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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.”