BRIAN ALDISS

Report on Probability A

Those who seek for revelation become themselves a revelation

Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 1968

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007482405

Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780007482412

Version: 2015-08-28

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

PART ONE: G Who Waits

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

PART TWO: S The Watchful

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

PART THREE: The House and The Watchers

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

PART ONE

Chapter One

The Report begins:

One afternoon early in a certain January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost or wind; the trees in the garden did not stir. There was no rain, although anybody accustomed to predicting rain might have forecast it with a fair expectation of being right before nightfall. Cloud lay thickly over the sky. The face of the sun was not visible. Consequently, shadows had no form.

A single window on the north-west side of the house reflected the light back in a dull fashion, without movement, except once when the reflection of a pigeon, wheeling above the garden, splashed across it. No movement came from the house. No sound came from the house.

G lived not in the house but in a wooden bungalow in the garden, overlooked by the window set high in the north-west side of the house. The bungalow, which contained only one room, measured about five by four metres, being longer than it was deep. It was raised above the ground on low pillars of brick. It was constructed of planks arranged vertically on the front and rear and horizontally on the sides. Its roof was also of planks, covered by asphalt; the asphalt was secured in place by large flat-headed nails which dug into the black material. Cracks ran round many of the nails.

The wooden bungalow had two windows. These were fitted in its front wall, one on either side of a door. This was the only door. It did not fit well. The windows contained large single panes of glass. The window-frames and the door had been painted with white paint. Although dirt had greyed this paint, it was still in moderately good condition and not in particular need for repainting. The rest of the wooden bungalow, excluding of course the roof, had been painted yellow. This paint had proved less satisfactory than the white, peeling off in many places to reveal the bare wood underneath.

Between the two windows was an ill-fitting door. A key remained in the lock of this door on the inside, although the lock would not function because the door hinges had sunk and the wood had swollen. G always shut this door with great force at night; he did not like to imagine that Mr Mary might enter the wooden bungalow when he was inside it asleep. Sometimes when G shut the door with great force at night, the key would fall out of the lock onto the mat.

Approximately two years had passed since G began living in the wooden bungalow. During that period, the key had fallen onto the mat inside the door on many occasions.

When Mr Mary had had men build the wooden bungalow in the garden, he said to his wife: ‘It is for you; you can call it your summer house.’ The wooden bungalow had been constructed facing the north-west side of the house. It did not face it squarely, but at an angle of some twenty degrees, in the direction of east-south-east. It stood at a distance of some ten metres from the house. The house dominated the wooden bungalow.

On the early January days when the sun shone, it never rose far enough above the roof of the house to illuminate more than the upper half of the two windows on the front of the bungalow. Even this ration of sunshine was further abbreviated while the shadow of a group of chimneys on the roof of the house made its passage across the front of the bungalow. Since the bungalow faced east-south-east, the sunshine that did reach the windows impinged obliquely into the one room. It shone onto a small section of mat that was stretched over the floorboards and over a portion of the couch on which G slept. G was never on the couch when the sun was.

The couch stood along the northmost side of the room. At the other end of the room to the couch, G had a small stove of an antique pattern which burnt paraffin. By this stove was a chair on which G sat for a considerable period each day. One of the rear legs of this chair was slightly shorter than the others, so that it was possible to make the chair rock a little when one wished it to do so. The chair had once belonged in the house. The style of the chair was the style known to G as wheelback, because the spokes that formed the back of the chair radiated out from a centre in a fashion reminiscent of the hubs of a cart wheel. The back of the chair had once possessed five supports or spokes; one of these spokes had been missing for a long time. It was because this spoke was missing that Mr Mary had ordered the chair to be placed in the wooden bungalow. The chair had been made shortly before the first world war; it bore on the underside of the round wooden seat the date 1912. G had seen this date and did not forget it.

When G sat on the chair, he generally permitted his gaze to rest only on the objects inside the bungalow. These objects were few in number. He was familiar with all of them. Most of the objects were manufactured, as were a stove with a pattern of circular holes on its upper surface and a galvanised bucket that stood near the chair. Most of them had not been intended originally for the wooden bungalow, but had been brought over by his wife, before they had quarrelled. One or two belonged to G.

Some of these objects were connected directly or in a more tenuous degree with the passage of time. G’s clock had been specifically designed to indicate the passage of time; it was his clock, for he had bought it with part of his wages in the days when Mr Mary was paying him a weekly fee. On its face, which formed a circle, were the arabic numerals from one to twelve and a pair of hands. The smaller of the two hands pointed at the lower lobe of the figure eight, while the larger hand pointed at the space between the nine and the ten. These two hands had been at these positions, maintaining between them an angle of fifty degrees, for a period of something over eleven months. Although, when his attention encompassed the clock, G entertained the theory that the clock still worked, he was reluctant to test the theory by attempting to wind the clock mechanism.

Also connected with the passage of time was a calendar for the previous year, 19—. It indicated the day as being 9th February. G was aware that this date was incorrect. Above the functional part of the calendar (non-functioning though it was) hung a picture, stuck to the same piece of cardboard that bore the pack of dates. When G turned his attention to it, he saw that it bore a representation of two men in period dress standing on the edge of a gorge. One of these men wore a black beard and was pointing with a stick into the gorge; the other man held his hat in his hand and seemed to be gazing, not into the gorge, but at the end of the bearded man’s stick. In the foreground of the picture, the gorge was littered by broken trees and boughs and boulders of large dimension. In the distance, the gorge became purple; over this end of it, a bird with a large wing-span hovered. The scene, though grand, was not harsh, because a gentle afternoon light played across it. This light bathed the two men as if from the wings of a theatre, giving them an air of security although they stood so close to a precipice.

