That evening Ward had dinner with the Camerons. Professor Renthall, Director of the Hubble, and his wife completed the party. The table-talk consisted almost entirely of good-humoured gossip about their colleagues retailed by Cameron and Renthall, and Ward was able to mention his conversation with Kandinski.

‘At first I thought he was mad, but now I’m not so certain. There’s something rather too subtle about him. The way he creates an impression of absolute integrity, but at the same time never gives you a chance to tackle him directly on any point of detail. And when you do manage to ask him outright about this Venusian his answers are far too pat. I’m convinced the whole thing is an elaborate hoax.’

Professor Renthall shook his head. ‘No, it’s no hoax. Don’t you agree, Godfrey?’

Cameron nodded. ‘Not in Andrew’s sense, anyway.’

‘But what other explanation is there?’ Ward asked. ‘We know he hasn’t seen a Venusian, so he must be a fraud. Unless you think he’s a lunatic. And he certainly doesn’t behave like one.’

‘What is a lunatic?’ Professor Renthall asked rhetorically, peering into the faceted stem of his raised hock glass. ‘Merely a man with more understanding than he can contain. I think Charles belongs in that category.’

‘The definition doesn’t explain him, sir,’ Ward insisted. ‘He’s going to lend me his photographs and when I prove those are fakes I think I’ll be able to get under his guard.’

‘Poor Charles,’ Edna Cameron said. ‘Why shouldn’t he have seen a space-ship? I think I see them every day.’

‘That’s just what I feel, dear,’ Cameron said, patting his wife’s matronly, brocaded shoulder. ‘Let Charles have his Venusian if he wants to. Damn it, all it’s trying to do is ban Project Apollo. An excellent idea, I have always maintained; only the professional astronomer has any business in space. After the Rainbow tests there isn’t an astronomer anywhere in the world who wouldn’t follow Charles Kandinski to the stake.’ He turned to Renthall. ‘By the way, I wonder what Charles is planning for the Congress? A Neptunian? Or perhaps a whole delegation from Proxima Centauri. We ought to fit him out with a space-suit and a pavilion — "Charles Kandinski — New Worlds for Old".’

‘Santa Claus in a space-suit,’ Professor Renthall mused. ‘That’s a new one. Send him a ticket.’

The next weekend Ward returned the twelve plates to the Site Tycho.

‘Well?’ Kandinski asked.

‘It’s difficult to say,’ Ward answered. ‘They’re all too heavily absorbed. They could be clever montages of light brackets and turbine blades. One of them looks like a close-up of a clutch plate. There’s a significant lack of any real corroborative details which you’d expect somewhere in so wide a selection.’ He paused. ‘On the other hand, they could be genuine.’

Kandinski said nothing, took the paper package, and went off into the caf.

The interior of the Site Tycho had been designed to represent the control room of a space-ship on the surface of the Moon. Hidden fluorescent lighting glimmered through plastic wall fascia and filled the room with an eerie blue glow. Behind the bar a large mural threw the curving outline of the Moon on to an illuminated star-scape. The doors leading to the rest-rooms were circular and bulged outwards like air-locks, distinguished from each other by the symbols cj and.

The total effect was ingenious but somehow reminiscent to Ward of a twenty-fifth-century cave.

He sat down at the bar and waited while Kandinski packed the plates away carefully in an old leather briefcase.

‘I’ve read your book,’ Ward said. ‘I had looked at it the last time I saw you, but I read it again thoroughly.’ He waited for some comment upon this admission, but Kandinski went over to an old portable typewriter standing at the far end of the bar and began to type laboriously with one finger. ‘Have you seen any more Venusians since the book was published?’ Ward asked.

‘None,’ Kandinski said.

‘Do you think you will?’

‘Perhaps.’ Kandinski shrugged and went on with his typing.

‘What are you working on now?’ Ward asked.

‘A lecture I am giving on Friday evening,’ Kandinski said. Two keys locked together and he flicked them back. ‘Would you care to come? Eight-thirty, at the high school near the Baptist chapel.’

‘If I can,’ Ward said. He saw that Kandinski wanted to get rid of him. ‘Thanks for letting me see the plates.’ He made his way out into the sun. People were walking about through the fresh morning air, and he caught the clean scent of peach blossom carried down the slopes into the town.

Suddenly Ward felt how enclosed and insane it had been inside the Tycho, and how apposite had been his description of it as a cave, with its residential magician incanting over his photographs like a down-at-heel Merlin manipulating his set of runes. He felt annoyed with himself for becoming involved with Kandinski and allowing the potent charisma of his personality to confuse him. Obviously Kandinski played upon the instinctive sympathy for the outcast, his whole pose of integrity and conviction a device for drawing the gullible towards him.

Letting the light spray from the fountains fall across his face, Ward crossed the square towards his car.

Away in the distance 2,000 feet above, rising beyond a screen of fir trees, the three Mount Vernon domes shone together in the sun like a futuristic Taj Mahal.

Fifteen miles from Vernon Gardens the Santa Vera highway circled down from the foot of Mount Vernon into the first low scrub-covered hills which marked the southern edge of the desert. Ward looked out at the long banks of coarse sand stretching away through the haze, their outlines blurring in the afternoon heat. He glanced at the book lying on the seat beside him, open at the map printed between its end covers, and carefully checked his position, involuntarily slowing the speed of the Chevrolet as he moved nearer to the site of the Venus landings.

In the fortnight since he had returned the photographs to the Site Tycho, he had seen Kandinski only once, at the lecture delivered the previous night. Ward had deliberately stayed away from the Site Tycho, but he had seen a poster advertising the lecture and driven down to the school despite himself.

The lecture was delivered in the gymnasium before an audience of forty or fifty people, most of them women, who formed one of the innumerable local astronomical societies. Listening to the talk round him, Ward gathered that their activities principally consisted of trying to identify more than half a dozen of the constellations. Kandinski had lectured to them on several occasions and the subject of this latest instalment was his researches into the significance of the Venusian tablet he had been analysing for the last three years.

When Kandinski stepped onto the dais there was a brief round of applause. He was wearing a lounge suit of a curiously archaic cut and had washed his beard, which bushed out above his string tie so that he resembled a Mormon patriarch or the homespun saint of some fervent evangelical community.

For the benefit of any new members, he prefaced his lecture with a brief account of his meeting with the Venusian, and then turned to his analysis of the tablet. This was the familiar ultimatum warning mankind to abandon its preparations for the exploration of space, for the ostensible reason that, just as the sea was a universal image of the unconscious, so space was nothing less than an image of psychosis and death, and that if he tried to penetrate the interplanetary voids man would only plunge to earth like a demented Icarus, unable to scale the vastness of the cosmic zero. Kandinski’s real motives for introducing this were all too apparent the expected success of Project Apollo and subsequent landings on Mars and Venus would, if nothing else, conclusively expose his fantasies.