Report on Probability A

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Unbelievable, yes,” Domoladossa said. “And yet curiously credible. If only we could glimpse their motives.… You notice all three of the watchers seem to take interest in Mrs. Mary. I still say she’s the key to the whole thing.”

  “It’s all oddly innocent,” Midlakemela said.

  “I find it all damned SINISTER,” the Governor said.

  “Oh well, I must go for lunch,” Domoladossa said. “I’m late already, and it’s veal today.”

  Part Three

  The House and The Watchers

  1

  Joe Growleth got back from lunch refreshed. He had come to a firm conclusion: their robot fly had not penetrated another dimension or anything like that. It had entered into some weird kind of mental communication.

  This conclusion was eminently satisfying to Joe. The math behind the actuality of the fly was complex, and it could be that here at last was the desired bridge between the mental and the physical. He went back cheerfully into the stale room and looked up at the big screen.

  Charlock and Corless were strolling back up the hillside from the lodge. Both wore raincoats, for cloud was closing in and a light drizzle had started. They were smiling and obviously in complete accord.

  “We’re agreed then,” Charlock said. “We have here a local flaw in the structure of the universe. It must clearly be infinitesimal, otherwise the world would be disrupted. So, through this freak, we are permitted to see into a subatomic world—and find it startlingly like our own!”

  “Just a question of scale,” Corless said. “And who knows if we ourselves.…” He paused. Some thoughts were too tremendous for utterance.

  The two men halted before the apparition in the air. They looked through the framed photograph on the desk in time to see Domoladossa returning cheerfully from lunch.

  Domoladossa had come to a conclusion over lunch. Probability World A held the clue to other probabilities beyond that. Once they had solved the riddle of its nature, it might be possible to visit there in person. He sat down and took up the report, curious to find what C was doing, lurking above the garage.

  Even in the centre of the loft, under the highest line of roof, it was too low for C to walk entirely upright. He hunched his shoulders and proceeded to the front of the loft, where a small window had been set into the sheet of asbestos. The window was square, with sides measuring half a metre. Two crossed bars divided it into four square panes. Three of these panes were covered with dirt on the outside. The lower left-hand pane had been broken and entirely removed. The window was not designed to open. The sill of the window was about two thirds of a metre above the floor; C went and squatted by the window, in such a way that his eyes looked over the edge of the sill and through the window.

  In his right hand he held a slice of cake from which he took large bites.

  He stared through the window at a road. The road ran south-east. On the other side of it was a wide pavement; a tall man wearing black overalls and a grey felt hat passed along the pavement, followed at some distance by two men in blue carrying a stretcher on which lay a bicycle with two flat tires; the frame of the bicycle was covered with blood. The surface of the road was of a dark crumbling texture. Cars passed along it, four of them bearing black crêpe ribbons tied to their radiators.

  The road was bounded chiefly by high brick walls, generally surmounted by pieces of broken bottle embedded in concrete, or by railings sharply pointed, so that they stood like spears pointing towards the clouds. Here and there was a greenhouse at which flowers could be bought, or a private brewery, or a clinic at which the poor people might have their pets killed free of charge, or a café. A café stood almost opposite the unopenable window of the garage.

  This café had two long shop windows, one on either side of a recessed door. Outside the café were stands bearing various vegetables, oranges, bales of material, and newspapers. Over the café was a board bearing the words “Stationer Family G. F. WATT Grocer Café Snacks Draper.” Through the window could be seen a variety of goods. G. F. Watt could also be seen, standing inside one of the windows with his arms folded, looking out across the road.

  C stuffed the last piece of the slice of cake into his mouth and rubbed his fingers of the right hand against the fingers of the left hand.

  “She’s not so bad, old Violet.”

  Lying below the window on the floor of the loft was a home-made instrument. It was constructed of six cylindrical tins each some ten centimetres high. The top of each tin had been pushed into the tin above it to form a tube some forty-four metres long. In the bottom and the top tin, holes had been created, so that small tabs of metal pointed inwards, holding in place two mirrors, one at the top and one at the bottom of the tube. These pieces of mirror were set at angles of forty-five degrees to the axis of the tube. In the sides of the top and bottom tins facing the two mirrors, circular openings had been cut. Anyone looking into the bottom of these circular openings could see reflected in the bottom mirror whatever was reflected in the top mirror. The instrument was a home-made periscope.

  C picked up the home-made periscope and thrust one end through the bottom left-hand corner of the window. He sat on the left side of the window, with his stockinged right foot under his buttocks. He revolved the tin bottom section of his periscope in one direction while, with his other hand, revolving the rest of the periscope tube in an opposite direction. At a certain point, he stopped this motion, and stared into the small mirror set in the bottom of the tube. Through it, he could see the reflection in the top mirror of a small stretch of street otherwise inaccessible to his eyesight.

  The arrangement of mirrors showed the east corner of the house, the side nearest to the asbestos garage, where it was joined by a wall facing the street. In the corner where the top of the wall, capped by rounded cement in which pieces of broken glass had been embedded, met the bricks of the house, a tuft of grass grew. Taking in this tuft of grass, the arrangement of mirrors moved slightly, so that it gave C an oblique view of the front of the house and of the wall beyond the house.

