Report on Probability A (11 page)

He stared into the corner ahead of him, where the sloping beams of the roof met the front wall of the old building. There, on the front wall, was hung some wallpaper with a pattern of bunches of flowers separated from each other by a pattern of trellis. The corner of the paper nearest the beams had peeled away from the wall and hung curling and discoloured over the rest of the paper. A spider worked its way over one of the discoloured bunches of flowers.

Turning his head away, S looked out of the round window. Running from a point somewhere below the window or slightly to its left was a gravel walk which went towards the house; this walk was boarded with a privet hedge. The privet was not uniformly in good condition all the way along the walk; at one place, some metres from the old brick building, the bushes which comprised it became straggling. Behind the straggling part was a cat covered with black and white fur. It crouched with its head low to the ground and its ear back on its head; its rump, which was raised higher than its head, supported a tail which twitched first to the right and then to the left in slow deliberate movements. Its eyes were fixed on a point roughly a metre and a quarter further down the walk, and thus nearer to the old brick building than the cat. At this point was a pigeon, moving with a waddle in an erratic circle, pecking at the ground with its beak. Its legs and feet were red; round one of its legs it wore a ring of a metal resembling pewter. Its body was covered with white and grey feathers.

In one of the windows of the house, a movement could be detected. The woman clad mainly in white had left the kitchen. Her form now appeared through the long window of the dining-room. She moved about the table. She then disappeared, but later became visible once more through the left-hand open section of the kitchen window.

It could be seen that a second person was in the kitchen, not moving, and seeming to rest partially against the table in the middle of the room. The upper half only of this person was visible; it was covered in a blue garment that appeared to be a cardigan. The person had hair partly concealing her face as she turned towards the woman clad in white, who was active in one corner of the kitchen. The woman in the blue garment moved to the other side of the table, the side nearer the window, and leant with her back against the sink with her hands behind her back touching one another.

Still directing his gaze through the round window, S leant his body back from the brickwork. His right arm had been covering a niche in the brickwork. He brought up his left hand and felt with it into this niche. When his fingers encountered the brickwork at the back of the niche, he looked away from the window into the niche. The niche was empty. On the floor just below the round window, resting with its four sections extended, was a brass telescope. S picked it up and directed it towards the window. As he did so, he glanced into a part of the garden near at hand and saw that a fat pigeon waddled on the gravel walk, its head and neck thrusting forward with every step it took. Behind it, partly concealed behind a stretch of privet hedge, was a black and white cat, crouching with its skull low on its front paws and its ears flat against its skull.

Placing the eyepiece of the telescope to his eye, S directed it up the garden to survey the kitchen window. Through the middle panel of the window could be seen a woman's head; the woman was looking away from the window into the room. Between her head and the eye of the watcher were interposed the glass of the kitchen window, the glass of the round window in the old brick building that had once housed a gentleman's private coach, and the four lenses of the telescope. Her hair curled upwards from her neck, was combed upwards, and secured low on the back of her head with an ornamental comb. Her right hand had been removed from behind her back; she waved it gently, bent at the elbow, with the fingers pointing upwards and untensed. Beside the table, near to her and visible through the open right-hand side of the window, was a plump woman in a white apron. The plump woman had her hands resting on her hips. It could be seen that occasionally her lips moved.

The two women began to alter their positions. Their movements could be seen in the circle of vision. The woman in a white apron went to the left side of the kitchen and bent down. When she straightened, she was seen to bear a large dish in her two hands. She placed this on the table and then again bent down on the left side of the room. The other woman moved to the table bearing a tray. She put the tray on the table. She picked up the large dish and placed it on the tray. On the large dish, golden brown objects could be seen. The woman with the tawny hair picked up the tray and turned with it, moving until she was hidden by the frame of the window and the brickwork adjoining.

The circle of vision moved to the right, gliding over the brickwork of the house, leaving the kitchen window behind in the darkness beyond the circle. It passed across a door in which gleamed a small square of green glass, across more brickwork, and reached a long window, the sides of which were bordered inside by curtains of a green material; these curtains did not move.

As the circle of vision settled, the woman with tawny hair came into view, bearing before her a plate on a tray. She went to a corner of the room, where her movements were lost, turned, and placed the plate on the table. She moved out of sight. Almost at once, a plump woman came into view bearing a tray; on the tray, dishes could be distinguished. They became lost to view as the plump woman moved to a corner of the room. She turned and distributed the dishes on the table before her. From the edge of the table hung a white cloth. At the end of the table nearest to the window, a chair was placed; its legs curled slightly, as did its back. At the other end of the table, the watcher could just distinguish part of the back of another chair rising above the table top.

When the woman had distributed the dishes, she turned again to the corner of the room at which she had previously busied herself. She took two trays into her hands and left the room.

A man dressed in dark suiting came into view. The woman with the tawny hair swept up into a curve on the back of her head followed him. The man came towards the window. As he did so, he shot a glance out of the window and down the garden. For an appreciable moment of time, he appeared to be looking up the telescope at the eye of the watcher. The circle of vision moved away, swimming over the brickwork and a speeding stretch of garden, and then returning. Six layers of glass were interposed between the watcher in the old building and the man in the dark suiting.

The man in the dark suiting, without pausing at the long window, took hold of the back of the chair near the window, pulled it towards him, and sat down upon it, moving it so that he sat up to the table. The woman followed his example, seating herself at the other end of the table. The table was so placed that the man's head obscured the woman's face. The man had his back to the window. The man had a long dark back. His two hands picked up articles from the table. His elbows began to move.

