Report on Probability A Read online

  “Where the.…”

  Removing his gaze from the house, S turned to look in the niche; as he did so, he caught sight of the telescope lying extended under the round window. He picked it up and applied the eyepiece to his right eye, steadying the instrument with both hands as he directed it towards the house.

  Into the circle of vision moved the end of the asbestos and concrete garage; it slipped away to the right; a shrub entered the circle briefly, and then a coal bunker, attached to the south corner of the house, and then the long windows of the dining-room, and then the green back door. The circle of vision sank and stopped. In its centre there now rested a full milk bottle, topped by a silver foil cap and standing on the left of the step below the back door.

  The circle of vision remained still. In its centre rested the milk bottle; also visible was a part of the step, greyey white, a portion of the brickwork of the house, with its texture of bricks broken by the lines of cement between. In the upper right quarter of the circle was the bottom left corner of the back door, green, closed. Through the four lenses of the telescope, the colours were dull and distorted. On the step, on the extreme limit of vision to the right, lay a dead leaf; through the telescope it appeared black. Apart from these objects, everything else was swallowed in the blackness that lay beyond the circle of vision.

  The milk bottle had sloping shoulders. It appeared to have been filled with milk to within about two centimetres of the silver foil cap. It stood on the step. The step was a greyish white, distance rendering it textureless. Where it faded into the blackness, a sort of chromatic effect appeared, a rim of several bright colours dividing the circle of vision from the blackness. The step was not entirely level. Because the milk bottle stood on an uneven step, it was perhaps not standing absolutely straight. The silver foil cap seemed to come to within about ten centimetres of the extreme bottom left tip of the closed door. The door was still closed.

  After some while, the dead leaf moved slightly along the step towards the milk bottle. Possibly it was not so much black as a dark brown. It looked shapeless. It lay directly below the corner of the door, on a line with the vertical crack between the door and the jamb. The circle of vision moved slightly, so that this vertical crack lay at its centre. The milk bottle now stood on the left of the circle, near the darkness.

  The circle began to tremble. S put down the telescope, resting it still extended on the floor under the round window. He rubbed his eyes with both hands. He stretched his arms above his head. His mouth opened, his head lolled backward, as he yawned. He bent forward, picked up the telescope again, and applied it to his eye.

  Bare asparagus beds, a strip of lawn, fled past. A white bottle appeared and the view steadied. The bottle slipped to the left of the circle of vision, so that into the centre of the circle came the vertical crack between door and door jamb. Below it lay a dark dead leaf, shapeless on a grey step. After some while the leaf slid along the step and vanished into the darkness.

  After a further while, the vertical crack between door and door jamb widened. The circle of vision became active, moving over a small radius to take in a human foot that protruded from the now opening door. The foot landed on the step, shod in a shoe of a brown material and finished with a high and tapering heel. From the foot rose a slender leg, soon concealed beneath a light blue skirt; an angle further up the skirt revealed where a knee was positioned beneath it. This smoothly curving angle became more noticeable as a hand came into view some distance from it. This hand was a left one, sporting on its fourth finger two rings which gleamed as the hand moved below the level of the knee, down, and curled round the neck of the milk bottle just above the sloping shoulders. The hand tightened its grip, lifted the bottle, raised it beyond the level of the bended knee, which unbent as the bottle was withdrawn from sight of the watcher. The delicately shod foot was withdrawn from the step. It disappeared behind the door. The door closed. A vertical line remained between door and door jamb, pointing down to an empty greyish white step.

  2

  The right hand with its five soiled nails came up and pinched S’s nose at the bridge between his eyes. He screwed up his face and blinked.

  He sat down on the planking of the floor of the old brick building with his legs partly under him, resting his right shoulder against the part of the wall adjacent to the round window. Gradually, his head sank back until it also rested against the brickwork. The brickwork here was whitewashed; some grains of the whitewash came down and spread in a fine powder over the hair. The right hand remained over the face, now resting over the eyes and the eyebrows.

  After a lapse of time, the legs moved, taking up a fresh pattern on the floor. The right hand remained over the eyes and eyebrows and partially covered the nose. The left hand pressed against the rough wood of the floor, its arm supporting some of the weight of the torso. Gradually the torso leaned further over this left hand, until its position had to be changed, whereupon the left arm bent, moving upwards until the lower section of it slipped up onto the ledge under the round window. The elbow now touched the wood of the window casement, while the hand dangled in air. The right hand remained covering the eyes.

  When a measure of time had gone by, this right hand came down from its sheltering gesture on the face to rest lightly on the right thigh.

  S now opened his eyes and stared ahead.

  Outside the old brick building, a fluttering and scraping noise could be heard. This noise communicated itself to the small section of planking directly over S’s head, turning into a more persistent scratching sound as a pigeon entered the small loft provided behind the pigeon holes in the brickwork. S remained staring ahead, giving no sign that he heard these noises. Once he raised his right hand to rub his cheek with his palm.

  Slowly his gaze began to move over the room. It fastened on a picture framed and hung on the cross-beam nearest to him.

