Screaming Science Fiction Read Free Page A

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.
    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