S put down the telescope without closing it, laying it under the round window on the flooring. He pinched his nose between his eyes, where the bridge was narrowest. He blinked his eyes and looked round the side of the round window, through the glass and up to the house. Through the kitchen window, he could see that the plump woman sat at the table behind the open window. She no longer wore the white apron; as far as could be seen, she wore a grey dress. She leaned over the table. She went through the motions of eating.

“They are eating a meal in the house,” the Governor said
.

“Exactly,” Domoladossa said. “An ordinary meal, an everyday occurrence. Yet who knows if their intestinal flora are as ours? Who can say if the meat they enjoy—veal, isn't it?—would not poison us?”

“There's so much we don't know,” agreed the Governor. “Meanwhile, all we can do is scrutinize their every movement.”

“If we could get our data more directly,” Midlakemela said. “If we could only penetrate inside Mr. Mary's house.”

“S
HE
holds the key to the mystery. I feel it in my bones,” Domoladossa said, reverting to his old hobby horse
.

He was being scrutinized by two Distinguishers on a hillside. They, in turn, were being watched by a group of men in a New York building
.

Joe Growleth had been working in the room for five hours and was a little weary. Turning to Congressman Sadlier, he said, “Well, that's how it seems to be. Our robot fly has materialized into a world where it so happens that the first group of inhabitants we come across is studying another world they have discovered
—
a world in which the inhabitants they watch are studying a report they have obtained from another world.”

“I'd say we've run into some kind of mental reflection-distortion effect—hitherto unknown, as they say in the Sunday supplements.”

“Maybe so. Or maybe the key to it all lies in that report. Hey!
—
Suppose that report comes from the real world! Suppose the guys reading it, and the guys on the hillside watching them, and us watching
THEM,
are
FALSE
worlds, phase echoes.… Makes your flesh creep, doesn't it?”

The Congressman said, “All we are after is facts. We don't have to decide what reality is, thank God!”

Cloud began to thicken over the house. The sun was obscured. Leaves blew across the asparagus bed; some rolled over the tops of the three mounds. To the left of the asparagus bed, a fat pigeon flapped and clattered its wings and rose to perch on a low privet hedge that fringed a gravel walk. Further away from the watcher, a black and white cat rose from behind a stem of privet and stalked away towards the house. Its tail was black, with a white tip at the end of it. The tail was carried high; the white tip twitched gently as the cat walked away. The pigeon rose from the privet hedge to fly awkwardly into an apple tree.

5

The room above the old coach house had for its ceiling an inverted V of dark beams which supported old tiles of a mellow orange. Between the beams were spiders' webs; many of the webs were grey with dust. At the far end of the room was a small square window only a few centimetres above the level of the floor. The room was divided into three by supporting cross-beams of dark wood. The light in the room was dim. Between the two crossbeams nearest to S hung a hammock, made of canvas and suspended by rope. Over the sides of this hammock hung some sacks stitched together with garden twine, the ends of one or more blankets, and part of the face of a toy bear. The bear's nose was indicated with black wool stitched in a square over the beige material of the head. The bear had no mouth. It had one amber eye, which seemed to look down at S.

S rose to his feet and laid the bear so that it did not protrude over the side of the hammock. To do this, he reached over the first of the low cross-beams from which the hammock was suspended. A picture hung on S's side of the beam. His shirt caught the corner of the picture frame, setting it swinging. S stepped back and steadied it.

The picture was in black and white, though behind the glass both the black of the print and the white of the paper were faded. The picture showed a man and a woman touching each other, the man dressed in the garb of a shepherd, the woman in some sort of smock, worn over a skirt; it was not certain that she was not partially undressed. The shepherd was clearly neglecting his sheep, which had begun to stray into a field of corn, to secure the attention of the girl. It was difficult to understand from the picture whether his efforts to interest her were meeting with success, for her look could be read either as scornful or as one of sly desire.

The shepherd was holding out for her inspection a moth of a certain species which he had caught. The girl was looking away from this moth towards him. It was impossible to determine whether he would stand a better chance of winning the girl's complaisance (if that was what he sought) by abandoning his attempt to interest her in the moth, perhaps by letting it fly away, and concentrating on less indirect attempts at persuasion, such as stroking her tawny hair and paying her compliments, or by continuing to exhibit the captive moth, offering at the same time a sort of lecture on natural history which might win the girl's confidence and be turned later to good effect as it led to more intimate conversation.

The situation was possibly as challenging for the shepherd to resolve as it was for the onlooker. If the girl was married to the shepherd's employer, the situation might be even more difficult. For it was possible that under her heavy lids she was looking at him in a way which he was at liberty to misinterpret as encouraging; he might then run his hands through that tawny hair, so soft about the nape of the neck; he might even attempt—half succeed!—to kiss that plump underlip; and she might then go to her husband and reveal what had taken place, thus involving the shepherd in a number of troubles; or, once in that difficult position, he might be unsure whether it had been brought about because the girl had told her husband voluntarily, or whether, in his plodding way, the husband had forced a confession from her. He might be dismissed from his post, to hover for ever after like a troubled spirit about the scene and cause of the disaster.

“This is another discussion of the painting of Holman Hunt's!” exclaimed the Suppressor of the Archives, who was acting as the senior juryman of the ten.

He walked softly across the darkened room and laid his hand on the shoulder of the tranced woman, who immediately ceased to deliver her report. As her sing-song voice died, the jurymen seemed to come alive. One of them, whose official role was Impaler of Distortions, touched his lamp and said, “Since, it seems to me, this Holman Hunt painting has fully as much substance as the world in which the Wandering Virgin now finds herself, I took the liberty to have my servant Imago bring us a facsimile of the work in question. Here it is now. Imago!”