As a lecturer Kandinski was poor, losing words, speaking in a slow ponderous style and trapping himself in long subordinate clauses, but his quiet, matter-of-fact tone and absolute conviction in the importance of what he was saying, coupled with the nature of his material, held the talk together. His analysis of the Venusian cryptograms, a succession of intricate philological theorems, was well above the heads of his audience, but what began to impress Ward, as much as the painstaking preparation which must have preceded the lecture, was Kandinski’s acute nervousness in delivering it. Ward noticed that he suffered from an irritating speech impediment that made it difficult for him to pronounce ‘Venusian’, and he saw that Kandinski, far from basking in the limelight, was delivering the lecture only out of a deep sense of obligation to his audience and was greatly relieved when the ordeal was over.
At the end Kandinski had invited questions. These, with the exception of the chairman’s, all concerned the landing of the alien space vehicle and ignored the real subject of the lecture. Kandinski answered them all carefully, taking in good part the inevitable facetious questions. Ward noted with interest the audience’s curious ambivalence, simultaneously fascinated by and resentful of Kandinski’s exposure of their own private fantasies, an expression of the same ambivalence which had propelled so many of the mana-personalities of history towards their inevitable Calvarys.
Just as the chairman was about to close the meeting, Ward stood up.
‘Mr Kandinski. You say that this Venusian indicated that there was also life on one of the moons of Uranus. Can you tell us how he did this if there was no verbal communication between you?’
Kandinski showed no surprise at seeing Ward. ‘Certainly; as I told you, he drew eight concentric circles in the sand, one for each of the planets. Around Uranus he drew five lesser orbits and marked one of these. Then he pointed to himself and to me and to a patch of lichen. From this I deduced, reasonably I maintain, that—’
‘Excuse me, Mr Kandinski,’ Ward interrupted. ‘You say he drew five orbits around Uranus? One for each of the moons?’
Kandinski nodded. ‘Yes. Five.’
‘That was in 1960,’ Ward went on. ‘Three weeks ago Professor Pineau at Brussels discovered a sixth moon of Uranus.’
The audience looked around at Ward and began to murmur.
‘Why should this Venusian have omitted one of the moons?’ Ward asked, his voice ringing across the gymnasium.
Kandinski frowned and peered at Ward suspiciously. ‘I didn’t know there was a sixth moon…’ he began.
‘Exactly!’ someone called out. The audience began to titter.
‘I can understand the Venusian not wishing to introduce any difficulties,’ Ward said, ‘but this seems a curious way of doing it.’
Kandinski appeared at a loss. Then he introduced Ward to the audience. ‘Dr Ward is a professional while I am only an amateur,’ he admitted. ‘I am afraid I cannot explain the anomaly. Perhaps my memory is at fault. But I am sure the Venusian drew only five orbits.’ He stepped down from the dais and strode out hurriedly, scowling into his beard, pursued by a few derisory hoots from the audience.
It took Ward fifteen minutes to free himself from the knot of admiring white-gloved spinsters who cornered him between two vaulting horses. When he broke away he ran out to his car and drove into Vernon Gardens, hoping to see Kandinski and apologize to him.
Five miles into the desert Ward approached a nexus of rock-cuttings and causeways which were part of an abandoned irrigation scheme. The colours of the hills were more vivid now, bright siliconic reds and yellows, crossed with sharp stabs of light from the exposed quartz veins. Following the map on the seat, he turned off the highway onto a rough track which ran along the bank of a dried-up canal. He passed a few rusting sections of picket fencing, a derelict grader half-submerged under the sand, and a collection of dilapidated metal shacks. The car bumped over the potholes at little more than ten miles an hour, throwing up clouds of hot ashy dust that swirled high into the air behind him.
Two miles along the canal the track came to an end. Ward stopped the car and waited for the dust to subside. Carrying Kandinski’s book in front of him like a divining instrument, he set off on foot across the remaining three hundred yards. The contours around him were marked on the map, but the hills had shifted several hundred yards westwards since the book’s publication and he found himself wandering about from one crest to another, peering into shallow depressions only as old as the last sand-storm. The entire landscape seemed haunted by strange currents and moods; the sand swirls surging down the aisles of dunes and the proximity of the horizon enclosed the whole place of stones with invisible walls.
