Kandinski seemed to lose patience. ‘I saw it,’ he explained, impotently tossing his notebook on to the desk. ‘I spoke to the Prime!’
Ward nodded non-committally and picked up the photograph again. Kandinski stepped over to him and took it out of his hands. ‘Ward,’ he said carefully. ‘Believe me. You must. You know I am too big a man to waste myself on a senseless charade.’ His massive hands squeezed Ward’s shoulders, and almost lifted him off the seat. ‘Believe me. Together we can be ready for the next landings and alert the world. I am only Charles Kandinski, a waiter at a thirdrate caf, but you are Dr Andrew Ward of Mount Vernon Observatory. They will listen to you. Try to realize what this may mean for mankind.’
Ward pulled himself away from Kandinski and rubbed his shoulders.
‘Ward, do you believe me? Ask yourself.’
Ward looked up pensively at Kandinski towering over him, his red beard like the burning, unconsumed bush.
‘I think so,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, I do.’
A week later the 23rd Congress of the International Geophysical Association opened at Mount Vernon Observatory. At 3.30 P.M., in the Hoyle Library amphitheatre, Professor Renthall was to deliver the inaugural address welcoming the 92 delegates and 25 newspaper and agency reporters to the fortnight’s programme of lectures and discussions.
Shortly after 11 o’clock that morning Ward and Professor Cameron completed their final arrangements and escaped down to Vernon Gardens for an hour’s relaxation.
‘Well,’ Cameron said as they walked over to the Site Tycho, ‘I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it must be like to run the Waldorf-Astoria.’ They picked one of the sidewalk tables and sat down. ‘I haven’t been here for weeks,’ Cameron said. ‘How are you getting on with the Man in the Moon?’
‘Kandinski? I hardly ever see him,’ Ward said.
‘I was talking to the Time magazine stringer about Charles,’ Cameron said, cleaning his sunglasses. ‘He thought he might do a piece about him.’
‘Hasn’t Kandinski suffered enough of that sort of thing?’ Ward asked moodily.
‘Perhaps he has,’ Cameron agreed. ‘Is he still working on his crossword puzzle? The tablet thing, whatever he calls it.’
Casually, Ward said: ‘He has a theory that it should be possible to see the lunar bases. Refuelling points established there by the Venusians over the centuries.’
‘Interesting,’ Cameron commented.
‘They’re sited near Copernicus,’ Ward went on. ‘I know Vandone at Milan is mapping Archimedes and the Imbrium, I thought I might mention it to him at his semester tomorrow.’
Professor Cameron took off his glasses and gazed quizzically at Ward. ‘My dear Andrew, what has been going on? Don’t tell me you’ve become one of Charles’ converts?’
Ward laughed and shook his head. ‘Of course not. Obviously there are no lunar bases or alien space-craft. I don’t for a moment believe a word Kandinski says.’ He gestured helplessly. ‘At the same time I admit I have become involved with him. There’s something about Kandinski’s personality. On the on hand I can’t take him seriously—’
‘Oh, I take him seriously,’ Cameron cut in smoothly. ‘Very seriously indeed, if not quite in the sense you mean.’ Cameron turned his back on the sidewalk crowds. ‘Jung’s views on flying saucers are very illuminating, Andrew; they’d help you to understand Kandinski. Jung believes that civilization now stands at the conclusion of a Platonic Great Year, at the eclipse of the sign of Pisces which has dominated the Christian epoch, and that we are entering the sign of Aquarius, a period of confusion and psychic chaos. He remarks that throughout history, at all times of uncertainty and discord, cosmic space vehicles have been seen approaching Earth, and that in a few extreme cases actual meetings with their occupants are supposed to have taken place.’
As Cameron paused, Ward glanced across the tables for Kandinski, but a relief waiter served them and he assumed it was Kandinski’s day off.