A third object connected more remotely with the passage of time was the front page of a daily newspaper, The Daily —, for a day in April of the preceding year. G had fastened this sheet of newsprint and pictures to the wooden wall by two drawing pins, one at each of the two top corners of the paper; later he had added two more drawing pins at the bottom corners, because the damp emanating from the wall had caused the paper to curl upwards.

G had kept this sheet of newspaper because he found its contents more interesting than the contents of most newspapers. The main headline across the page said SERIOUS BLAZE DAMAGES WARSHIP IN SOUTHERN HARBOUR. The report of this fire, in which nobody was injured, was illustrated by an aerial photograph of the warship with smoke pouring from it. When G was a child of seven years, an uncle had taken him to see this ship. On the other side of the page, headlines announced ZEGENGAIS UNDER ARREST. In the last column was notice of a strike in a car factory. Lower down the page were items of more domestic interest: MITZI TABORI WEDS FOURTH HUSBAND, FISH FAMINE CAUSES RECORD PRICES, and a report on a day of a big murder trial headed ‘IN LAUGHING FIT I KILLED HER’. An item which particularly interested G as a gardener was headed HOSE GOES!, and described how a man in the state of New York had watched in amazement while his fifty-feet-long garden hose had burrowed underground, resisting everyone’s attempts to pull it back; it had finally disappeared, only to reappear two days later outside the Baptist church in what was described as a dazed condition.

Between the sheet of newspaper, which hung on one of the side walls, and the wheelback chair, stood a galvanised bucket and a paraffin stove of old-fashioned design. A small table made of bamboo stood on the other side of the wheelback chair, nearer the couch.

Also in the room was a cupboard of unpainted wood, in which G kept several small toilet articles; a copy of Hugh Walpole’s The Cathedral; some neatly folded bandages; a crumpled handkerchief belonging to Mr Mary’s wife; a bowl with a rose pattern in which lay rusting curtain hooks, a penknife, and a pair of spectacles that had belonged to an uncle of G’s; a candlestick; some candles; string; several strangely shaped stones found in the garden; a white china cat with the name of a seaside town printed on its stomach; some mending things; a round 1 oz. tobacco tin with holes punched in its lid, in which G had once intended to keep a lizard; and some groceries.

To the left of the cupboard of unpainted wood was one of the two windows set in the front wall of the wooden bungalow. Attached to the left side of it, as G sat on his seat regarding it, was a mirror measuring some fifteen by thirty centimetres and framed in a veneered wood, such as might have belonged at some past period to a small version of a cheval-glass. This mirror or looking-glass was fixed to the window frame at such an angle that, as G sat on the wheelback chair, he could look at the mirror and see reflected in it a part of the garden not otherwise visible from where he sat.

This was the part of the garden visible when one overlooked it in a southerly direction. The reflection showed the west corner of the house, with a concrete path leading round it; and certain limited sections of the garden, such as the vegetable garden, the fruit garden, and a narrow section of a long lawn on which trees grew, beyond which lay, hidden by the decline of the ground, a sunken garden; these sections were divided from each other by privet hedges running in various directions, chopped into pieces by the narrow dimensions of the looking-glass, so that the true relationship of the pieces to one another, the fact that they were often merely fragments of one hedge, would have been lost to a newcomer looking into the mirror.

The hypothetical newcomer would also have seen a more distant hedge that divided the garden from the property of an elderly bachelor known to have an ancestor who had built a lighthouse in the southern hemisphere; part of an asparagus bed lying between the back of the house and an old brick outhouse; the old brick outhouse itself, on the roof of which strutted a homing pigeon; a round window set in the front of the brick building; and sundry other particulars that were regularly glimpsed by G when he directed his gaze to the mirror. Most of the time he sat looking directly out of the window, staring at the blank wall of the house some distance away or, for preference, staring down comfortably at the floor.

On the floor lay two old fibre mats, the stripes of which had faded from their original oranges and greens under the long application of human feet. Because it was not raining, G took up one of these mats and carried it outside. As he began to shake it, he saw Mr Mary’s wife come round the edge of the house. She was walking from the back door to the side gate, which meant that she had to traverse the length of path between G and the house, coming at her nearest point to within twenty metres of him; she saw him, and he knew she saw.

He continued to flap the mat before him, so that its faded orange and green stripes rose and fell before his vision, alternately revealing and concealing her; between each brief concealment she was a fraction further along the path.

When she was at perihelion, and already only a few metres from the brown side gate, G let his arms drop and faced her through the cloud of dust that hung in the air between them.

‘When the fishing is poor, they say the price of fish rises.’

‘Fish are plentiful now.’

‘Are the fish eager to be caught?’

‘My fishmonger has satisfied customers all the year.’

‘Even in a time of plenty, are not some fish more satisfying than others?’

‘All fish contain vitamins, so says my fishmonger.’

Although she slowed her pace as she spoke, Mr Mary’s wife never entirely stopped walking towards the brown side gate; nor did she entirely turn her face towards G. She had now reached the brown side gate, and turned her attention to the bolt. Shedding a small flake of rust, it yielded, and she swung the gate open. She walked through it and closed it from the outside. The gate was set in a wall nearly two metres high; on the top of the wall were embedded a few shreds of bottle glass.

Domoladossa looked up from the long report.

‘Mr Mary’s wife,’ he said. ‘We think she may be the key to the whole matter. I shall be interested to see what the report makes of her.’

‘The main object of the report is directed towards a different objective,’ Midlakemela said. ‘Let us call this continuum we are studying – the one containing Mr Mary and his wife – Probability A. We know it is closely related to our continuum, which I like to think of as Certainty X. Nevertheless, even superficially, Probability A reveals certain basic values that differ widely from our own. It is our first duty to examine those values.’

Domoladossa sighed. He both admired and detested the slow, careful mind of the younger man.

