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dirt. In one of these holes sat a homing pigeon called X; when it saw S approaching, it fluttered upwards with heavy strokes of its wings and landed on the tiling of the roof.
    In one of the old doors, the right-hand one, was a smaller door, no more than one and an half metres high. Having reached the old brick building, S put his hand to the catch of this small door and pushed it open. Before entering the aperture, he paused and glanced over his shoulder.
    The back of the house was some thirty-five metres away; it stood on a slightly higher level than did the old brick building, for the gravel walk leading to the latter had sloped down a dip in the ground. From this elevation, five windows were visible, excluding the small pane of bottle glass in the centre of the back door. One of these windows was open; this was the downstairs window on the left of the back door; it was the kitchen window, and through it the head of Mr. Mary’s wife could be discerned bowed over some business at the sink.
    Showing signs of hurry, S bent his back and entered the brick building through the small aperture, pulling the door closed after him and securing it on the inside by a loop of cord attached to the door, which he draped over a nail knocked part way into the ancient timber of the larger door in which the small one was set.
    As he read, Domoladossa felt a sense of privilege. A week ago, he and all his millions of fellow men were living in a world of apparent uni-probability. Then this other continuum manifested itself. Who knew, there could be a myriad different probability worlds? But he was one of the first to read the report on Probability A.
    He experienced danger as he read. This house, and the outhouse S was entering—they were so banal that you’d never look at them twice in ordinary life. But did Probability A contain ordinary life? Were the very molecules of the bricks different? Or would the fact of their all being the same make the whole business even more miraculous?
    And this was just Probability A. A myriad probabilities.… The Gods had been not merely prodigal but mad.
    A photograph of his wife stood on Domoladossa’s desk. He gazed at it tenderly. There would be continua where they had never met, of course … Then he returned to the report.

5
    The inside of the old brick building was large enough to house a private carriage such as prosperous people drove in the days before automobiles were invented. The floor space was partly filled by a bench along the right-hand wall; several old oil drums that stood along the rear wall; a motor-driven lawn mower and a miscellany of garden tools that stood or leaned along the left-hand wall; and a number of boxes, broken pieces of furniture, a tin trunk with the initials H.S.M. stencilled large upon it, a rusty bird cage, a garden roller, a kitchen mangle with a bicycle leaning against it with flat tires, a pile of sacks, a petrol can, several lengths of copper piping, and various other oddments, all lying about the floor, chiefly at the rear or south-west end of the brick building.
    Also at that end of the building was a solid wooden structure of steps leading up to the room above. S advanced to this structure and ascended the steps, placing his feet with care as well as speed, for the treads had been unevenly hollowed in the middle.
    As he ascended, his head, and consequently his eyes, came level with and then rose above the floor of the upper room, a rough, splintery, and uneven floor of old planks which was streaked here and there in no particular pattern with areas of smoothness—round a knot in the wood, or along the side of a board raised slightly higher than its neighbours; these smooth parts were of a lighter yellow tone than the predominant rough areas of wood.
    Walking indiscriminately over these areas, S proceeded to the front of the room in eight and a half paces, stopped, and knelt. He could now see out of the round window that was divided into