Cameron continued: ‘Most people regard Charles Kandinski as a lunatic, but as a matter of fact he is performing one of the most important roles in the world today, the role of a prophet alerting people of this coming crisis. The real significance of his fantasies, like that of the ban-the-bomb movements, is to be found elsewhere than on the conscious plane, as an expression of the immense psychic forces stirring below the surface of rational life, like the isotactic movements of the continental tables which heralded the major geological transformations.’
Ward shook his head dubiously. ‘I can accept that a man such as Freud was a prophet, but Charles Kandinski—?’
‘Certainly. Far more than Freud. It’s unfortunate for Kandinski, and for the writers of science fiction for that matter, that they have to perform their tasks of describing the symbols of transformation in a so-called rationalist society, where a scientific, or at least a pesudo-scientific explanation is required a priori. And because the true prophet never deals in what may be rationally deduced, people such as Charles are ignored or derided today.’
‘It’s interesting that Kandinski compared his meeting with the Venusian with Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus,’ Ward said.
‘He was quite right. In both encounters you see the same mechanism of blinding unconscious revelation. And you can see too that Charles feels the same overwhelming need to spread the Pauline revelation to the world. The AntiApollo movement is only now getting under way, but within the next decade it will recruit millions, and men such as Charles Kandinski will be the fathers of its apocalypse.’
‘You make him sound like a titanic figure,’ Ward remarked quietly. ‘I think he’s just a lonely, tired man obsessed by something he can’t understand. Perhaps he simply needs a few friends to confide in.’
Slowly shaking his head, Cameron tapped the table with his glasses. ‘Be warned, Andrew, you’ll burn your fingers if you play with Charles’ brand of fire. The mana-personalities of history have no time for personal loyalties — the founder of the Christian church made that pretty plain.’
Shortly after seven o’clock that evening Charles Kandinski mounted his bicycle and set off out of Vernon Gardens. The small room in the seedy area where he lived always depressed him on his free days from the Tycho, and as he pedalled along he ignored the shouts from his neighbours sitting out on their balconies with their crates of beer. He knew that his beard and the high, ancient bicycle with its capacious wicker basket made him a grotesque, Quixotic figure, but he felt too preoccupied to care. That morning he had heard that the French translation of The Landings from Outer Space, printed at his own cost, had been completely ignored by the Paris press. In addition a jobbing printer in Santa Vera was pressing him for payment for 5,000 anti-Apollo leaflets that had been distributed the previous year.
Above all had come the news on the radio that the target date of the first manned Moon flight had been advanced to 1969, and on the following day would take place the latest and most ambitious of the instrumented lunar flights. The anticipated budget for the Apollo programme (in a moment of grim humour he had calculated that it would pay for the printing of some 1,000 billion leaflets) seemed to double each year, but so far he had found little success in his attempt to alert people to the folly of venturing into space. All that day he had felt sick with frustration and anger.
At the end of the avenue he turned on to the highway which served the asparagus farms lying in the 20-mile strip between Vernon Gardens and the desert. It was a hot empty evening and few cars or trucks passed him. On either side of the road the great lemon-green terraces of asparagus lay seeping in their moist paddy beds, and occasionally a marsh-hen clacked overhead and dived out of sight.
Five miles along the road he reached the last farmhouse above the edge of the desert. He cycled on to where the road ended 200 yards ahead, dismounted and left the bicycle in a culvert. Slinging his camera over one shoulder, he walked off across the hard ground into the mouth of a small valley.
The boundary between the desert and the farm-strip was irregular. On his left, beyond the rocky slopes, he could hear a motor-reaper purring down one of the mile-long spits of fertile land running into the desert, but the barren terrain and the sense of isolation began to relax him and he forgot the irritations that had plagued him all day.
A keen naturalist, he saw a long-necked sand-crane perched on a spur of shale fifty feet from him and stopped and raised his camera. Peering through the finder he noticed that the light had faded too deeply for a photograph. Curiously, the sandcrane was clearly silhouetted against a circular glow of light which emanated from