‘Quite so. Probability A’s time-flow rate seems to differ from our own, for instance. Instrumentation is being devised so that we can have absolute scales by which to measure such discrepancies.’ He looked askance at Midlakemela. ‘Has it occurred to you that our congruence with Probability A may be temporary? In a week it may have vanished again.’

‘And then?’

‘We may be left all alone in the uni-probable space-time universe familiar to our fathers. Or the faulting may occur again, and we may find ourselves congruent with Probability Z, where few factors indeed coincide with our own. We just don’t know.’

‘So perhaps we should continue to peruse the report.’ Midlakemela was the sort who always got promotion.

There was neither frost nor wind that afternoon. The trees in the garden did not stir. Behind the wooden bungalow was a long brick wall marking the north-west boundary of the garden; beech trees were planted beside it from the bottom of the garden to a point not far from the wooden hut, where an elder tree incongruously stood, its lax branches touching the back of the wooden bungalow; these trees did not stir. On the side of the house facing the wooden bungalow, only one window looked out, a high bow window, set near the east or street corner of the house; a curtain stirred at this window.

G looked quickly up and caught the movement of the curtain. He could not see anybody at the window. The curtain was of a cream material. It did not move again. G covered his mouth momentarily with his hand and then rubbed it. He turned away and took the striped mat back into the wooden bungalow. He deposited the mat back on the floor of the bungalow. Then he emerged into the open once again, carrying the second mat. He commenced to shake this as thoroughly as he had shaken the first one. A cloud of dust rose in the air before him. As he worked, he kept his eye on the bow window set high in the blank wall of the house.

A black and white cat picked its way daintily through the stems of a privet bush that bounded the lawn to his left hand. It held its tail erect. It walked past a sundial that was supported by an almost naked boy cast in iron, rubbing against the boy’s legs as it went, heading towards G. G ceased to shake the rug. He called to the cat in an affectionate tone. The cat made a noise in reply.

G retreated into the wooden bungalow, carrying a striped mat which he laid on the floor in a convenient position, next to a second and similar mat. Straightening his back, he moved over to a cupboard of unpainted wood, opened one of its doors, and extracted from its shelves a small white jug of the kind generally used for keeping milk in. G went to the door and showed this jug to the cat. The cat climbed up the step of the wooden bungalow and rubbed himself against the door.

‘You’re early for your rations today. The jug’s empty till I get some more, but you’d better come in.’

The cat entered the wooden bungalow, crossed the floor, and jumped up onto the couch. G closed the door, pressing his shoulder to it to do so. He returned the white jug to the cupboard, leaving one of the cupboard doors open. Then he went over to the couch and picked up the cat round its chest, so that its paws hung down, black and white in varying proportions.

‘You’re a naughty pussy cat. What’s she been doing today? Where do you think she’s going, eh?’

He carried the cat over to the wheelback chair and sat down facing the window that had a mirror attached to it. He arranged the cat on his lap; the cat settled itself. It purred. It had a white tip to its tail.

‘You’ll never tell me, will you? You never tell me a thing.’

G stroked the cat. His hands were thick. He did not look at the cat. He looked out of the two windows, his gaze moving from the left one to the right one. Looking through the left one, he could see the front wall of the garden, but not the brown side gate that was set in it. Finally Mr Mary’s wife appeared, visible through the left window, walking along the concrete path that ran from the side gate, round the back of the house, to the back door. She was looking straight ahead.

She walked along the path. She was invisible for a moment, hidden from view of the left window, and then she could be seen through the right-hand window. The view of her was now rather less of a side view than a half-back view. She became hidden by the side of the window frame. G leaned forward, so that the black and white cat stuck its claws through his trousers and into his thighs. The woman now appeared reflected in the mirror set slantwise against the side of the window. She presented an almost full back view, walking towards the corner of the house. Her coat could be inspected, and her brown hair above her coat. She moved round the side of the house and was gone. The mirror reflected only a portion of the garden.

G sat up straight again. He removed the cat’s claws, unhooking them gently from his trousers. He cleared his throat. He began to stroke the animal again.

Chapter Two

When the rain began that afternoon, the time by the hands of G’s clock was almost ten minutes to eight.

The rain slid quietly down from the clouds overhead, making its first noise when it hit the panes of the two windows of the wooden bungalow.

G was looking at a black-and-white reproduction of a painting hanging slightly above and to the right of a cupboard of unpainted wood. The reproduction was mounted and framed in a frame of varnished wood. The subject of the picture was a rural scene. Sheep grazed, hay stood in stooks, wheat ripened. In the foreground, a country lad, possibly a shepherd, wooed a girl. The girl looked at the country lad doubtfully. Flowers grew, apples lay by the girl’s skirt.

‘Well, those were the good old days when.… It’s not the same today when you can’t.… It strikes me.…’

As G sat looking at the picture, his mouth came slowly open. His gaze became unfocused.

Still the rain persisted. It ran slantingly down the panes; when G got up from where he was sitting in his wheelback chair and gazed through the panes, they made a knotted visibility of the corner of the house that was available to his eyes.

He could see only one window on this side of the house. It was small bow window with yellow or cream curtains, and it constituted the side or lesser window of a room which G knew to be Mr Mary’s bedroom, although he had never entered it.

Almost directly beneath the window, the corner of the house met the wall in which was set the brown side gate, forming an angle in which lay a dull and damp part of the garden. In the days when he had attempted to make something grow in this portion of the garden, G had been repeatedly unsuccessful. The stretch of lawn enclosed between the triangle composed of wall, house, and path grew less luxuriantly as it got nearer the house, so that it became as worn as a carpet from which all pile had been trodden by constant usage, although in fact nobody ever trod there. Against the wall of the house, the grass faded altogether, and was replaced by ferns. G could see the ferns now as he forced his gaze beyond the streaming windows. He knew they would be getting wet, but so strongly did the rain flow over the window that he could gain no ocular corroboration of this.