  So oblique was this view that it needed long study before it could be interpreted.

  Seen from this angle and through an arrangement of mirrors that permitted a glimpse of only part of it at once, the front of the house was distorted into a thin diamond shape, the only features of it immediately distinguishable being a curved stone porch supported by two stone pillars, and a pair of stone steps, on the two ends of which rested the bases of the pillars.

  Aslant from this porch ran the pavement that passed the house. As the watcher watched, a man passed along the pavement, carrying a deflated inner tube of a bicycle tire in his bare hands. The arrangement of mirrors did not swing to follow him, so that his feet and legs were first visible, then the rest of his body and his face, the eyebrows of which had been removed, as he came level with the front door; his feet and legs began to disappear into the foreground of the reflection almost at once; soon most of the bicycle tube had also gone, but there then seemed to be an interval when the man walked for some paces before the upper part of his body dropped below the range of the periscope.

  When the man carrying the bicycle tube had gone, the pavement remained empty.

  On one point along the steep perspective of brick visible in the arrangement of mirrors was the appearance of a niche which, to a skilled observer, could be interpreted as the position of a brown side gate set in the wall on the far side of the house. From this niche appeared the point of a rolled umbrella, followed immediately by a rolled umbrella and a plump woman wearing a kidney-coloured coat and a small hat and carrying a basket. Her image, distorted by a flaw in one of the mirrors, represented her as a tall thin woman.

  She turned to face in a south-easterly direction and walked in that direction along the pavement, so that she was inadverently approaching the periscope. The periscope moved to keep her in range as well as it could.

  The thin-looking plump woman turned her eyes towards the opposite side of the road whe
re stood a café. She slightly raised her umbrella, as if in response to a salutation from that direction.

  “What would George say if he could see you carrying on with old Watt? He’d lock you up, that’s what he’d do, my ducks!”

  In the arrangement of mirrors, the woman became curiously foreshortened as she drew nearer. Her legs disappeared, and with them all but the moving toes of the ankle boots in which her feet were enclosed. At the same time, her bosom and stomach took an undue prominence.

  As she progressed, the image of her face became eclipsed by forehead, hair, and hat, on which drooped imitation flowers, nodding like pink, blue, and yellow snowdrops. Behind her head a knot of hair worked into a bun became visible. As she moved, so C moved the longer section of the periscope to keep her in sight.

  The top of the head with its small hat was large now. The yellowy white hair combed into the bun was visible. The back of the liver-coloured coat became visible, more and more, until heels and then stockinged legs were also noticeable under it. Now the whole length of the plump woman was contained in the arrangement of mirrors; she was retreating down the road, carrying an umbrella in one hand and a shopping basket in the other. The right half of her body was distorted by a flaw in the glass. Over her shoulder as she became smaller with distance could be glimpsed a distant white cross with, beyond it, a row of columns that ran along a façade of the railway station.

  “You see, it’s not going to rain, for all your worrying.”

  The periscope was withdrawn from the bottom left-hand corner of the small window. It was placed below the window.

  C turned away from the window and sat with his back to it. He set his stockinged feet in front of his buttocks so that his knees were almost on a level with his face; he rested his arms on top of the knees and his chin on top of the arms.

  The distance between him and the square window at the back of the garage, which looked over the garden of the house, was not more than five and a half metres. To his left, this distance was occupied by a sharp-prowed canoe painted a light blue. The name Flier was painted in white letters on the side of the canoe. Rests made of a light wood supported the canoe in an upright position. Inside the canoe, the seats had been removed and the space was filled with a mixture of wood shavings and blankets covered by a small tarpaulin. The tarpaulin was black; small cracks ran all over it. One end of the tarpaulin was draped over the far side of the canoe, where two paddles lay in dust. The dust was thick. It became less thick in the centre of the floor, but gathered again on the other side. The floor was made of narrow planks, and divided into two slightly differing parts. The first two metres of floor ran from under the front window to a crack across the width of the loft. Beyond this crack, the rest of the planks to the back of the garage were removable in joined groups of four, so that this end of the floor could be temporarily removed to transfer any large objects such as canoes from the body of the garage to the loft.

  Along the other side of the loft, the right side as C sat, lay a series of cardboard boxes bearing the names of various products, soap, cornflakes, and baked beans, and containing C’s possessions. Against one of the boxes lay a pair of boots. They were black; they had recently been polished until they shone. They contrasted with the dirty and darned socks on C’s feet.

  The cardboard boxes were closed. On top of the one nearest the front of the garage lay a square paper book with a bright cover. The title of the paper book was “City Murder Chillers.” The cover depicted a man trapped on a wooden plank between two skyscrapers. In each hand he held a gun. He was firing at four men who seemed to be running towards him. Behind him, another man with a blowlamp was attempting to burn through the wooden plank. C picked up the paper book and opened it. It consisted chiefly of coloured picture stories. The first story was called “Among the Missing.” C began to look at it.

