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.
Finally he found the ring of hills indicated and climbed a narrow saddle leading to its centre. When he scaled the thirty-foot slope he stopped abruptly.
Down on his knees in the middle of the basin with his back to Ward, the studs of his boots flashing in the sunlight, was Kandinski. There was a clutter of tiny objects on the sand around him, and at first Ward thought he was at prayer, making his oblations to the tutelary deities of Venus. Then he saw that Kandinski was slowly scraping the surface of the ground with a small trowel. A circle about 20 yards in diameter had been marked off with pegs and string into a series of wedgeshaped allotments. Every few seconds Kandinski carefully decanted a small heap of grit into one of the test-tubes mounted in a wooden rack in front of him.
Ward put away the book and walked down the slope. Kandinski looked around and then climbed to his feet. The coating of red ash on his beard gave him a fiery, prophetic look. He recognized Ward and raised the trowel in greeting.
Ward stopped at the edge of the string perimeter. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘I am collecting soil specimens.’ Kandinski bent down and corked one of the tubes. He looked tired but worked away steadily.
Ward watched him finish a row. ‘It’s going to take you a long time to cover the whole area. I thought there weren’t any gaps left in the Periodic Table.’
‘The space-craft rotated at speed before it rose into the air. This surface is abrasive enough to have scratched off a few minute filings. With luck I may find one of them.’ Kandinski smiled thinly. ‘262. Venusium, I hope.’
Ward started to say: ‘But the transuranic elements decay spontaneously…’ and then walked over to the centre of the circle, where there was a round indentation, three feet deep and five across. The inner surface was glazed and smooth. It was shaped like an inverted cone and looked as if it had been caused by the boss of an enormous spinning top. ‘This is where the spacecraft landed?’
Kandinski nodded. He filled the last tube and then stowed the rack away in a canvas satchel. He came over to Ward and stared down at the hole. ‘What does it look like to you? A meteor impact? Or an oil drill, perhaps?’ A smile showed behind his dusty beard. ‘The F-109s at the Air Force Weapons School begin their target runs across here. It might have been caused by a rogue cannon shell.’
Ward stooped down and felt the surface of the pit, running his fingers thoughtfully over the warm fused silica. ‘More like a 500-pound bomb. But the cone is geometrically perfect. It’s certainly unusual.’
‘Unusual?’ Kandinski chuckled to himself and picked up the satchel.
‘Has anyone else been out here?’ Ward asked as they trudged up the slope.
‘Two so-called experts.’ Kandinski slapped the sand off his knees. ‘A geologist from Gulf-Vacuum and an Air Force ballistics officer. You’ll be glad to hear that they both thought I had dug the pit myself and then fused the surface with an acetylene torch.’ He peered critically at Ward. ‘Why did you come out here today?’
‘Idle curiosity,’ Ward said. ‘I had an afternoon off and I felt like a drive.’
They reached the crest of the hill and he stopped and looked down into the basin. The lines of string split the circle into a strange horological device, a huge zodiacal mandala, the dark patches in the arcs Kandinski had been working telling its stations.
‘You were going to tell me why you came out here,’ Kandinski said as they walked back to the car.
Ward shrugged. ‘I suppose I wanted to prove something to myself. There’s a problem of reconciliation.’ He hesitated, and then began: ‘You see, there are some things which are self-evidently false. The laws of common sense and everyday experience refute them. I know a lot of the evidence for many things we believe in is pretty thin, but I don’t have to embark on a theory of knowledge to decide that the Moon isn’t made of green cheese.’
‘Well?’ Kandinski shifted the satchel to his other shoulder.
‘This Venusian you’ve seen,’ Ward said. ‘The landing, the runic tablet. I can’t believe them. Every piece of evidence I’ve seen, all the circumstantial details, the facts given in this book… they’re all patently false.’ He turned to one of the middle chapters. ‘Take this at random — 'A phosphorescent green fluid pulsed through the dorsal lung-chamber of the Prime’s helmet, inflating two opaque fan-like gills…' Ward closed the book and shrugged helplessly. Kandinski stood a few feet away from him, the sunlight breaking across the deep lines of his face.
‘Now I know what you say to my objections,’ Ward went on. ‘If you told a 19th century chemist that lead could be transmuted into gold he would have dismissed you as a mediaevalist. But the point is that he’d have been right to do so—’
‘I understand,’ Kandinski interrupted. ‘But you still haven’t explained why you came out here today.’
Ward stared out over the desert. High above, a stratojet was doing cuban eights into the sun, the spiral vapour trails drifting across the sky like gigantic fragments of an apocalyptic message. Looking around, he realized that Kandinski must have walked from the bus-stop on the highway. ‘I’ll give you a lift back,’ he said.
As they drove along the canal he turned to Kandinski. ‘I enjoyed your lecture last night. I apologize for trying to make you look a fool.’
Kandinski was loosening his boot-straps. He laughed unreproachfully. ‘You put me in an awkward position. I could hardly have challenged you. I can’t afford to subscribe to every astronomical journal. Though a sixth moon would have been big news.’ As they neared Vernon Gardens he asked: ‘Would you like to come in and look at the tablet analysis?’
Ward made no reply to the invitation. He drove around the square and parked under the trees, then looked up at the fountains, tapping his fingers on the windshield. Kandinski sat beside him, cogitating into his beard.
Ward watched him carefully. ‘Do you think this Venusian will return?’
Kandinski nodded. ‘Yes. I am sure he will.’
Later they sat together at a broad roll-top desk in the room above the Tycho. Around the wall hung white cardboard screens packed with lines of cuneiform glyphics and Kandinski’s progressive breakdown of their meaning.
Ward held an enlargement of the original photograph of the Venusian tablet and listened to Kandinski’s explanation.
‘As you see from this,’ Kandinski explained, ‘in all probability there are not millions of Venusians, as every one would expect, but only three or four of them altogether. Two are circling Venus, a third Uranus and possibly a fourth is in orbit around Neptune. This solves the difficulty that puzzled you and antagonizes everyone else. Why should the Prime have approached only one person out of several hundred million and selected him on a completely random basis? Now obviously he had seen the Russian and American satellite capsules and assumed that our race, like his now, numbered no more than three or four, then concluded from the atmospheric H-bomb tests that we were in conflict and would soon destroy ourselves. This is one of the reasons why I think he will return shortly and why it is important to organize a world-wide reception for him on a governmental level.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Ward said. ‘He must have known that the population of this planet numbered more than three or four. Even the weakest telescope would demonstrate that.’
‘Of course, but he would naturally assume that the millions of inhabitants of the Earth belonged to an aboriginal sub-species, perhaps employed as work animals. After all, if he observed that despite this planet’s immense resources the bulk of its population lived like animals, an alien visitor could only decide that they were considered as such.’
‘But space vehicles are supposed to have been observing us since the Babylonian era, long before the development of satellite rockets. There have been thousands of recorded sightings.’
Kandinski shook his head. ‘None of them has been authenticated.’
‘What about the other landings that have been reported recently?’ Ward asked. ‘Any number of people have seen Venusians and Martians.’
‘Have they?’ Kandinski asked sceptically. ‘I wish I could believe that. Some of the encounters reveal marvellous powers of invention, but no one can accept them as anything but fantasy.’
‘The same criticism has been levelled at your space-craft,’ Ward reminded him.
