I was inside and up the steps three at a time; and no need to worry now about the state of my heart for I was galvanized, my actions electric, supercharged! Yanked aloft by a fear and a pain beyond physical pain, I hurtled up those steps, while from behind and below me Josh Bertin’s cry followed despairingly from the well of the corkscrew: “Ray!…Ray…!’
Up to the old lamp room I swept, and on up its iron ladder and through the open trapdoor on to the flat, circular roof. And there was Andrew clinging to the iron three-bar safety rail—or rather hanging on it. One foot had slipped through and jammed there, dangling in space, and the other leg was bent at the knee, propping him against an upright. His left arm lay loosely along the top rail, while his opposite shoulder and arm lolled stiffly across it, supporting his weight. With his shirt-sleeves flapping like that and his head on one side, he looked like…like a sorry scarecrow fallen from its cross. And I saw that I was right and he hadn’t in fact been looking at us as we came in but at something else, down on the beach—as he’d blindly stared at it ever since his final, killing pain had reached out to me and knocked me out during the flight.
The mist had curled away a little and now I too could see it there on the narrow shingle strand. A beached whale, with three great, deep crimson slashes across its spine where some liner’s screw had broken its broad back!
The blood was still pumping, though very sluggishly now, sporadically; overhead the gulls wheeled and cried their excitement, like vultures waiting for the last spark to flicker low and expire; out at sea a cow and her calf stood off and spouted, and it seemed to me that over and above my own pain I could feel something of theirs, too.
…Until, like ice-water down my back, there dawned the realization that I could actually feel it, and finally I knew that I was compensating for Andrew’s loss….
That was three months ago and since then…I’ve thought about it a lot up here, where there’s plenty of time and space to think. And my thoughts have been diverse.
I watch the curving reef which is Japan appear at the rim of the mighty Pacific, and as it slides closer I can point a trembling finger at the very bay where in these same moments of time the dolphins are still being slaugh-tered in their thousands. I feel the outward rush of human agony as bombs explode in Zambia, while the African continent slips by so distantly beneath my observation ports that my eyes see nothing but its beauty. A million babies are born and their mothers cry out, and a million men die—but they only feel their own pain while I feel something of all of it. And with every revolution I feel more.
Nine months to go, and Saturn is waiting for me out there beyond the pain of the world. But now and then I ask myself: will the wash from the world one day reach out to me even there? Or will I have moved on, outwards to the stars, before then?
Sometimes I wonder: are there other men or beings out there, in the stars?
And sometimes I pray there are not….
The Strange Years
Seven years before “The Man Who Felt Pain,” this next story had also made its debut in
Fantasy Tales
(Spring, 1982). Now, I’ve always had a weird fascination for the
Attack of the
What-the-Hell-Ever subgenre of stories, whether it’s body-snatchers or fifty-foot women or killer tomatoes, so sooner or later I knew I was going to have to have a go at it too. And let’s face it, there had been some very strange years in the late 1970s. Anyway, Steve Jones—one of the editors and the guiding light of England’s most prestigious, best-remembered fantastic magazine at that time—Steve called “The Strange Years” “an apocalyptic jewel,” about which I was well pleased. But the story may even in its way have been a little prophetic, too. Because truth to tell there’s been some even stranger, far more malicious years since….
He lay face-down on the beach at the foot of a small dune, his face turned to one side, the summer sun beating down upon him. The clump of beachgrass at the top of the dune bent its spikes in a stiff breeze, but down here all was calm, with not even a seagull’s cry to break in upon the lulling hush, hush of waves from far down the beach.
It would be nice, he thought, to run down the beach and splash in the sea, and come back dripping salt water and tasting it on his lips, and for the very briefest of moments be a small boy again in a world with a future. But the sun beat down from a blue sky and his limbs were leaden, and a great drowsiness was upon him.
Then…a disturbance. Blown on the breeze to climb the far side of the dune, flapping like a bird with broken wings, a slim book—a child’s exercise book, with tables of weights and measures on the back—flopped down exhausted in the sand before his eyes. Disinterested, he found strength to push it away; but as his fingers touched it so its cover blew open to reveal pages written in a neat if shaky adult longhand.
He had nothing else to do, and so began to read….
“When did it begin? Where? How? Why?
“The Martians we might have expected (they’ve been frightening us long enough with their tales of invasion from outer space) and certainly there have been enough of threats from our Comrades across the water. But this?
“Any ordinary sort of plague, we would survive. We always have in the past. And as for war: Christ!—when has there not been a war going on somewhere? They’ve irradiated us in Japan, defoliated us in Vietnam, smothered us in DDT wherever we were arable and poured poison into us where we once flowed sweet and clean—and we always bounced right back.
“Fire and flood—even nuclear fire and festering effluent—have not appreciably stopped us. For ‘They’ read ‘We,’ Man, and for ‘Us’ read ‘the world,’ this Earth which once was ours. Yes, there have been strange years, but never a one as strange as this.
“A penance? The ultimate penance? Or has Old Ma Nature finally decided to give us a hand? Perhaps she’s stood off, watching us try our damnedest for so damned long to exterminate ourselves, and now She’s sick to death of the whole damned scene. ‘OK,’ She says, ‘have it your own way.’ And She gives the nod to Her Brother, the Old Boy with the scythe. And He sighs and steps forward, and—
“And it is a plague of sorts; and certainly it is DOOM; and a fire that rages across the world and devours all…Or will that come later? The cleansing flame from which Life’s bright phoenix shall rise again? There will always be the sea. And how many ages this time before something gets left by the tide, grows lungs, jumps up on its feet and walks…and reaches for a club?
“When did it begin?
“I remember an Irish stoker who came into a bar dirty and drunk. His sleeves were rolled up and he scratched at hairy arms. I thought it was the heat. ‘Hot? Damned right, sur,’ he said, ‘an’ hotter by far down below—an’ lousy!’ He unrolled a newspaper on the bar and vigorously brushed at his matted forearm. Things fell onto the newsprint and moved, slowly. He popped them with a cigarette. “’Crabs, sur!’ he cried. ‘An’ Christ!—they suck like crazy!’