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of France, in the summer of 2049, when we were resting up after a month-long series of shuttle runs to destroy a lot of outdated space debris: sputs and sats and bits of old rockets lodged in their many, often dangerous orbits up there far outside Earth’s envelope.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 there 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.