  “Oh Jeanette.… If only I could make you understand.…”

  The picture was a representation in black and white of a man and woman in a rural setting. In the background might be seen a flock of sheep and a cornfield bathed in sun, the two divided by a grassy lane shaded by willows growing on either side of it. In the foreground, on a bank covered with flowers, were two people, depicted at a moment which left their motives for ever in some ambiguity. One of these figures was a country girl. On her knee rested a lamb and two apples; two more apples lay beside her. It could be presumed that the girl was feeding or attempting to feed the lamb with the apples.

  The girl had been interrupted in her task by the second figure, a young shepherd dressed in the fustian of a bygone age. He leant confidentially over the girl’s shoulder after having scrambled up the bank; his left cheek appeared to rest against the girl’s hair which, being long and unconfined, lay over each shoulder.

  After regarding these two representations of people for some while, S rose to his feet and moved closer to the picture; he began to examine it at eye level. He breathed on the glass so that the two representations were obscured, lifted his left arm, and rubbed the glass with the cuff of the left sleeve of his shirt.

  The picture was now clearly visible through the glass. In the foreground, the two persons sprawled on a flower-covered bank, their bodies forming a sort of inverted V, with their heads together at the top of the V, for while the shepherd was on the left of the central axis of the picture, kneeling and leaning forward, the girl with the lamb on her lap was sitting on the right of the central axis of the picture and leaning backwards; the girl was supporting the weight of her torso by a right arm thrust backwards until the hand had come to rest at a point further to the left than an imaginary straight line dropped from her shoulder, with the result that this arm took up a diagonal that nearly matched the diagonal of the shepherd’s body, against which it seemed lightly to rest.

  If there was anything behind this phenomenon, if it was not its own lesson, then it could be interpreted to mean that although the girl in part leant away from, or was ave
rse to, the advances of the shepherd, there was nevertheless a part of her that inclined towards him, or was predisposed to accept his advances.

  “I wonder if she ever let him … or is going to let him … if she.…”

  This ambiguity could hardly be resolved by a scrupulous examiner, since the rest of the picture seemed to echo rather than resolve the ambiguity. (In the same way, the scrupulous examiner was unable to decide permanently whether the creator of the picture had marshalled his objects with a deliberate attempt at a discomforting ambiguity or obliquity of statement, or whether he had aimed at making some form of statement incapable of paraphrase and perhaps not previously attempted, and in so aiming had not entirely succeeded, lapsing instead into an ambiguity that was unwished for.)

  It was open to interpretation whether the shepherd was intent upon becoming more intimate with the girl, or whether his absorption was in the collection of lepidoptera: for he leant forward clutching gently in his left hand a large death’s head moth which he thrust forward over the girl’s left shoulder for her to inspect. Either he had brought this creature as a pretty thing that might serve as a pretext for becoming more intimate with her (and the possessiveness of his pose suggested this alternative) or else he was more concerned with the fine specimen that he had managed, surely with some skill, to capture intact (and the solemnity of his gaze at the moth favoured this alternative). This latter interpretation seemed the less likely, since shepherds, whose associations with nature render them unsurprised by its manifestations, rarely become lepidopterists. On the other hand, this particular moth, fine specimen though it was, represented an unfortunate choice of a bauble with which to lull the girl’s apprehensions, since superstitions attaching to the death’s head moth would make it an object of unease to such a simple country person as the girl depicted.

  In any event, the girl was not regarding the moth. She had turned her head away from it, though whether this was from a revulsion for the moth or because in so doing she could have a close look at the face of the shepherd, virtually resting on her left shoulder, remained in doubt.

  “Really,” said Domoladossa, “this is too bad! Here is this long and increasingly pedantic description of a mediocre painting hanging in the coach house. What’s more, it has already been described once, and that was quite enough. Such an item must be quite irrelevant to our main interest.”

  “Do you think so?” Midlakemela said neutrally.

  “I do think so! Don’t you?”

  Midlakemela shrugged and inclined his head. In a moment, he excused himself and went over to the Governor’s office.

  “Any news?”

  “Not really, sir. But there is one curious item which has just come up. Domoladossa doesn’t think it important, but I believe it ought to be mentioned to you, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s a picture, sir, hanging in the loft above the coach house where S is hiding. From its description, it might well be the same picture that G has hanging in his wooden bungalow, which the report describes only briefly and in general terms. We’re getting a much more ample report of it now. It seems to me a bit fishy that the same picture should hang in both places.”

  “I don’t see why, Midlakemela. What is this picture?”

  “It’s a shepherd and his girl friend, sir. Evidently in a rather promiscuous situation. Could we check on it? It appears it was painted by a W. H. Hunt, and is called The Hireling Shepherd.”

  The Governor rubbed his nose. “Never heard of him.”

