Report on Probability A

by Brian W Aldiss

  Turning away from the round window, S walked to the other end of the room, avoiding the three low cross-beams and moving between the black iron stove and the hammock. Set in the floor at the other end of the room was a trapdoor made of the same sort of wood as the floor, though less worn than the floor. S lifted this trapdoor and climbed down the steps that were revealed beneath it. He emerged into a dim and dusty room, the cobbled floor of which was encumbered by a variety of objects. As S passed a work bench on his left, he passed on his right a stack of old timber, a lawn mower, a number of boxes of varying shapes and sizes, some broken pieces of furniture, including an old wash-hand stand with a cracked marble top, a tin trunk with a domed lid on which had been painted the initials H.S.M., a garden roller, a large kitchen mangle of an obsolete variety, a rusty bird cage, and various other objects, including a row of garden tools standing or leaning against the wall. S advanced to two old timber doors that formed the north-east side of the old building; they had slumped on their hinges, so that their lower edges touched the ground; some of their panels had shrunk, so that chinks of light could filter through horizontal and vertical cracks.

  In the left hand of these two doors was set a smaller door, which S now opened slightly. Thrusting his head forward, he peered out towards the south-east corner of the building, close to which ran the course of a dirt path leading from further up the garden to a rubbish tip set behind trees. At that point grew a thin and gnarled trunk, rising from the ground to branch out higher up into a voluminous ivy partly covering that side of the old building. Close to the gnarled trunk stood a rusty storm lantern.

  Opening the small door further, S stepped through it, putting his feet on the ground and moving towards the storm lantern; as he went, he looked across his left shoulder up at the house. In the dining-room window, he saw a movement. Someone was watching him from behind the dining-room curtains.

  Without reaching the lantern, S turned round and moved back to the small door; he climbed through it without hesitation and moved back through the dismal coach house with its forsaken objects grouped mainly on his left hand. Against the rear wall, a sturdy wooden staircase led to the room above. S ran up the stairs, climbed into the room, and let down a trapdoor over the stair well. Ducking his head, he moved forward again, avoiding three low beams that ran across the space from wall to wall, passing on his left an old stove bearing on its lid an inscription wrought from the iron that read Stentorian 1888 (these words almost encircled the lid) and on his right a hammock secured from two of the low beams.

  A round window, crossed by two horizontal and two vertical bars so as to divide it into nine panes, the centre pane of which was square, was set in the front wall of the building. Dropping down onto his knees, S pressed against the brickwork to the right of the round window. At that point, a recess gave into the wall; plunging his hand into the recess, S drew from it a folded telescope some fifteen centimetres long and bound in leather. The leather was worn and soft. Pulling at this telescope with both hands, S extended it until three brass sections appeared. In the smallest section was an eyepiece. Placing the telescope so that it pointed unobtrusively out of one of the small side panes of glass, S applied his right eye to the eyepiece.

  Moving his left hand, which held the telescope by the leather binding, S trained the telescope’s circle of vision onto the house. Its brickwork appeared, red and fuzzy. After a slight pressure on the end of the instrument, the fuzziness dissolved into a pattern of oblong bricks surrounded by broken vertical and continuous horizontal lines of concrete. The circle of vision moved across the pattern until from the darkness outside it emerged the long windows of the dining-room.

  Inside the dining-room could be seen the corner of a table spread with a white cloth; objects could be distinguished lying on the cloth. A good deal of light filled the dining-room, flowing into it not only from this window but from a second window round the corner on the southeast side of the house. By this light it was possible to distinguish that the long drapes hanging on either side of the two windows which could be opened onto the garden were of a green colour. It could also be distinguished that from behind the left of the two drapes protruded, at the lower part, a shoe and a section of leg clad in some dark suiting, and at the middle part, a shoulder, clothed in the same dark suiting, and, possibly, murkily, just above the shoulder, the left side of a face. The circle of vision became unsteady. In consequence, definition of detail became more difficult, but it seemed as if fingers—something of the lightness of flesh—clutched at the drape on a level with a protruding shoulder.

  The circle of vision took on a flutter, so that as it travelled involuntarily in a small arc it also encompassed brief glimpses of the bathroom window above, and of the grass below the long dining-room window. The left-hand drape inside the window did not move.

  Removing the telescope from his eye, S steadied his left arm by resting the elbow on the brick ledge beneath the round window and by pressing the wrist against the brick at the side of the window. He applied his eye once more to the eyepiece of the optical instrument, in time to catch a movement in the dining-room window. The left-hand drape had been released. It settled back into position. No other movement could be seen in the room.

  S removed the telescope from his right eye and placed it on the flooring directly under the round window, almost touching the wall.

  “Oh, Vi, if you’ve been telling him.…”

  S rose to his feet. He patted his knees, then sank until he was on them. Ensuring that his body was not exposed to the window, he looked out of one of the side panes towards the house.

  “I don’t know what I’d do …”

  Blue sky interspersed with cloud was behind the house. The roof of the house was covered with grey-blue slates, while the angles of the roof were capped by lines of stone. The roof tree was capped by a similar line of stone and was terminated at each end by an ornamental stone urn that stood out against the sky. A wide chimney stack containing six tubby pottery chimneys rose from this side of the roof. Below the line of the roof ran a rain gutter. At the two visible corners of the house, drainpipes met this guttering and ran down straight to the ground. The brickwork of the rear of the house was interspersed by five windows and a door. Three of these windows were on the first floor, the right-hand window belonging to a bathroom that possessed a second window round the corner on the south-east wall of the house. Beneath the visible bathroom window was a window comprising two long doors which could be opened by anyone inside the room, to give them access to the garden. On either side of this long window hung long curtains; the curtains did not move. Neither the curtain on the left nor the curtain on the right of the long window stirred, nor could any movement, nor any figure or part of a figure be discerned in the room. The room was a dining-room; the part of it visible to the watcher seemed to be empty. Nothing animate appeared in it. The two long glass doors were divided in all into sixteen panes; through none of the panes could any person or any part of any person be detected.

  The other window set in the lower storey of the house belonged to the kitchen. Unlike the other windows, it had a steel frame, divided into three sections. The two outer sections were open. Within the kitchen, a predominantly white figure could be seen moving about.

  “I don’t know what I’d do.”

  The white figure was not always visible. Most of the time she was poorly visible at the back of the kitchen, when her presence was more inferred than seen; at other times she moved to a part of the kitchen where she could not be observed at all. Once she bent down so that she could not be seen in a part of the room where she was normally visible.

  S blinked his eyes.

  His legs were doubled under him, so that he sat on the tawny planking with the following parts of his anatomy touching it: some of his right buttock, the outer side of his right thigh, his right knee, the outer side of his right calf, his right ankle, and his right foot, while his left leg copied the attitude of his right one, overlapping it
so that from the knee down it also touched the planking and the tip of the left shoe pressed against the heel of the right shoe. The shoes were dusty. His right shoulder and a part of the right-hand side of his body pressed against the brickwork beside the round window.

  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.”

  “SHE 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.”