Report on Probability A by Brian W. Aldiss Read Free Book Online Page A

telescope, one consisting of the square of glass that formed the central panel of the nine glass panels together comprising the round window in the front of the old brick building, and one consisting of the openable but closed portion of the kitchen window. So near was this closed portion of the kitchen window to the moving lips that the breath issuing between them had fogged the pane, obscuring still further both the right cheek already obscured by the towel and a part of the towel itself. The straining right eye that watched through the telescope could just discern a tongue in movement, and the tips of white teeth revealed by the lower lip when the mouth opened widely.
    Accompanying this activity of the mouth, the head also moved, chiefly with a sort of nodding that kept time with the lip movements. The hair untidily nodded. In the front, this hair had been neatly parted in the middle, and then swept back; evidently it was gathered together by some device at the rear of the skull; the loose ends had then been bunched carelessly (or hastily) forward and secured against the crown of the skull on top of the neat hair by small metal clips; this hair nodded now like a wave breaking. It was tawny hair, rather dark over the crown, more of a golden tone at the ends. Against the right side of the woman’s neck was a thick tawny lock; this was swinging with the movement of the head. The eyes were wider open than formerly, so that less of the heavy lids was on display; the irises appeared to be perhaps of a thick golden colour.
    Domoladossa pencilled a note in the margin of the report: “She was singing.”
    He wanted to add, “She was happy,” but that would be carrying the job of interpretation too far.
    He was almost breathless with the thought of the happiness of this alien woman, a happiness that the impartiality of the report seemed to heighten. He considered the passage he had just read extremely erotic, and wondered how the Governor would take it.
    Eagerly, he read on.
    The woman turned from the window with a quick movement. She moved across the kitchen, keeping parallel with the sink. She held her head high, so that its details were lost in the poor light, but it appeared that her mouth was still opening and closing by the movement of the muscles in her neck and the bobbing of her chin, though these details too were uncertain since the woman was progressing erratically, taking certain rhythmic steps that made her shoulders rise and sink. At the same time, she spread her arms to shoulder height and waved them while keeping them level; in her right hand she still retained the white towel. She rotated once through three hundred and sixty degrees in a clockwise direction, waving her hands as she did this. When she was again proceeding across the kitchen in her previously determined direction parallel with the sink, she crossed behind the third of the window that was open and disappeared from sight.
    S lowered the telescope. He looked through the dusty window that was divided into nine sections, several of them draped with small webs from which spiders had gone, and stared at the house some thirty-five metres away. He could see the lower left-hand window that belonged to the kitchen with its right-hand section open. He blinked his eyes and nipped the bridge of his nose with the thumb and index finger of the left hand. He saw a movement in the kitchen.
    Lifting the telescope to his right eye, S closed his left eye. He held the instrument near to the eyepiece with his right hand, gripping it with his left hand at the other extremity, where the barrel was bound in leather; doing this necessitated bending both elbows; he rested the left elbow on the lower extremity of the brick ledge that surrounded the round window. Even with this support, the circle of vision trembled slightly as it moved with its encompassing darkness over the asparagus bed, not focusing on the earth, and up across a confused patch of lavender and