Report on Probability A Read online

  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?

  4

  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 tire, 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 recognized; 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 Untamable 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 pi
llars.

  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 so 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 tires. 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 an 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.

  5

  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 tires, 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 ste
ps, 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.