Returning to the police car, the sergeant shook his head. As they drove off he looked out at the endless stretch of placid suburban homes.

‘Apparently there was an ancient sea here once. A million years ago.’ He picked a crumpled flannel jacket off the back seat. ‘That reminds me, I know what Mason’s coat smells of — brine.’

The Venus Hunters

When Dr Andrew Ward joined the Hubble Memorial Institute at Mount Vernon Observatory he never imagined that the closest of his new acquaintances would be an amateur star-gazer and spare-time prophet called Charles Kandinski, tolerantly regarded by the Observatory professionals as a madman. In fact, had either he or Professor Cameron, the Institute’s Deputy Director, known just how far he was to be prepared to carry this friendship before his two-year tour at the Institute was over, Ward would certainly have left Mount Vernon the day he arrived and would never have become involved in the bizarre and curiously ironic tragedy which was to leave an ineradicable stigma upon his career.

Professor Cameron first introduced him to Kandinski. About a week after Ward came to the Hubble he and Cameron were lunching together in the Institute cafeteria.

‘We’ll go down to Vernon Gardens for coffee,’ Cameron said when they finished dessert. ‘I want to get a shampoo for Edna’s roses and then we’ll sit in the sun for an hour and watch the girls go by.’ They strolled out through the terrace tables towards the parking lot. A mile away, beyond the conifers thinning out on the slopes above them, the three great Vernon domes gleamed like white marble against the sky. ‘Incidentally, you can meet the opposition.’

‘Is there another observatory at Vernon?’ Ward asked as they set off along the drive in Cameron’s Buick. ‘What is it an Air Force weather station?’

‘Have you ever heard of Charles Kandinski?’ Cameron said. ‘He wrote a book called The Landings from Outer Space. It was published about three years ago.’

Ward shook his head doubtfully. They slowed down past the checkpoint at the gates and Cameron waved to the guard. ‘Is that the man who claims to have seen extra-terrestrial beings? Martians or ‘Venusians. That’s Kandinski. Not only seen them,’ Professor Cameron added. ‘He’s talked to them. Charles works at a caf in Vernon Gardens. We know him fairly well.’

‘He runs the other observatory?’

‘Well, an old 4-inch MacDonald Refractor mounted in a bucket of cement. You probably wouldn’t think much of it, but I wish we could see with our two-fifty just a tenth of what he sees.’

Ward nodded vaguely. The two observatories at which he had worked previously, Cape Town and the Milan Astrographie, had both attracted any number of cranks and charlatans eager to reveal their own final truths about the cosmos, and the prospect of meeting Kandinski interested him only slightly. ‘What is he?’ he asked. ‘A practical joker, or just a lunatic?’

Professor Cameron propped his glasses on to his forehead and negotiated a tight hairpin. ‘Neither,’ he said.

Ward smiled at Cameron, idly studying his plump cherubic face with its puckish mouth and keen eyes. He knew that Cameron enjoyed a modest reputation as a wit. ‘Has he ever claimed in front of you that he’s seen a… Venusian?’

‘Often,’ Professor Cameron said. ‘Charles lectures two or three times a week about the landings to the women’s societies around here and put himself completely at our disposal. I’m afraid we had to tell him he was a little too advanced for us. But wait until you meet him.’

Ward shrugged and looked out at the long curving peach terraces lying below them, gold and heavy in the August heat. They dropped a thousand feet and the road widened and joined the highway which ran from the Vernon’ Gardens across the desert to Santa Vera and the coast.

Vernon Gardens was the nearest town to the Observatory and most of it had been built within the last few years, evidently with an eye on the tourist trade. They passed a string of blue and pink-washed houses, a school constructed of glass bricks and an abstract Baptist chapel. Along the main thoroughfare the shops and stores were painted in bright jazzy colours, the vivid awnings and neon signs like street scenery in an experimental musical.

Professor Cameron turned off into a wide tree-lined square and parked by a cluster of fountains in the centre. He and Ward walked towards the cafs — Al’s Fresco Diner, Ylla’s, the Dome — which stretched down to the sidewalk. Around the square were a dozen gift-shops filled with cheap souvenirs: silverplate telescopes and models of the great Vernon dome masquerading as ink-stands and cigar-boxes, plus a juvenile omnium gatherum of miniature planetaria, space helmets and plastic 3-D star atlases.

The caf to which they went was decorated in the same futuristic motifs. The chairs and tables were painted a drab aluminium grey, their limbs and panels cut in random geometric shapes. A silver rocket ship, ten feet long, its paint peeling off in rusty strips, reared up from a pedestal among the tables. Across it was painted the caf’s name.

‘The Site Tycho.’

A large mobile had been planted in the ground by the sidewalk and dangled down over them, its vanes and struts flashing in the sun. Gingerly Professor Cameron pushed it away. ‘I’ll swear that damn thing is growing,’ he confided to Ward. ‘I must tell Charles to prune it.’ He lowered himself into a chair by one of the open-air tables, put on a fresh pair of sunglasses and focused them at the long brown legs of a girl sauntering past.

Left alone for the moment, Ward looked around him and picked at a cellophane transfer of a ringed planet glued to the table-top. The Site Tycho was also used as a small science fiction exchange library. A couple of metal bookstands stood outside the caf door, where a soberly dressed middle-aged man, obviously hiding behind his upturned collar, worked his way quickly through the rows of paperbacks. At another table a young man with an intent, serious face was reading a magazine. His high cerebrotonic forehead was marked across the temple by a ridge of pink tissue, which Ward wryly decided was a lobotomy scar.

‘Perhaps we ought to show our landing permits,’ he said to Cameron when after three or four minutes no one had appeared to serve them. ‘Or at least get our pH’s checked.’

Professor Cameron grinned. ‘Don’t worry, no customs, no surgery.’ He took his eyes off the sidewalk for a moment. ‘This looks like him now.’

A tall, bearded man in a short-sleeved tartan shirt and pale green slacks came out of the caf towards them with two cups of coffee on a tray.

‘Hello, Charles,’ Cameron greeted him. ‘There you are. We were beginning to think we’d lost ourselves in a timetrap.’

The tall man grunted something and put the cups down. Ward guessed that he was about 55 years old. He was well over six feet tall, with a massive sunburnt head and lean but powerfully muscled arms.

‘Andrew, this is Charles Kandinski.’ Cameron introduced the two men. ‘Andrew’s come to work for me, Charles. He photographed all those Cepheids for the Milan Conference last year.’

Kandinski nodded. His eyes examined Ward critically but showed no signs of interest.

‘I’ve been telling him all about you, Charles,’ Cameron went on, ‘and how we all follow your work. No further news yet, I trust?’

Kandinski’s lips parted in a slight smile. He listened politely to Cameron’s banter and looked out over the square, his great seamed head raised to the sky.

‘Andrew’s read your book, Charles,’ Cameron was saying. ‘Very interested. He’d like to see the originals of those photographs. Wouldn’t you Andrew?’

‘Yes, I certainly would,’ Ward said.

Kandinski gazed down at him again. His expression was not so much penetrating as detached and impersonal, as if he were assessing Ward with an utter lack of bias, so complete, in fact, that it left no room for even the smallest illusion. Previously Ward had only seen this expression in the eyes of the very old. ‘Good,’ Kandinski said. ‘At present they are in a safe deposit box at my bank, but if you are serious I will get them out.’