Glanville moved along the beach, picking his way between the veins of frosted quartz. As the wreck of the excursion module and the smaller capsule near by came between himself and the pavilion, he began to see the faint outlines of a lowhulled ship, a schooner or brigantine, with its sails reefed, as if waiting at anchor in some pirate lagoon. Ignoring it, Glanville crept into a shallow fault that crossed the lake, its floor some three feet below the surrounding surface. Catching his breath, he undid the parcel, then carried the object inside it under one arm as he set off towards the glimmering wreck of the module.

Twenty minutes later Glanville stepped out from his vantage point behind the excursion module. Around him rode the spectral hulks of two squaresailed ships, their bows dipping through the warm sand. Intent on the pavilion ahead of him, where the silver figure of Thornwald had stood up like an electrified ghost, Glanville stepped through the translucent image of an anchorcable that curved down into the surface of the lake in front of him. Holding the object he had taken from the parcel above his head like a lantern, he walked steadily towards the pavilion.

The hulls of the ships rode silently at their anchors behind him as he reached the edge of the lake. Thirty yards away, the silver paint around the pavilion speckled the sand with a sheen of false moonlight, but the remainder of the beach and lake were in a profound darkness. As he walked the last yards to the pavilion with a slow rhythmic stride, Glanville could see clearly Thornwald's tall figure pressed against the wall of the veranda, his appalled face, in the shape of his own hands, staring at the apparition in front of him. As Glanville reached the steps Thornwald made a passive gesture at him, one hand raised towards the pistol lying on the table.

Quickly, Glanville threw aside the object he had carried with him. He seized the pistol before Thornwald could move, then whispered, more to himself than to Thornwald: 'Strange seas, Captain, I warned you...' He crouched down and began to back away along the veranda, the pistol levelled at Thornwald's chest.

Then the door on his left opened and before he could move the translucent figure of his wife stepped from the interior of the pavilion and knocked the weapon from his hand.

He turned to her angrily, then shouted at the headless spectre that stepped through him and strode off towards the dark ships moored in the centre of the lake.

Two hours after dawn the next morning Captain Thornwald finished his preparations for departure. In the last minutes he stood on the veranda, gazing out at the even sunlight over the empty lake as he wiped away the last traces of the aluminium paint with a solvent sponge. He looked down at the seated figure of Glanville tied to the chair by the table. Despite the events of the previous night, Glanville now seemed composed and relaxed, a trace even of humour playing about his soft mouth.

Something about this bizarre amiability made Thornwald shudder. He secured the pistol in his holster another evening by this insane lake and he would be pointing it at his own head.

'Captain...' Glanville glanced at him with docile eyes, then shrugged his fat shoulders inside the ropes. 'When are you going to untie these? We'll be leaving soon.'

Thornwald threw the sponge on to the silver sand below the pavilion. 'I'll be going soon, Glanville. You're staying here.' When Glanville began to protest, he said: 'I don't think there's much point in your leaving. As you said, you've built your own little world here.'

'But...' Glanville searched the captain's face. 'Frankly, Thornwald, I can't understand you. Why did you come here in the first place, then? Where's Judith, by the way? She's around here somewhere.'

Thornwald paused, steeling himself against the name and the memory of the previous night. 'Yes, she's around here, all right.' As if testing some unconscious element of Glanville's memory, he said clearly: 'She's in the module, as a matter of fact.'

'The module?' Glanville pulled at his ropes, then squinted over his shoulder into the sunlight. 'But I told her not to go there. When's she coming back?'

'She'll be back, don't worry. This evening, I imagine, when the timewinds blow, though I don't want to be here when she comes. This sea of yours had bad dreams, Glanville.'

'What do you mean?'

Thornwald walked across the veranda. 'Glanville, have you any idea why I'm here, why I've hunted you all this way?'

'God only knows something to do with the emigration laws.'

'Emigration laws?' Thornwald shook his head. 'Any charges there would be minor.' After a pause, he said: 'Murder, Glanville.'

Glanville looked up with real surprise. 'Murder? You're out of your mind! Of whom, for heaven's sake?'