With the rain came the darkness. Darkness fell early these January afternoons. Because the panes in the two windows of the wooden bungalow rested insecurely in their sockets, owing to the crumbling of the putty that surrounded them, and also because they had not been cut to make an exact fit to begin with, the rain soon began to trickle inside the sills. With the thickening of the light, it became impossible to see whether the rain came down on one or both sides of the panes.

Other features in the one room of the bungalow were also becoming submerged. On the calendar, the two men in period dress remained visible after the precipice below them had faded. The couch at the far end of the room failed to retain its shape in G’s sight. The cupboard and the bamboo table merged into one ambiguous object. The paraffin lamp, burning with its transparent door split into four gleaming panels, assumed a new character entirely; the circular holes perforated in two sizes on its top cast a pattern of oval lights on the sloping roof overhead.

For a short while, as the room darkened into obscurity, it seemed by comparison that the two windows grew brighter and glowed with their own light; then they faded to become two patches in the dark, and the man was left to be in his own universe.

G was active; his right hand felt its way down the lapel and edge of his jacket until it reached the top button. The jacket was old. Its edge was ragged. The button too was ragged. It was made of leather. G remembered that it had once been sewn on by an uncle. He pushed it through the equivalent hole in the left side of his jacket. Then he rose from the chair, and felt for a galvanised bucket. Edging it forward, he pushed it into the corner of the room under a stain that looked like a coral. He returned to the wheelback chair.

After only the slightest interval, a clear metal noise sounded in the dark. An identical noise followed almost at once, and another, and another, and another, until a point came in the sequence when G’s idly attentive ear could detect a change in the tones of the notes. They continued by a very gradual degree to alter until the metallic sound was lost altogether; in its place was a continuing liquid plop, as the bucket filled with rain water.

On his seat G sat, his shoulder-blades pressed against the four remaining supports, his legs stretched out before him, and his fingers curled under the seat of the chair. The fingers of his left hand came in contact with an irregularity on the underside of the chair seat; he identified the irregularity as the date 1912, carved on the chair when it was made. He rubbed his fingers back and forth across the four digits.

‘Are the fish glad to be caught?’ he said quietly.

The rain continued steadily outside. A gust of wind came, sending the water drops scattering. Some minutes later, another gust came. Soon it was blowing steadily. The outermost twigs of an elder tree which grew behind the bungalow scraped across the back wall.

Even with the increased noise in the bungalow, the drip of rain into the bucket was clearly audible. The heaviness of the note finally reminded G that the bucket was almost full. He got up, went over to it, felt for its handle, straightened up with it and made his way carefully to the door. As he went, he heard the drips from the roof fall to the floor.

He tugged at the door. It came quickly open and a gust of wet air blew into his face. Descending onto the one wooden step, he held the bucket by top and bottom, swung it, and sent its contents flying out towards the grass.

The bulk of the house was dark, except for a section of it that included the small bow window of Mr Mary’s bedroom. This section was lit by a street light that burned on the other side of the brick wall in which stood the brown side gate. This light threw the shadow of the wall slantwise up the side of the house; it gleamed on the bits of broken glass embedded in the wall and now washed by the rain, casting their shadows also onto the house.

G threw a look at the house and retreated into the bungalow with the empty bucket. He slammed the door. The door key fell out of the lock and dropped to the floor.

Without hurry, G took the bucket back to the corner and stood it down there. The clear metallic noise began again at once in the room.

Going over to the cupboard, G opened one of its doors and felt inside for a candle and matches. He located them, and stuck the candle, which was already partly consumed, in the candlestick. He struck a match with difficulty, hearing it grind too softly against the damp side of the box, and then transferred its small flame to the black twist of the candle’s wick. When the candle burned properly, he left it where it was and collected the ingredients for a kettleful of tea. Into his small kettle he put a handful of leaves of tea from a green packet, adding to them a splash of milk from a tin of condensed milk that bore two punched holes in its top. Taking up a tin mug, he dipped it into the bucket filling it with rain water and poured this liquid into the kettle on top of the tea leaves and the condensed milk. He did this a second time, wiped the bottom of the kettle with a rag, and set it down on the paraffin stove. Then he blew out the candle, closed the cupboard, and returned to the wheelback chair, taking the tin mug with him.

Several sounds were distinguishable in the wooden room. The wind could be heard outside making several distinct noises in its course over different obstacles. The rain could be heard, making different vibrations, a light one on the window, a heavier drumming kind on the wooden sides of the bungalow, and a muffled kind on the asphalt of the roof overhead. The leak from the corner of the roof still contributed its noise into the bucket. The elder tree still raked the back of the bungalow with its twigs. To all these noises, another was later added. It was only a whisper of sound when G first detected it, but he had been anticipating it, and held it steadily in his attention until it grew stronger. Eventually it was loud. It cheered G.

To accompany the sound, a trickle of steam came from the spout of the kettle, which was deeply cleft, so that in the dim glow from the stove it looked like the open beak of a bird. The sound and the steam grew together in volume, the former now loud and insistent, the latter now a column that continued the line of the kettle spout outwards for some centimetres before billowing upwards in a cloud.

At first G gave no outward indication that he heeded these manifestations from his kettle. Only when the kettle lid became agitated by the pressure of steam inside, so that it jarred in its socket, did he stir. Removing the kettle from the stove, he poured some of its contents into his tin mug. He set the kettle down by his right foot, where it would be handy for a refill.

The time taken to bring the kettle to a boil over a weak heat had been considerable. G was not in any hurry. It took him as long to drink the unsweetened contents of his mug. When he had drained the mug, he refilled it. By now the tea was cooling; he drank this second cup no faster than the first.

