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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,’