Ward nodded vaguely. The two observatories at which he had worked previously, Cape Town and the Milan Astrographie, had both attracted any number of cranks and charlatans eager to reveal their own final truths about the cosmos, and the prospect of meeting Kandinski interested him only slightly. ‘What is he?’ he asked. ‘A practical joker, or just a lunatic?’
Professor Cameron propped his glasses on to his forehead and negotiated a tight hairpin. ‘Neither,’ he said.
Ward smiled at Cameron, idly studying his plump cherubic face with its puckish mouth and keen eyes. He knew that Cameron enjoyed a modest reputation as a wit. ‘Has he ever claimed in front of you that he’s seen a… Venusian?’
‘Often,’ Professor Cameron said. ‘Charles lectures two or three times a week about the landings to the women’s societies around here and put himself completely at our disposal. I’m afraid we had to tell him he was a little too advanced for us. But wait until you meet him.’
Ward shrugged and looked out at the long curving peach terraces lying below them, gold and heavy in the August heat. They dropped a thousand feet and the road widened and joined the highway which ran from the Vernon’ Gardens across the desert to Santa Vera and the coast.
Vernon Gardens was the nearest town to the Observatory and most of it had been built within the last few years, evidently with an eye on the tourist trade. They passed a string of blue and pink-washed houses, a school constructed of glass bricks and an abstract Baptist chapel. Along the main thoroughfare the shops and stores were painted in bright jazzy colours, the vivid awnings and neon signs like street scenery in an experimental musical.
Professor Cameron turned off into a wide tree-lined square and parked by a cluster of fountains in the centre. He and Ward walked towards the cafs — Al’s Fresco Diner, Ylla’s, the Dome — which stretched down to the sidewalk. Around the square were a dozen gift-shops filled with cheap souvenirs: silverplate telescopes and models of the great Vernon dome masquerading as ink-stands and cigar-boxes, plus a juvenile omnium gatherum of miniature planetaria, space helmets and plastic 3-D star atlases.
The caf to which they went was decorated in the same futuristic motifs. The chairs and tables were painted a drab aluminium grey, their limbs and panels cut in random geometric shapes. A silver rocket ship, ten feet long, its paint peeling off in rusty strips, reared up from a pedestal among the tables. Across it was painted the caf’s name.
‘The Site Tycho.’
A large mobile had been planted in the ground by the sidewalk and dangled down over them, its vanes and struts flashing in the sun. Gingerly Professor Cameron pushed it away. ‘I’ll swear that damn thing is growing,’ he confided to Ward. ‘I must tell Charles to prune it.’ He lowered himself into a chair by one of the open-air tables, put on a fresh pair of sunglasses and focused them at the long brown legs of a girl sauntering past.
Left alone for the moment, Ward looked around him and picked at a cellophane transfer of a ringed planet glued to the table-top. The Site Tycho was also used as a small science fiction exchange library. A couple of metal bookstands stood outside the caf door, where a soberly dressed middle-aged man, obviously hiding behind his upturned collar, worked his way quickly through the rows of paperbacks. At another table a young man with an intent, serious face was reading a magazine. His high cerebrotonic forehead was marked across the temple by a ridge of pink tissue, which Ward wryly decided was a lobotomy scar.
‘Perhaps we ought to show our landing permits,’ he said to Cameron when after three or four minutes no one had appeared to serve them. ‘Or at least get our pH’s checked.’
Professor Cameron grinned. ‘Don’t worry, no customs, no surgery.’ He took his eyes off the sidewalk for a moment. ‘This looks like him now.’
A tall, bearded man in a short-sleeved tartan shirt and pale green slacks came out of the caf towards them with two cups of coffee on a tray.
‘Hello, Charles,’ Cameron greeted him. ‘There you are. We were beginning to think we’d lost ourselves in a timetrap.’
The tall man grunted something and put the cups down. Ward guessed that he was about 55 years old. He was well over six feet tall, with a massive sunburnt head and lean but powerfully muscled arms.
‘Andrew, this is Charles Kandinski.’ Cameron introduced the two men. ‘Andrew’s come to work for me, Charles. He photographed all those Cepheids for the Milan Conference last year.’
Kandinski nodded. His eyes examined Ward critically but showed no signs of interest.
‘I’ve been telling him all about you, Charles,’ Cameron went on, ‘and how we all follow your work. No further news yet, I trust?’
Kandinski’s lips parted in a slight smile. He listened politely to Cameron’s banter and looked out over the square, his great seamed head raised to the sky.