He rinsed out the mug in the bucket, which was now half full of water, and set it back in the cupboard beside the packet of tea and the condensed milk. Then he freshened his hands and face in the bucket. Several drops of water fell from the roof into the hair on the crown of his head as he did so.

Picking up the bucket by the handle, he carried it over to the door and opened the door. Some wind and rain blew in upon him. He grasped the bucket with two hands and threw its contents clear of the steps. Then he came in and slammed the door as tightly as possible into its socket. Sometimes on windy nights, an extra strong gust would blow the door wide on its hinges.

After replacing the bucket in its corner, G walked to the other end of the room and sat down on the edge of the couch. He undid the laces of his boots and was easing them off his feet when a slight difference in the opacity of the gloom made him look up and out of the nearest window.

From where he sat on this side of the room, he could see through the streaming panes to the blank black west corner of the house and the blur of the garden beyond it. When he stood up and padded to the window, he could see the small bow window of that room he had never entered, the room that was Mr Mary’s bedroom. A light had just come on in the room. As G looked, a figure came to the window.

The figure was darkened by the light behind it. The street lamp faintly lit it, but the blur on the two panes of glass interposed in the space between G and the figure made all detail impossible to distinguish. The figure reached up its arms in a wide gesture and drew the curtains together across the bow window. A slight chink of light remained at the top of the curtains, then this was adjusted. There was no further sign from the window of the house. G waited where he was for some while.

‘Another satisfied customer.’

He went back to his couch. He pulled off his trousers, set them carefully on the floor, and climbed on to the couch. Three blankets were lying on top of it. He worked his way under them, adjusted them round his stockinged feet, pillowed his head with one arm, and closed his eyes.

The bottom of the bucket was already covered by water leaking in from the roof, so that the metallic sound of dripping was replaced by the liquid sound of dripping. He lay listening to it for a certain passage of time.

When the bucket became full, the water started to pour down the sides of the bucket. It collected in a puddle about the bucket and commenced to trickle across the floor in a north-easterly direction. The wooden bungalow was built above the ground on ten low brick pillars which left a gap between the ground and the floor; some of these pillars had sunk slightly, so that the bungalow had a slight list towards the corner that stood nearest to the brick wall containing the brown side gate. This list was sufficient to give the water a flow. It pushed outward until it touched the front wall of the bungalow, and then ran along beside that wall until it reached the gap under the door. The water then flowed away under the door and escaped into the soil beside the bungalow step.

‘Several factors worth investigating there, when we get the instruments,’ Midlakemela said briskly.

‘The report is all very meticulous, but there’s much it leaves out,’ Domoladossa said. ‘Temperatures, inside and outside, for instance.’

‘And the boiling of G’s kettle. Probability A is an entirely new continuum – we can take nothing for granted. The laws of our universe may not obtain there.’

‘Quite. But what interests me is that the psychological make-ups of these people, G, Mary, and the rest may be alien to us. They may LOOK human, but they may not BE human.’

Midlakemela was less interested in that state of affairs. Instead, he glanced at his watches and said, ‘Time for me to go to see the Governor. Anything you want?’

‘No. I’ll get on with the report.’

Midlakemela walked down the great curving room, treading the marked path among the bamboo screens. His superior officer sank back at his desk, absorbed in the report. He leaned forward, skipping the movements of G’s life, until he reached a point on the morrow where G was emptying his bucket in the garden.

Chapter Three

Because the concrete slabs were already partially dry after the night’s rain, the thrown water left a clear ragged outline across them.

After G had observed this ragged outline, he stood gripping the empty bucket and looked to his right, across the garden. He saw the corner of the house round which the concrete path led; he saw the concrete path leading round the corner; he saw the various parts of the garden available to his vision, the privet hedges that in one place divided lawn from vegetable garden, that in another divided vegetable garden from fruit garden, that in another divided fruit garden from flower garden (though because the flower garden was in the main round the other side, the south-south-east side, of the house, it was rendered invisible to him by the bulk of the house), that in another divided the entire garden from the garden of another property owned by a man whose maternal grandfather had built a lighthouse in the southern hemisphere; he saw the asparagus bed that grew between the back of the house and the ancient brick coach house; he saw, perching on the roof of the ancient brick coach house, a homing pigeon whose name he had reason to suppose was X; he saw the tips of some of the fruit bushes, at present without leaf; he saw trees that would bear in their due season Victoria plums, Conference pears, and three sorts of apple: Cottenham Seedlings, Reinette du Canadas, and Court Pendu Plats; he saw the sundial, which was supported by an almost naked iron boy; he saw a linnet sitting on this sundial; he saw, by a slight further turn of his head towards the right, a line of beech trees that grew from the bottom and west corner of the garden parallel to the brick wall (that ran to join the street wall in which was the brown side gate) almost until they reached the point where the elder tree grew behind the wooden bungalow; he saw five varieties of birds sitting in the beech trees. Some of the birds sang. He saw no human beings in the garden.

When he swung his head quickly to the left again, he did not catch anyone looking at him from the window that belonged to Mr Mary’s bedroom.

Turning back, he deposited the empty bucket inside the door of the bungalow. He grasped the door by its metal doorknob. Exercising some force, he drew it shut. He walked forward until he got onto the concrete path at a point north of the ragged mark made by the water thrown from the bucket, and went to the side gate, which had been painted with a brown paint twenty-six months previously, when G had been in Mr Mary’s employ. G opened the gate and stepped into the road.

The road ran almost due north-west. It was wide and had pavements on both sides of it. Its surface was of a dark crumbly texture. On either side stood high brick walls, generally surmounted by embedded pieces of broken bottles, or railings painted green and ending in shapes like spears pointing to the sky; here and there were a private brewery, or shops at which tickets might be bought to enable one to travel to other towns in comfortable motor coaches, or large greenhouses shaped of glass and iron in which flowers and other things which had recently been growing might be bought; opposite the house was a café; at the far end of the road looking south-east were a cross of white marble and a group of lamp standards; there was also, behind the cross and the lamp standards, a low building with pillars along its front which was a railway station; from it came the sound of trains.

