He took the first street on the right, walking quickly down it until he hit another street he knew somewhat better—
—Or did he?
Yes, yes, of course he did. The street was deserted now, quite empty, but just over there was good old….
Good old Wolwords!
Lights blazed and burst into multicolored sparks before Scott’s bilious eyes. His mind spun wildly. He grabbed hold of a lamppost to steady himself and tried to think the thing out properly.
It must be a new building, that place—yes, that had to be the answer. He’d been doing a lot of desk-duties lately, after all. It was quite possible, what with new techniques and the speed of modern building, that the store had been put up in just a few weeks.
The place didn’t look any too new, though….
Scott’s condition rapidly grew worse—understandably in the circumstances, he believed—but there was a tube station nearby. He decided to take a train home. He usually walked the mile or so to his flat, the exercise did him good; but tonight he would take a train, give himself a rest.
He went dizzily down one flight of steps, barely noticing the absence of posters and the unkempt, dirty condition of the underground. Then, as he turned a corner, he came face-to-face with a strange legend, dripping in red paint on the tiled walclass="underline"
ROT THE TUBERS!
Deep creases furrowed the sergeant’s forehead as he walked on, his footsteps ringing hollowly in the grimy, empty corridors, but his head-ache just wouldn’t let him think clearly.
Tubers, indeed! What the hell—Tubers…?
Down another flight of steps he went, to the deserted ticket booths, where he paused to stare in disbelief at the naked walls of the place and the dirt- and refuse-littered floor. For the first time he really saw the condition of the place. What had happened here? Where was everyone?
From beyond the turnstiles he heard the rumble of a distant train and the spell lifted a little. He hurried forward then, past the empty booths and through the unguarded turnstiles, dizzily down one more flight of concrete steps, under an arch and out onto an empty platform. Not even a drunk or a tramp shared the place with him. The neons flared hideously, and he put out a hand against the naked wall for support.
Again, through the blinding flashes of light in his head, he noticed the absence of posters: the employment agencies, the pretty girls in lingerie, the film and play adverts, spectacular films and avant-garde productions—where in hell were they all?
Then, as for the first time he truly felt upon his spine the chill fingers of a slithering horror, there came the rumble and blast of air that an-nounced the imminent arrival of a train—and he smelled the rushing reek of that which most certainly was not a train!
Even as he staggered to and fro on the unkempt platform, reeling under the fetid blast that engulfed him, the Tuber rushed from out its black hole—a Thing of crimson viscosity and rhythmically flickering cilia.
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.