I took a pace back, collapsed into my chair, dazedly shook my head as a mixture of emotions flooded through me. “But…why tell me? I mean, haven’t you told Andrew?”
Now the smile, a worried one at best, left his face. “I told him last week—by letter, special delivery, a jet copter—and his answer…wasn’t satisfactory. I told him yesterday, and when he could bring himself to answer the phone I got the same response. And I’ve tried to tell him again this morning, but apparently he’s not taking calls. So maybe you’d better tell him for me.”
“Unsatisfactory?” Over everything else he’d said that one word had stuck in my mind. “His answer was unsatisfactory? In what way?”
“Ray,” Durant looked straight into my eyes, “your brother is convinced he’s going to die—of other people’s pain. He says he’s given it plenty of thought and knows there’s no way of stopping it. And he says that since it’s coming, he’d prefer it came here on Earth than out there. Going out into space would only delay it anyway, he says. So you’re his last chance. Possibly he’s already too far gone physically for the job, in which case you’ll not only have to talk him into accepting it, but also get him back up on his feet one last time. You did it before, between you, so maybe you can do it again. That’s the whole thing, and that’s why I sent for you….”
“Do my parents—?” I started, but he cut me off.
“Your parents are your parents, Ray. I know them almost as well as you do. In some respects I know them better. Andrew has forbidden them to visit him, says not to baby him and that he’s doing fine, and when he’s ready to see them he’ll turn up on their doorstep. Do you think it’s likely—or even right—that I should tell them he’s going downhill? But I have told them we might send him out to Saturn if he wants it, and that it’s up to him. Though in fact it now looks like it’s up to you. When are you seeing him?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “As soon as I can get there. Right now, if there was any quick way.”
“There is,” he told me. “Get your things together, whatever you want to take with you, and be at the helipad in one hour. I’ll clear it and see that you’re jet-coptered over. Two and a half hours and you’re there, OK?”
And of course I said yes, that was OK….
I didn’t try to call Andrew first; it was to be a surprise, and it was. But on the way across I talked to my pilot, the one who’d taken Durant’s letter to Andrew on Perring’s Rock. “How did he look to you?” I asked him.
Josh Bertin was a Belgian and had been a jet-copter pilot for ESP as long as I’d been around; I knew him personally and he knew our history. “Andrew…wasn’t his brightest,” he answered, carefully. And, before I could quiz him further: “You know why he bought the Rock, of course?”
“Oh, yes,” I nodded. “Miles out to sea. No people. No pain. Not so much, anyway.”
Josh glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “Yes…and no,” he said. “Oh, that’s the reason he settled there, for sure, but—”
When his pause threatened to go on indefinitely, I prompted him: “But?”
“He mentioned something you and he call the PE? Something to do with how close people were to him? Well, he told me it’s breaking down. All the way down.”
“Josh,” I was really alarmed now, “I think you’d better tell me—”
“But,” he broke in on me, “he’s coping with it—so far. Learning to live with it. All he has to do is keep telling himself it’s not real, that’s all—that the pain belongs to someone else—and then he’ll be OK. As long as nothing big happens. But right out there in the sea? Well, he’s not expecting any disasters, you know? And Ray, that’s it. No good asking me any more, ’cos that’s all he told me.”
I said nothing but simply turned over what he’d said in my mind. And while I was still turning it over, that’s when the pain hit me. Andrew’s pain—and I knew it!
It came from outside of me, slamming into me like an explosive shell and fragmenting deep inside. It was like a tankful of pain had overflowed into my guts. Someone was crushing my heart, yanking it this way and that, trying to tear it out of me. I had thought I knew what pain was, but I hadn’t. This was pain! Big Pain!
It would have driven me surging to my feet, but I was strapped in. I cried out, or gurgled, and then I must have blacked out….
When I came to Josh had slapped an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth and was shaking me. He’d switched the jet-copter to automatic pilot, and he was white as death. But as soon as I opened my eyes, dragged the mask off my face and let it fall, then he took a deep breath and climbed down a little. “Are you OK?” he said. And: “Jesus, Ray—what was all that?”
At the time I’d known what it was, but now I couldn’t be sure, didn’t want to be sure. I had thought it was Andrew, something from him that couldn’t be contained, overflowing into me. But…I didn’t even know if that was possible. Being a twin, I knew all about the so-called “Corsican Brothers” case, but nothing like that had ever happened to me (to us?) before. So…maybe it was just me. My heart? Had I been pushing it too hard?
“I don’t know what it was,” I finally answered Josh. “I’m too scared to think what it was. I only know it was pain, and that it’s gone now.”
But I didn’t tell him that something else had gone, too, something which I hadn’t even been aware of until suddenly—right there and then—I no longer had it. It had been a warm feeling, that’s all. A feeling that there was something out there other than what I could see, feel and touch. A sure knowledge that the universe was bigger than me. Now that I’d lost it I knew that it had been something greater than merely “I think, therefore I am.” Perhaps it had been “we think….” But now there was just an emptiness, with nothing out there at all except the world and all of space and all the other stars and worlds in it. And for the first time in my life I experienced loneliness. Even with someone right there beside me, I was lonely….
It was mid-September, still warm but very soggy, and fog lay like a milky shroud on the ocean where Perring’s Rock stuck up like a partly clenched fist from the grey surging water, its lighthouse index finger pointing at the leaden sky. Perring’s Rock was the sloping acre and a half plateau of some drowned mountain, rising seventy or eighty feet out of the sea with the lighthouse built at the highest point of the slope. There was something of a tiny scalloped bay and beach to the west, away from our approach path, and a flat area on our side of the lighthouse picked out with typical helipad patterns.
Like ninety per cent of all lighthouses the Rock had been abandoned since before the turn of the century, when super high-tech Radar, Skyspy and the W-sats had put them out of business for good. But the way they’d built this one, the sea wasn’t going to claim it for a long time still to come. And desolate? The place looked about as lonely as I now felt. Except as we landed I saw that it wasn’t, or saw something which caused me to think that it wasn’t.
It was Andrew himself!—leaning over the rail of the lighthouse’s circular balcony or platform, waving to us through the blast from our fans as we came down. Then I was free of my straps and sliding the cabin door open, out of my seat and down under the rotors before they’d even nearly stopped turning, and running up the rock-carved steps to pause at the foot of the tower. And there was my brother up top, still leaning on the rail high overhead, his shirt-sleeves flapping in a breeze sprung up off the sea. Except…he wasn’t looking down at me at all but at something else. And he was so still, so very still there at the rail. Not so much leaning on it, I now saw, as propped up by it.