Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people’s pain. He feeds off it, and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should home in on Minner Burris, a space traveler whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together again differently. Burris’ pain is constant. And so is that of Lona Kelvin, used by...