Thornwald patted the raw skin around his chin. The pale image of his hands still clung to his face. 'Of your wife.'

'Judith? But she's here, you idiot! You saw her yourself when you arrived!'

'You saw her, Glanville. I didn't. But I realized that you'd brought her here with you when you started playing her part, using that mincing crazy voice of yours. You weren't very keen on my going out to the module. Then, last night, you brought something from it for me.'

Thornwald walked across the veranda, averting his eyes from the wreck of the module. He remembered the insane vision he had seen the previous evening as he sat watching for Glanville, waiting for this madman who had absconded with the body of his murdered wife. The timewinds had carried across to him the image of a spectral ship whose rotting timbers had formed a strange portcullis in the evening sun a dungeongrate. Then, suddenly, he had seen a terrifying apparition walking across this sea of blood towards him, the nightmare commander of this ship of Hell, a tall woman with the slow rhythmic stride of his own requiem. 'Her locks were yellow as gold... the nightmare lifeindeath was she, who thicks man's blood with cold.' Aghast* at the sight of Judith's head on this lamia, he had barely recognized Glanville, her mad Mariner, bearing her head like a wild lantern before he snatched the pistol.

Glanville flexed his shoulders against the ropes. 'Captain, I don't know about Judith... she's not too happy here, and we've never got on with just ourselves for company. I'd like to come with you.'

'I'm sorry, Glanville, there's not much point you're in the right place here.'

'But, Captain, aren't you exceeding your authority? If there is a murder charge..

'Not "captain", Glanville "commissioner". I was promoted before I left, and that gives me absolute discretion in these cases. I think this planet is remote enough; no one's likely to come here and disturb you.'

He went over to Glanville and looked down at him, then took a clasp knife from his pocket and laid it on the table. 'You should be able to get a hand around that if you stand up. Goodbye, Glanville, I'll leave you here in your gilded hell.'

'But Thornwald... Commissioner!' Glanville swung himself round in the chair. 'Where's Judith? Call her.'

Thornwald glanced back across the sunlight. 'I can't, Glanville. But you'll see her soon. This evening, when the timewinds blow, they'll bring her back to you, a dead woman from the dead sea.'

He set off towards the capsule across the jewelled sand.

1966.

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race Author's note. The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, raised many questions, not all of which were answered by the Report of the Warren Commission. It is suggested that a less conventional view of the events of that grim day may provide a more satisfactory explanation. In particular, Alfred larry's The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race gives us a useful lead.

Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.

Kennedy got off to a bad start.

There was a governor in his car and its speed remained constant at about fifteen miles an hour. However, shortly afterwards, when the governor had been put out of action, the car accelerated rapidly, and continued at high speed along the remainder of the course.

The visiting teams. As befitting the inauguration of the first production car race through the streets of Dallas, both the President and the VicePresident participated. The VicePresident, Johnson, took up his position behind Kennedy on the starting line. The concealed rivalry between the two men was of keen interest to the crowd. Most of them supported the home driver, Johnson.

The starting point was the Texas Book Depository, where all bets were placed on the Presidential race. Kennedy was an unpopular contestant with the Dallas crowd, many of whom showed outright hostility. The deplorable incident familiar to us all is one example.

The course ran downhill from the Book Depository, below an overpass, then onto the Parkland Hospital and from there to Love Air Field. It is one of the most hazardous courses in downhill motorracing, second only to the Sarajevo track discontinued in 1914.

Kennedy went downhill rapidly. After the damage to the governor the car shot forward at high speed. An alarmed track official attempted to mount the car, which continued on its way, cornering on two wheels.

Turns. Kennedy was disqualified at the Hospital, after taking a turn for the worse. Johnson now continued the race in the lead, which he maintained to the finish.

The flag. To signify the participation of the President in the race Old Glory was used in place of the usual chequered square. Photographs of Johnson receiving his prize after winning the race reveal that he had decided to make the flag a memento of his victory.

Previously, Johnson had been forced to take a back seat, as his position on the starting line behind the President indicates. Indeed, his attempts to gain a quick lead on Kennedy during the false start were forestalled by a track steward, who pushed Johnson to the floor of his car.