  When he had turned two pages, he shut the book, tossing it to a corner of the loft with a flip of his wrist. The book landed in the dusty wedge of space where the roof sloped down and met the floor. The roof was made of a light metal, bent into a regular pattern to strengthen it. It had come in sheets; at regular intervals, several rows of bolts ran from one end of the garage to the other, clamping these sheets together. The ends of most of these bolts were green.

  In the loft, the light was dim. A slight noise began to fill the loft. It grew in volume. As rain fell from the sky, it landed on the sloping roof of the garage. The sloping roof was of light metal. The rain drummed on it. As the rain came down more heavily, the noise increased in volume. The rain ran down the two sides of the roof into rain gutters that edged the roof. The gutters fed into two vertical drainpipes set one on either side of the garage. The water bubbled into the drainpipes with a noise that could be heard inside the loft. No rain came inside the loft.

  “The old girl was right, after all!”

  Getting to his feet, C hunched his shoulders and moved to the window at the back of the garage. The window had not been designed to open. It was small and square, with two bars of wood dividing it into four squares. Three of the squares were glazed. The bottom right-hand square had had its glass removed. Rain came in the hole. In the dirt just below the window was a block of wood, thick, and shaped to fit into the bottom right-hand square of the window. C picked it up and wedged it into place in the hole. The rain stopped coming through the hole.

  C looked out of the window.

  “Quite a nice little shower!”

  The view through the three panes of glass in the window was distorted by rain pouring down the glass. To the thickness of the glass were added the convolutions of water, flowing irregularly downwards, spreading over the glass. The patterns the water made as it ran down the glass were always changing.

  The view of the garden encompassed on the left a high brick wall, the top of which was capped by rounded concrete blocks; in the cracks between the blocks small green ferns grew. This wall was the wall bounding Mr. Mary’s estate on its south-east side. It ran straight down the boundary, dividing the garden from the yard of a banana importer and distributor, until at its far end it met a privet hedge dividing the garden from a garden belonging to an unmarried man known to have a grandfather who had built a lighthouse somewhere along the coast of Africa or South America. The point at which the brick wall and the privet hedge met (the southern corner of the garden) was concealed from the window in the garage by a cluster of shrubs that fringed an ornamental pool. The cluster of shrubs was obscured by the water running down the window.

  More distantly, and now distorted by the rain pouring down the window of the garage, the hedge could be seen bounding the longest side of the long lawn. On the other side of it lay a dirt path upon which puddles now gathered. Both privet hedge and dirt path ran down to an old brick building that had once served as a coach house.

  The coach house, though its outlines trembled and were uncertain because of the rain now coursing over the small window of the garage, was easily visible to C. When he had first taken refuge in the loft of the garage, six months ago, the old brick building had been almost entirely hidden behind the summer foliage of the apple and plum and pear trees. Only its tiled roof had been visible. The tiled roof was visible now.

  “He must be getting a regular shower bath in there. You can’t tell me that roof would keep the rain out for long. Bet it’s pouring down on him!”

  The front of the coach house could be seen through the rain. In the upper half of it, a round window was set in the brickwork. At this distance, in this light, no detail could be discerned. Below the round window, two large doors ran across the façade of the building. The doors were dark with wet.

  “Better him than me.”

  A pigeon known as X clattered from a point in the brickwork somewhere above the round window, circled awkwardly with its wing-tips appearing to clap together first above then below the tip of its body, and flew northwards behind the bulk of the house. Rain fell. It poured over the windows of the garage and obscured the view. />
  From time to time, Domoladossa interrupted his reading of the report to make a sketch map on a rough pad which lay on his desk near the framed photograph of his wife. Following the information given in the report, he now carefully drew in a few more details.

  “It’s a human problem, of course,” he muttered. He determined to volunteer to be the first to enter this probability world; he would go straight to Mrs. Mary—when they had more information on her.

  2

  On the roof of the garage rain fell. The roof, constructed with a light metal, gave off a resonant noise under the continued impact of thousands of drops of rain. The roof did not leak. At regular intervals along the inside of the roof ran several rows of bolts, secured in place with nuts. These bolts kept in place the sheets of metal that together comprised the roofing. Most of these nut and bolt combinations were green; the others were grey, their original colour. The green ones began to glisten. The ends of them began to glisten. Whether one looked at them or looked away, the glistening ends swelled slowly.

  On the glistening ends of the bolts, drops of water formed. The bolt ends that were grey did not have glistening ends. Along the inside of the roof, six rows of bolt ends began to glisten. The light from the unopening window at the front of the asbestos garage was caught by a series of small raindrops hanging from the roof. The drops imprisoned and reflected the light. One by one the drops fell to the planks on the loft floor.

  “It looks as if it’s never stinking well going to stop. God, how I’d like—oh, it’s all the same!”

  The drops did not fall in unison. Water collected on each bolt at a different rate. Each glistening end kept its own tempo. Some of the bolts seemed as if they would remain dry once their current drip had been shed; but slowly a point of moisture grew, containing a highlight within it. And the point of moisture extended itself into a droplet. With the slowest bolts, the droplets would hang there for a time to be measured in minutes; eventually the droplet would extend itself, stretch towards the floor, part company with the end of the bolt, and strike off on its own for the floor.