  He called a subordinate and despatched him scurrying for an encyclopaedia. The subordinate returned, leafing through a fat volume, finally to read aloud with an air of triumph:

  “‘Winkel Henri Hunt (1822-1887). Russian-born German of British extraction, b. at St. Petersburg. Displayed from childhood equal liking for art and science. Professional career that of expert chemist, all spare time devoted to painting and bear-shooting. First canvases show influence of Fuseli.… Well known portraits of such muscians as Gazakirski and Borodin, with whom v. friendly. Discovered hunterine oxide (1850); best-known paintings include On the Steps of the Winter Palace (1846), Death of Attila (1849) and The Hireling Shepherd (1851). Married in 1859, Countess—’”

  “Enough!” said the Governor. “Well, Midlakemela, the painter exists in our probability-world, just as in Probability A. It is something to go on, I suppose. But as to why both G and S should have copies of one of his pictures.…”

  The girl’s face was oval. It did not appear particularly intelligent, nor particularly pretty; yet it was not unattractive. The two eyes were large and set widely apart; they lay under heavy, even puffy, lids, while the lower lids were also noticeable. Above these lids were broad soft eyebrows, untouched by art. The nose seemed not too long and rather soft, and on the whole an attractive nose, ending in a little soft bulb of flesh. The mouth too looked attractive in texture, though the broad lower lip gave it something of a pout; if it was pouting, there was no reason within the context of the picture not to suppose that the girl was pouting because she mistrusted the advances of the young shepherd. The look in her eyes could be read as reinforcing this impression, for they glanced sideways at him with an expression which might have been lazy contempt; on the other hand it might easily have been one of indolent complaisance.

  It was tantalizing to imagine that the painter could have created a second representation of this same imaginary scene, setting it say fifteen minutes (they would have to be imaginary minutes on an imaginary time scale, since art has little relation to the ordinary clock) ahead of the existing representation. Many doubts could then have been resolved, for one paradox of the existing picture was that its ambiguities were engendered by the fact that it showed only one moment on its time scale. Suppose that the second representation, depicting the same scene some fifteen minutes later, could be produced. It too would only show one moment on its time scale; but by comparison with the earlier moment in the first and existing picture, it would make much clear. For instance, it might show the shepherd some distance away in the middle distance, back tending his sheep; in which case it would be clearer that in the first and existing picture the shepherd’s interest lay at least as much in the moth as in possession of the girl, and that the girl’s expression contained more lazy contempt than complaisance or concupiscence under the heavy summer lids of her eyes. Or the second picture might show that the warmth of the summer day had worked in these young bodies, and that the more instinctive side of human nature had had its way, that the girl’s expression in the first and existing picture might indeed have been sly, but was also full of complicity; for this second picture might depict the sheep untended breaking down the corn and the flowers of the bank crushed, as the shepherd and the girl became lovers, their bodies lying parallel and together, with that pale, soft, pouting lower lip pressed beneath the man’s heavy kisses.

  But the imaginary picture remained imaginary and the existing picture remained open to torturing interpretation.

  S turned away, opening his mouth to sigh as he jerked his head to one side. He began to walk up and down the room, avoiding the three cross-beams, going to the far end until his chin was level with a solitary seabird punctuating an expanse of printed blue sky, coming back to the front of the room until his chin was level with a large bunch of flowers separated from other such bunches by a diamond of trellis.

  When he had finished his pacing, he took up a sitting posture on a log on the floor from which he could gaze through a round window divided into nine panes of glass, the centre pane of which formed a small square, and commenced to survey the rear of the house that stood on a slight eminence some thirty-five metres away, beyond the bare asparagus beds.

  Domoladossa was interrupted in his reading of the report from Probability A by the return of Midlakemela. Accompanying Midlakemela was the Governor, who nodded cordially as Domoladossa rose.

  “Don’t disturb yourself. I just wanted to hear what your first impressions were.” />
  Through the photograph of Domoladossa’s wife on his desk, the four Distinguishers watching the scene became more alert. The eldest, whose name was Charlock, said, “Ah, now this man who has just entered bears a strong resemblance to the first man in this dimension we ever observed, when our congruence with it was first discovered. They are entirely unaware of us.”

  The youngest present, Corless, said impatiently, “Well, we can do nothing about it until our Cogitators invent a way of signalling between our dimension and theirs. I still hold to the theory that this … manifestation rests on a question of size. We are looking into a sub-atomic world, probably through a temporary distortion in the space-time-infrastructure.”

  Charlock began strolling down the hillside and Corless went with him. They were both intellectually fascinated by the phenomenon on the hill, but not emotionally involved; perhaps that might change when they had instruments with which to communicate with the inhabitants of the freak world.

  As they walked down the hill, a small robot fly followed them. As vision was transmitted to a vast receiving set in a second-storey hall in New York, a group of men, several of them in uniform, stood or sat watching the transmission.

  At a raised dais, a technician under orders from the statesmen present was controlling the flight of the robot fly.

  Congressman Sadlier turned to his companion.

  “You see, Joe, that’s the way it is. We’ve broken through at last—though what or where we’ve broken through to remains to be seen.”

  “A plurality of worlds …” Joe muttered. As a radio communications engineer, he felt he should come up with some bright suggestions; but at the moment only vague poetic associations filtered through his head.

  Unaware of his multiple watchers, Domoladossa was showing the Governor the next part of the report.