how come it skipped me? But even in space there was no answer to that. Not then….

  I did two months on W-Sat HI standing in for Andrew, a
nd almost without pause a further three months on the vast, incredible wheel which was Luna Orbital, watching the EV engineers laboriously putting together the miracle that would one day become Titan Station. And finally it was back to Earth.

  Meanwhile, I hadn’t been out of touch: I got coded radio mail which my personal receiver unscrambled on to disks for me. The Old Folks kept me in the picture regarding Andrew.

  “We found a specializing chemist who designed a drug for him,” my mother told me, her languid American drawl still very much in evidence for all that she’d been expatriate for thirty years. “It has side-effects—makes his whole skin itch and upsets his balance a little—but it does cut down on the pain. And it’s non-addictive!” Fine for anyone else; but my brother, my double, the athlete who was my twin? In private I cried about it.

  “He’s out of dock,” the Old Man’s gravelly English tones cheerfully informed me towards the end of one message, “house-hunting off Land’s End!”

  That last had me stumped. What the hell was “off” Land’s End? I called up the atlas on my computer and got the answer: the Isles of Scilly. But it was the wrong answer. There were also several lighthouses.

  When I got back down I had three months’ accumulated R and R and plenty to do with it, but first the Program Officer I/C wanted to see me. In Lyon I went up to Jean-Pierre Durant’s office and was ushered in. Durant was a short, sturdy man in his fifties, wide as a door, short-cropped graying hair, big hard hands, very powerful looking. And he was powerful in every way; but big-hearted with it, a man who loved his fellow men. Right then, however, I had a down on ESP because of Andrew (to me, they’d seemed too eager to write him off) and possibly it showed in my face. Also, I was in a hurry to get across the Channel to England, and down to Land’s End, and out to see my brother in the old deserted lighthouse he’d made his home. So Durant was the Big Boss—so what? I considered this an intrusion into my time. And perhaps that showed, too.