In view of the confusion at the start of the race, which resulted in Kennedy, clearly expected to be the winner on past form, being forced to drop out at the Hospital turn, it has been suggested that the hostile local crowd, eager to see a win by the home driver Johnson, deliberately set out to stop him completing the race. Another theory maintains that the police guarding the track were in collusion with the starter, Oswald. After he finally managed to give the sendoff Oswald immediately left the race, and was subsequently apprehended by track officials.

Johnson had certainly not expected to win the race in this way. There were no pit stops.

Several puzzling aspects of the race remain. One is the presence of the President's wife in the car, an unusual practice for racing drivers. Kennedy, however, may have maintained that as he was in control of the ship of state he was therefore entitled to captain's privileges.

The Warren Commission. The rakeoff on the book of the race. In their report, prompted by widespread complaints of foul play and other irregularities, the syndicate laid full blame on the starter, Oswald.

Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?

1966.

Cry Hope, Cry Fury!

Again last night, as the dusk air moved across the desert from Vermilion Sands, I saw the faint shiver of rigging among the reefs, a topmast moving like a silver lantern through the rock spires. Watching from the veranda of my beachhouse, I followed its course towards the open sandsea, and saw the spectral sails of this spectral ship. Each evening I had seen the same yacht, this midnight schooner that slipped its secret moorings and rolled across the painted sea. Last night a second yacht set off in pursuit from its hiding place among the reefs, at its helm a palehaired steerswoman with the eyes of a sad Medea. As the two yachts fled across the sandsea I remembered when I had first met Hope Cunard, and her strange affair with the Dutchman, Charles Rademaeker Every summer during the season at Vermilion Sands, when the town was full of tourists and avantgarde film companies, I would close my office and take one of the beachhouses by the sandsea five miles away at Ciraquito. Here the long evenings made brilliant sunsets of the sky and desert, crossing the sails of the sandyachts with hieroglyphic shadows, signatures of all the strange ciphers of the desert sea. During the day I would take my yacht, a Bermudarigged sloop, and sail towards the dunes of the open desert. The strong thermals swept me along on a wake of gilded sand.

Hunting for rays, I sometimes found myself carried miles across the desert, beyond sight of the coastal reefs that presided like eroded deities over the hierarchies of sand and wind. I would drive on after a fleeing school of rays, firing the darts into the overheated air and losing myself in an abstract landscape composed of the flying rays, the undulating dunes and the triangles of the sails. Out of these materials, the barest geometry of time and space, came the bizarre figures of Hope Cunard and her retinue, like illusions born of that sea of dreams.

One morning I set out early to hunt down a school of white sandrays I had seen far across the desert the previous day. For hours I moved over the firm sand, avoiding the sails of other yachtsmen, my only destination the horizon. By noon I was beyond sight of any landmarks, but I had found the white rays and sped after them through the rising dunes. The twenty rays flew on ahead, as if leading me to some unseen destination.

The dunes gave way to a series of walled plains crossed by quartz veins.

Skirting a wide ravine whose ornamented mouth gaped like the door of a halfsubmerged cathedral, I felt the yacht slide to one side, a puncture in its starboard tyre. The air seemed to gild itself around me as I lowered the sail.

Kicking the flaccid tyre, I took stock of the landscape submerged sandreefs, an ocean of dunes, and the shell of an abandoned yacht half a mile away near the jagged mouth of a quartz vein that glittered at me like the jaws of a jewelled crocodile. I was twenty miles from the coast and my only supplies were a vacuum flask of iced Martini in the sail locker.

The rays, directed by some mysterious reflex, had also paused, settling on the crest of a nearby dune. Arming myself with the speargun, I set off towards the wreck, hoping to find a pump in its locker.

The sand was like powdered glass. Six hundred yards further on, when the raffia soles had been cut from my shoes, I turned back. Rather than exhaust myself, I decided to rest in the shade of the mainsail and walk back to Ciraquito when darkness came. Behind me, my feet left bloody prints in the sand.

I was sitting against the mast, bathing my torn feet in the cold Martini, when a large white ray appeared in the air overhead. Detaching itself from the others, who sat quietly on a distant crest, it had come back to inspect me. With wings fully eight feet wide, and a body as large as a man's, it flew monotonously around me as I sipped at the last of the lukewarm Martini. Despite its curiosity, the creature showed no signs of wanting to attack me.