G waited beside a lamppost that stood on the pavement near the house and listened to the sound of trains. At the same time, he scanned the road to see if any cars were approaching from either direction. Because there were no cars, he crossed the road and went into the café.

Over the café ran a long board on which, in two sorts of letters, were printed the words ‘Stationer Family G. F. WATT Grocer Café Snacks Draper.’

G. F. Watt struggled with a machine that made noises as it sucked dirt off the floor; he was too busy to move out of G’s way. G squeezed between him and a large case that contained brightly coloured paper books and sat down at a small square table covered by a cloth printed with a design of red and white squares. G recognised the cloth. He put his hands on it as he sat down on a chair of wood constructed so that it could fold up into a small space when not in use. As G knew from a demonstration he had been given, the chair folded up efficiently, although it was not comfortable to sit on. G remembered he had once had an uncle who had sat on a chair which collapsed; G had not seen this happen, but the uncle had related the incident to him. The uncle had laughed when he related the incident.

Working methodically, G. F. Watt pushed the machine to the further end of the shop; there he switched it off and took it behind the counter, where he disappeared with it through a small door covered with an advertisement for a circus, leaving G alone in the café.

Through the café window, the front of the house could be seen; G surveyed it with care. The front door was reached by ascending two curved steps and was sheltered by a heavy stone porch, also curved, and supported by two stone pillars. To the left and the right of this door were windows. The window on the right – that is, the window nearest to the brown side gate – belonged to the sitting-room; the window to the left belonged to Mr Mary’s study. On the first floor were three windows; the one on the right, over the sitting-room, belonged to the room that was Mr Mary’s bedroom, as did the one in the middle over the front door, thus constituting the third window to this bedroom, the first one being the small bow window on the north-west side of the house visible from the wooden bungalow; the window on the left belonged to Mr Mary’s wife’s bedroom. It had red curtains. Above these windows on the first floor, which were each of the same size and smaller than the two windows on the ground floor, was the line of the roof. The angles of the roof were capped by carved stone, as was the roof tree, which bore a weathered stone urn at each end. The roof was covered by blue-grey slates. In the middle of it was a small dormer window; this window belonged to the attic; projecting from the woodwork immediately above this small window was a white flagpole no more than a metre in length, which bore no flag. G had never seen it bear a flag.

To the left of the house, a section of red-brick garden wall had been removed to make room for a garage. This garage was constructed in a style and of materials different from those of the house. Large slabs of asbestos strengthened at intervals formed three of its sides, the front being entirely formed by two doors of a light metal. Small sealed windows were set above the doors at the front and in a similar position at the rear (the rear one being concealed from G’s point of observation), the whole being capped by a corrugated metal roof.

Thus from G’s post at the table in the café he could observe seven windows belonging to Mr Mary’s property; equally, he could be observed where he sat from seven windows belonging to Mr Mary’s property. He saw no movement at any of the windows.

G. F. Watt now returned through the door bearing the advertisement for a circus. He had disposed of the cleaning machine in the back regions of his premises; he bore a tray which he carried round the counter and placed on top of the red and white squared tablecloth, pronouncing as he did so a tentative opening to a conversation.

‘Another strike in the car factory.’

‘They say the conditions are bad.’

‘Conditions have been worse.’

‘I’m sure you are quite right, that is the price we have to pay for progress – conditions have always been worse. It’s like in the fish shortages.’

‘How do you mean? This is a fine piece of poached haddock.’

‘In a fish shortage, the price of fish goes up.’

‘Taste your poached haddock.’

‘The coffee is good.’

‘The haddock?’

‘Excellent. Poached to a turn. Are you busy?’

‘I haven’t seen Mr Mary’s wife this morning.’

‘Perhaps it’s the strike?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s another strike in the car factory. They say conditions are bad.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Men hanging about the streets. She might not like to go out.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘Men hang about in the streets, you know.’

The two men both cast their gaze into the deserted road. G. F. Watt did not remove his until G had finished the meal; even then, he continued standing exactly where he was, close behind the chair that folded efficiently, so that when G rose to go he pushed the table forward to enable himself to rise. G moved to the door, opened it and went through onto the pavement. He looked up and down the road, found it empty of cars, and crossed it, heading for the brown side gate. The brown side gate was open, as he had left it.

G went through the gate and made for the wooden bungalow. When he reached it, he put his shoulder to the door of the wooden bungalow and pushed it open. The key lay inside on the floor, on the bare boards between the threshold of the door and the first of the fibre mats with green and orange stripes. G entered the bungalow without picking up the key.

Domoladossa thought, ‘We’ll have to decide. It may be possible to communicate with Probability A. We’ll have to decide – I’ll have to decide – whether these people have human responses.’

He glanced ahead at the report. He wanted to know about the rest of the occupants of the house. What did they do? What was their life about?

Chapter Four

As G closed his door behind him, S walked round the west corner of the house, treading on the blocks of concrete that formed the path to the brown side gate and avoiding the cracks between the blocks. He reached the brown side gate, opened it, went through it, and shut it behind him.

For a while he stood on the edge of the pavement, breathing deeply and looking to his left and to his right. A car passed him, moving slowly with a flat tyre, and disappeared down the road towards the white marble cross. S crossed the road.

He entered the café opposite the house. Nobody was there. Inside the door to the left was a small table covered with a red-and-white squared cloth which S recognised; there was a wooden chair beside the table, on which S sat; the seat of the wooden chair was not cold. S observed the house opposite. He noticed that the red curtain in one of the upper windows had not been drawn back tidily, so that it hung crookedly. He did not see anything move in any of the windows.

