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

shrub and path and grass, and swam up the brickwork with its pattern of horizontal and vertical lines, until it settled on the open third of the kitchen window.
    The woman was dimly visible, standing away from the window with her back to it. She had rid herself of the white towel. Her hands were behind her back, and consequently visible to the spectator. They appeared more pink at the extremities than were the arms. The hands were busy with the strings of the apron; they undid them, dropped the strings, and moved up to the woman’s shoulders; there they took hold of the apron string that ran behind the woman’s neck, lifted it over the woman’s head, and carried the apron by it out of sight.
    The circle of vision lingered over the open portion of window. All that could clearly be seen through the open window was a corner of a table; shadows lay behind the table. The circle trembled. Once it moved away from the window, travelled towards the right, inspected the back door with its square pane of green bottle glass, moved right again, looked into the window of the room on the right of the back door, which was the dining-room, slid upwards over the pattern of the brickwork with its horizontal and vertical lines, and then worked left again, peering over the sills of the three windows on the first floor as it went: the window of the bathroom, the central window, belonging to a spare bedroom, and another window belonging to a second spare bedroom; in all of these windows, no movement could be sighted. The circle of vision slanted away across the house as S removed the telescope from his eye.
    He blinked and pinched his nose at the bridge with the index finger and thumb of his left hand. Using both hands, he pressed both ends of the telescope so that the three brass sections slid one into the other and all slid into the outer barrel, which measured some fifteen centimetres; it was bound in worn leather.

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    S stood upright, put his hands into his pockets, removed them almost at once, brushed the knees of his trousers, and returned his hands to the pockets. He yawned and blinked his eyes.
    The floor of the room was built of thick wooden planks running from side to side in which two colours predominated, a darker brown tone in the hollows, where the timber was rough and splintery, and yellow on the raised parts, which had been smoothed by tread; the effect was approximately of tawny hair. S crossed the length of this flooring in ten paces until he stood by the top of the rough hewn structure of wooden steps that led up from the floor below.
    A square trapdoor also made of wood leant against the back wall of the room. S grasped it with his right hand and brought it over, first pulling and then lowering it, until the trapdoor fitted into a groove and the structure of wooden steps was concealed from view.
    Near to the spot where the trapdoor had rested when it was open was a small square window, hardly bigger than a man’s hand and situated only half a metre above the floor. This small window occupied the centre of the back wall of the room. Although its glass was cracked and dirty, a view could be seen through it if one stooped down. It looked out across a small patch of ground filled by straggling elder bush and nettles to the privet hedge dividing the garden from a garden beyond it. Of the four sides of the square plot of land belonging to Mr. Mary, this boundary behind the old brick building was the only one not marked by a brick wall. The privet hedge was a metre and a quarter high. On the other side of it lay the property of a single man whose maternal grandfather had constructed a lighthouse in the southern hemisphere; it was said that this architectural achievement had been acknowledged by a knighthood. S glanced out of the small square window and then straightened his back. He began to walk up and down the room.
    It was only possible to walk upright near the central axis of the room. Overhead sloped the bare beams