Ten minutes later, when it still circled overhead, I took the speargun from the locker and shot it through its left eye. Transfixed by the steel bolt, its crashing form drove downwards into the sail, tearing it from the mast, and plunged through the rigging on to the deck. Its wing struck my head like a blow from the sky.

For hours I lay in the empty sandsea, burned by the air, the giant ray my dead companion. Time seemed suspended at an unchanging noon, the sky full of mock suns, but it was probably in the early afternoon when I felt an immense shadow fall across the yacht. I lifted myself over the corpse beside me as a huge sandschooner, its silver bowsprit as long as my own craft, moved through the sand on its white tyres. Their faces hidden by their dark glasses, the crew watched me from the helm.

Standing with one hand on the cabin rail, the brass portholes forming haloes at her feet, was a tall, narrowhipped woman with blonde hair so pale she immediately reminded me of the Ancient Mariner's Nightmare LifeinDeath. Her eyes gazed at me like dark magnolias. Lifted by the wind, her opal hair, like antique silver, made a chasuble of the air.

Unsure whether this strange craft and its crew were an apparition, I raised the empty Martini flask to the woman. She looked down at me with eyes crossed by disappointment. Two members of the crew ran over to me. As they pulled the body of the sandray off my legs I stared at their faces. Although smoothshaven and sunburnt, they resembled masks.

This was my rescue by Hope Cunard. Resting in the cabin below, while one of the crew wrapped the wounds on my feet, I could see her palehaired figure through the glass roof. Her preoccupied face gazed across the desert as if searching for some far more important quarry than myself.

She came into the cabin half an hour later. She sat down on the bunk at my feet, touching the white plaster with a curious hand.

'Robert Melville are you a poet? You were talking about the Ancient Mariner when we found you.'

I gestured vaguely. 'It was a joke. On myself.' I could hardly tell this remote but beautiful young woman that I had first seen her as Coleridge's nightmare witch, and added: 'I killed a sandray that was circling my yacht.'

She played with the jade pendants lying in emerald pools in the folds of her white dress. Her eyes presided over her pensive face like troubled birds. Apparently taking my reference to the Mariner with complete seriousness, she said: 'You can rest at Lizard Key until you're better. My brother will mend your yacht for you. I'm sorry about the rays they mistook you for someone else.'

As she sat there, staring through the porthole, the great schooner swept silently over the jewelled sand, the white rays moving a few feet above the ground in our wake. Later I realized that they had brought back the wrong prey for their mistress.

Within two hours we reached Lizard Key where I was to stay for the next three weeks. Rising out of the thermal rollers, the island seemed to float upon the air, the villa with its terrace and jetty barely visible in the haze. Surrounded on three sides by the tall minarets of the sandreefs, both villa and island had sprung from some mineral fantasy of the desert. Rock spires rose beside the pathway to the villa like cypresses, pieces of wild sculpture growing around them.

'When my father first found the island it was full of gila monsters and basilisks,' Hope explained as I was helped up the pathway. 'We come here every summer now to sail and paint.'

At the terrace we were greeted by the two other tenants of this private paradise Hope Cunard's halfbrother, Foyle, a young man with white hair brushed forward over his forehead, a heavy mouth and pocked cheeks, who stared down at me from the balcony like some moody beach Hamlet; and Hope's secretary, Barbara Quimby, a plainfaced sphinx in a black bikini with bored eyes like twoway mirrors.

Together they watched me being brought up the steps behind Hope. The look of expectancy on their faces changed to polite indifference the moment I was introduced. Almost before Hope could finish describing my rescue they wandered off to the beachchairs at the end of the terrace.

During the next few days, as I lay on a divan near by, I had more time to examine this strange menage. Despite their dependence upon Hope, who had inherited the island villa from her father, their attitude seemed to be that of palace conspirators, with their private humour and secret glances. Hope, however, was unaware of these snide asides. Like the atmosphere within the villa itself, her personality lacked all focus and her real attention was elsewhere.