Behind the counter of the shop was a door covered by a poster advertising a circus that had once appeared locally; the circus had a Dozen Huge Untameable Lions performing in it. The door now opened. Through it came a man bearing a tray containing breakfast.

The man brought this tray round the counter and set the contents of the tray down upon the top of the table where S sat.

S looked down at a slice of haddock and adjusted it so that it lay in the middle of the white bone china plate. He spoke to the man who had brought the food.

‘No doubt it is a lovely morning in Tahiti this morning.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I said, No doubt it is a lovely morning in Tahiti today.’

‘I see. Another strike at the car factory.’

‘Fish looks nice.’

‘Conditions are bad there, they tell me.’

‘I compliment you on the taste also.’

‘A fine piece of poached haddock.’

‘Why are they striking?’

‘They tell me conditions are bad there.’

‘Higher wages, I suppose? Does she speak of it?’

‘I haven’t seen her this morning; she’s afraid of men hanging about in the streets, so I hear.’

‘What men? I don’t see any.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The street is empty.’

‘It’s early yet. Maybe about lunch time.’

‘Mm, I see what you mean. Still, it is nice fresh fish.’

The man made no immediate reply to this, standing behind the folding chair on which S sat, resting his hands on the back of it, and gazing out at the road through his shop window.

S also gazed out of the shop window as he sat eating. He gazed across the road at the house.

Because the house was directly opposite, only the front of it could be observed from the café. It presented a symmetrical picture, with the window to the left of the front door being balanced by the window to the right of the front door. The door itself was painted with a glossy green paint and had a crescent-shaped fanlight over it; it was reached by two curved steps and sheltered by a heavy stone porch, also curved, and supported by two stone pillars.

On the first floor there were three windows overlooking the street, the middle one being placed over the front door; and above this middle window was a small dormer window set in the roof with a small flagstaff protruding above it. The flagstaff bore no flag.

The dormer window, S knew, belonged to an attic room. Of the three windows below, the one on the left belonged to Mr Mary’s wife’s bedroom, while the other two belonged to Mr Mary’s bedroom. On the ground floor, the window to the left of the front door belonged to Mr Mary’s study; the one on the right belonged to the sitting-room.

In none of these windows was there any movement.

‘Not much doing over there this morning.’

To the south-east of the house, facing onto the road, was a garage, separated from the house only by a couple of metres. Although obviously built at a more recent date than the house, it presented some of the aspects of shabbiness. It was constructed of slabs of asbestos and pillars of reinforced concrete, apparently of a prefabricated pattern. Two double doors of a light metal occupied all the front wall of the garage. Above these doors, set under the peak of the roof, was a small square sealed window, its area of glass divided into four by a pair of crossed bars; from one of these small squares, the glass was missing. There was no movement visible through the small sealed window. The garage was covered by a corrugated metal roof.

‘I hear that in a fish shortage the price of fish goes up.’

‘People aren’t as honest as they used to be. But I enjoyed the haddock.’

‘Nice piece of poached haddock, that.’

S pushed the small table forward to that he could get up. He walked round a large case that contained brightly coloured paper books, opened the door, and walked out onto the pavement. A man was hurrying along the pavement wearing a woollen scarf about his neck and carrying a bicycle over his left shoulder; the bicycle had a green hooter and two flat tyres. He did not speak to S. S waited till he had disappeared and then crossed the road, heading for the brown side gate. He opened it and walked in.

Shutting the gate behind him, he drew the bolt into position and commenced to walk along the concrete path, taking care not to tread on the cracks between the concrete blocks. On his left hand was the house, to which he drew nearer as the path led him towards its west corner. On his right was a wooden bungalow; he regarded it from the corner of his right eye, and observed a small movement through the window to the left of the door. As he directed his gaze straight ahead again, his vision took in the image of a black and white cat bounding away from him in a westerly direction, running past a sundial supported by an iron boy. The cat darted through a gap in a privet fence dividing grass from vegetable garden, and was hidden among cabbages. A pigeon sometimes referred to as X rose heavily from the other side of the cabbage patch, circled cumbrously twice, and flew with a clatter of wings towards the old brick building behind the house.

S stepped over a ragged damp patch that spread over the path and continued straight until he reached the west corner of the house, turning it without pause, though at a slower rate.

In the middle of the rear or south-west face of the house was set the back door; at this door the concrete path terminated. S pursued it to within two metres of this terminal point and then turned right, along a path that had been worn in a stretch of grass. The path was muddy from the night’s rain. A sparrow which sat upon it flew off it and perched on a privet hedge as S approached. The path led to a gravel walk heading directly away from the house, and along this S walked. He now had the back of the house directly at his back; on his right hand was a privet hedge that bordered the walk; on his left hand lay three long mounds with furrows between them; these were the asparagus beds; underfoot was the gravel walk, in which, because the gravel was sparse and much trodden in to the earth, small weeds such as groundsel grew, bearing little flowers even at this time of year.

Both furrows and gravel walk led to a two-storey brick building. The brick had turned to a gentle orange with age; much of it was concealed by ivy which grew in several places from the ground up to the guttering. In the front of the building, old grey timbers ran among the brick. The lower half of this façade was mainly timber, and consisted of two heavy doors, the hinges of which had collapsed, letting the bottoms of the doors sink into the gravelly earth. In the upper halves of these doors were the frameworks for a double row of square panes of windows, but most of the panes had been broken and replaced by sheets of wood or cardboard or pieces of sacking; even the panes that remained were curtained by the cobwebs of many generations of spiders. The wood of these doors had attained a texture like elephant hide where weather had wrinkled and pitted it.

