Screaming Science Fiction Read Free

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.
    Imean 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