Ward murmured non-committally. They entered a small arcade and stood for a moment by the first shop, an aquarium called ‘The Nouvelle Vague’, watching the Angel fish and Royal Brahmins swim dreamily up and down their tanks.
‘It’s worth reading,’ Professor Cameron went on. ‘Without exaggerating, it’s really one of the most interesting documents I’ve ever come across.’
‘I’m afraid I have a closed mind when it comes to interplanetary bogey-men,’ Ward said.
‘A pity,’ Cameron rejoined. ‘I find them fascinating. Straight out of the unconscious. The fish too,’ he added, pointing at the tanks. He grinned whimsically at Ward and ducked away into a horticulture store halfway down the arcade.
While Professor Cameron was looking through the sprays on the hormone counter, Ward went over to a news-stand and glanced at the magazines. The proximity of the observatory had prompted a large selection of popular astronomical guides and digests, most of them with illustrations of the Mount Vernon domes on their wrappers. Among them Ward noticed a dusty, dog-eared paperback, The Landings from Outer Space by Charles Kandinski. On the front cover a gigantic space vehicle, at least the size of New York, tens of thousands of portholes ablaze with light, was soaring majestically across a brilliant backdrop of stars and spiral nebulae.
Ward picked up the book and turned to the end cover. Here there was a photograph of Kandinski, dressed in a dark lounge suit several sizes too small, peering stiffly into the eye-piece of his MacDonald.
Ward hesitated before finally taking out his wallet. He bought the book and slipped it into his pocket as Professor Cameron emerged from the horticulture store.
‘Get your shampoo?’ Ward asked.
Cameron brandished a brass insecticide gun, then slung it, buccaneerlike, under his belt. ‘My disintegrator,’ he said, patting the butt of the gun. ‘There’s a positive plague of white ants in the garden, like something out of a science fiction nightmare. I’ve tried to convince Edna that their real source is psychological. Remember the story "Leiningen vs the Ants"? A classic example of the forces of the Id rebelling against the Super-Ego.’ He watched a girl in a black bikini and lemon-coloured sunglasses move gracefully through the arcade and added meditatively: ‘You know, Andrew, like everyone else my real vocation was to be a psychiatrist. I spend so long analysing my motives I’ve no time left to act.’
‘Kandinski’s Super-Ego must be in difficulties,’ Ward remarked. ‘You haven’t told me your explanation yet.’
‘What explanation?’
‘Well, what’s really at the bottom of this Venusian he claims to have seen?’
‘Nothing is at the bottom of it. Why?’
Ward smiled helplessly. ‘You will tell me next that you really believe him.’
Professor Cameron chuckled. They reached his car and climbed in. ‘Of course I do,’ he said.
When, three days later, Ward borrowed Professor Cameron’s car and drove down to the rail depot in Vernon Gardens to collect a case of slides which had followed him across the Atlantic, he had no intention of seeing Charles Kandinski again. He had read one or two chapters of Kandinski’s book before going to sleep the previous night and dropped it in boredom. Kandinski’s description of his encounter with the Venusian was not only puerile and crudely written but, most disappointing of all, completely devoid of imagination. Ward’s work at the Institute was now taking up most of his time. The Annual Congress of the International Geophysical Association was being held at Mount Vernon in little under a month, and most of the burden for organizing the three-week programme of lectures, semesters and dinners had fallen on Professor Cameron and himself.
But as he drove away from the depot past the cafs in the square he caught sight of Kandinski on the terrace of the Site Tycho. It was 3 o’clock, a time when most people in Vernon Gardens were lying asleep indoors, and Kandinski seemed to be the only person out in the sun. He was scrubbing away energetically at the abstract tables with his long hairy arms, head down so that his beard was almost touching the metal tops, like an aboriginal halfman prowling in dim bewilderment over the ruins of a futuristic city lost in an inversion of time.
On an impulse, Ward parked the car in the square and walked across to the Site Tycho, but as soon as Kandinski came over to his table he wished he had gone to another of the cafs. Kandinski had been reticent enough the previous day, but now that Cameron was absent he might well turn out to be a garrulous bore.
After serving him, Kandinski sat down on a bench by the bookshelves and stared moodily at his feet. Ward watched him quietly for five minutes, as the mobiles revolved delicately in the warm air, deciding whether to approach Kandinski. Then he stood up and went over to the rows of magazines. He picked in a desultory way through half a dozen and turned to Kandinski. ‘Can you recommend any of these?’