Above the old doors, the brickwork began again and continued up to the eaves, interrupted only by a round and dusty window divided into nine panes, the central one of which was square. At the peak of the brickwork, under the V of the roof, a pattern of eight holes was set, their bases streaked with dirt. In one of these holes sat a homing pigeon called X; when it saw S approaching, it fluttered upwards with heavy strokes of its wings and landed on the tiling of the roof.

In one of the old doors, the right hand one, was a smaller door, no more than one and a half metres high. Having reached the old brick building, S put his hand to the catch of this small door and pushed it open. Before entering the aperture, he paused and glanced over his shoulder.

The back of the house was some thirty-five metres away; it stood on a slightly higher level than did the old brick building, for the gravel walk leading to the latter had sloped down a dip in the ground. From this elevation, five windows were visible, excluding the small pane of bottle glass in the centre of the back door. One of these windows was open; this was the downstairs window on the left of the back door; it was the kitchen window, and through it the head of Mr Mary’s wife could be discerned bowed over some business at the sink.

Showing signs of hurry, S bent his back and entered the brick building through the small aperture, pulling the door closed after him and securing it on the inside by a loop of cord attached to the door, which he draped over a nail knocked part way into the ancient timber of the larger door in which the small one was set.

As he read, Domoladossa felt a sense of privilege. A week ago, he and all his millions of fellow men were living in a world of apparent uni-probability. Then this other continuum manifested itself. Who knew, there could be a myriad different probability worlds? But he was one of the first to read the report on Probability A.

He experienced danger as he read. This house, and the outhouse S was entering – they were so banal that you’d never look at them twice in ordinary life. But did Probability A contain ordinary life? Were the very molecules of the bricks different? Or would the fact of their all being the same make the whole business even more miraculous?

And this was just Probability A. A myriad probabilities … The Gods had been not merely prodigal but mad.

A photograph of his wife stood on Domoladossa’s desk. He gazed at it tenderly. There would be continua where they had never met, of course … Then he returned to the report.

Chapter Five

The inside of the old brick building was large enough to house a private carriage such as prosperous people drove in the days before automobiles were invented. The floor space was partly filled by a bench along the right-hand wall; several old oil drums that stood along the rear wall; a motor-driven lawn mower and a miscellany of garden tools that stood or leaned along the left-hand wall; and a number of boxes, broken pieces of furniture, a tin trunk with the initials ‘H.S.M.’ stencilled large upon it, a rusty bird cage, a garden roller, a kitchen mangle with a bicycle leaning against it with flat tyres, a pile of sacks, a petrol can, several lengths of copper piping, and various other oddments, all lying about the floor, chiefly at the rear or south-west end of the brick building.

Also at that end of the building was a solid wooden structure of steps leading up to the room above. S advanced to this structure and ascended the steps, placing his feet with care as well as speed, for the treads had been unevenly hollowed in the middle.

As he ascended, his head, and consequently his eyes, came level with and then rose above the floor of the upper room, a rough, splintery, and uneven floor of old planks which was streaked here and there in no particular pattern with areas of smoothness – round a knot in the wood, or along the side of a board raised slightly higher than its neighbours; these smooth parts were of a lighter yellow tone than the predominant rough areas of wood.

Walking indiscriminately over these areas, S proceeded to the front of the room in eight and a half paces, stopped, and knelt. He could now see out of the round window that was divided into nine sections. Gazing through one of these sections, S stretched out his right hand to a point where the brickwork to the right of the round window curled into a small niche; putting his hand into the niche, S brought out a telescope.

This instrument was familiar to him. He had bought it about fifteen months ago, before Mr Mary had dismissed him, from an antique dealer whose nose was peppered with small white pimples no bigger than freckles. When closed, the telescope measured some fifteen centimetres in length; it was bound in worn leather. S pulled one end of it, revealing three brass tubes which extended out of each other. On the barrel of the smallest tube, the legend 22X was engraved, signifying that the telescope was capable of magnifying objects glimpsed through it twenty-two times. At the top of the smallest tube was the eyepiece, which S now raised to his right eye. Directing the telescope to point towards the house, he closed his left eye and stared with the other through the barrel of the telescope.

He was now viewing the world through five thicknesses of glass, four consisting of the lenses in his telescope and one of the small square panels of glass that formed the centre of the nine glass segments together comprising the round window. These layers of glass lent their slight coloration to the view.

The little circle of his vision was surrounded by black. He could not examine much of the view at one time.

He extended the telescope further. A red mist swam before his staring eye. He closed the telescope slightly. The red mist acquired texture and horizontal and vertical markings. S’s circle of vision slid over the rear wall of the house; it descended; it hovered for a moment on the back door and discerned the pane of green bottle glass that served the back door as a small window; and then it moved to the left, seeing brickwork again before it alighted on the kitchen window.

This window was different from the others of the house. The other windows were wooden framed; this was a window with metal frames. The metal frame was longer than it was high and supported three sub-sections, each of which carried six panes of glass; of these three sub-sections, the middle one was a fixture, but the two on either side of it opened, and had perforated metal bars to secure them when they were open. The window on the right was open at the present, and secured on the third perforation of its metal bar.

The circle of S’s vision slid over the window, came back, and settled on its target. The blackness now eclipsed everything but a tiny portion of brickwork, a sliver of metal frame, part of the open window viewed obliquely because it projected towards the watcher, and the small section of the kitchen framed within this opening.

Within the small section of the kitchen framed in the opening, a proportion of the figure of Mr Mary’s wife was visible. Tinted slightly by the layers of glass interposed between her and the watcher’s eye, she exposed to view, covered by a blue cardigan, something more than half her body from a line drawn by the window sill about ten centimetres above her waist: of her trunk, her left breast and shoulder were clearly visible, covered by the blue cardigan, which in turn was partially covered by an apron, two strings of which ran over the shoulders; possibly because this apron had faded, or because its pattern was small and confused, its colour registered only as a blur through the telescope.

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