Screaming Science Fiction Read Free Page B

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