Whom had Foyle and Barbara Quimby expected Hope to bring back? What navigator of the sandsea was Hope Cunard searching for in her schooner with her flock of white rays? To begin with I saw little of her, though now and then she would stand on the roof of her studio and feed the rays that flew across to her from their eyries in the rock spires. Each morning she sailed off in the schooner, her opalhaired figure with its melancholy gaze scanning the desert sea. The afternoons she spent alone in her studio, working on her paintings. She made no effort to show me any of her work, but in the evenings, as the four of us had dinner together, she would stare at me over her liqueur as if seeing my profile within one of her paintings.

'Shall I do a portrait of you, Robert?' she asked one morning. 'I see you as the Ancient Mariner, with a white ray around your neck.'

I covered the plaster on my feet with the dragongold dressing gown left behind, I assumed, by one of her lovers. 'Hope, you're making a myth out of me. I'm sorry I killed one of your rays, but believe me, I did it without thinking.'

'So did the Mariner.' She moved around me, one hand on hip, the other touching my lips and chin as if feeling the contours of some antique statue. 'I'll do a portrait of you reading Maldoror.'

The previous evening I had treated them to an extended defence of the surrealists, showing off for Hope and ignoring Foyle's bored eyes as he lounged on his heavy elbows. Hope had listened closely, as if unsure of my real identity.

As I looked at the empty surface of the fresh canvas she ordered to be brought down from her studio, I wondered what image of me would emerge from its blank pigments. Like all paintings produced at Vermilion Sands at that time, it would not actually need the exercise of the painter's hand. Once the pigments had been selected, the photosensitive paint would produce an image of whatever still life or landscape it was exposed to. Although a lengthy process, requiring an exposure of at least four or five days, it had the immense advantage that there was no need for the subject's continuous presence. Given a few hours each day, the photosensitive pigments would anneal themselves into the contours of a likeness.

This discontinuity was responsible for the entire charm and magic of these paintings. Instead of a mere photographic replica, the movements of the sitter produced a series of multiple projections, perhaps with the analytic forms of cubism, or, less severely, a pleasant impressionistic blurring. However, these unpredictable variations on the face and form of the sitter were often disconcerting in their perception of character. The running of outlines, or separation of tonalities, could reveal telltale lines in the texture of skin and features, or generate strange swirls in the sitter's eyes like the epileptic spirals in the last demented landscapes of Van Gogh. These unfortunate effects were all too easily reinforced by any nervous or anticipatory movements of the sitter.

The likelihood that my own portrait would reveal more of my feelings for Hope than I cared to admit occurred to me as the canvas was set up in the library. I lay back stiffly on the sofa, waiting for the painting to be exposed, when Hope's halfbrother appeared, a second canvas between his outstretched hands.

'My dear sister, you've always refused to sit for me.' When Hope started to protest Foyle brushed her aside. 'Melville, do you realize that she's never sat for a portrait in her life! Why, Hope? Don't tell me you're frightened of the canvas? Let's see you at last in your true guise.'

'Guise?' Hope looked up at him with wary eyes. 'What are you playing at, Foyle? That canvas isn't a witch's mirror.'

'Of course not, Hope.' Foyle smiled at her. 'All it can tell is the truth. Don't you agree, Barbara?'

Her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses, Miss Quimby nodded promptly. 'Absolutely. Miss Cunard, it will be fascinating to see what comes out. I'm sure you'll be very beautiful.'

'Beautiful?' Hope stared down at the canvas resting at Foyle's feet. For the first time she seemed to be making a conscious effort to take command of herself and the villa at Lizard Key. Then, accepting Foyle's challenge, and refusing to be outfaced by his brokenlipped sneer, she said: 'All right, Foyle. I'll sit for you. My first portrait you may be surprised what it sees in me.'

Little did we realize what nightmare fish would swim to the surface of these mirrors.

During the next few days our portraits emerged like pale ghosts from the paintings. Each afternoon I would see Hope in the library, when she would sit for her portrait and listen to me reading from Maldoror, but already she was only interested in watching the deserted sandsea. Once, when she was away, sailing the empty dunes with her white rays, I hobbled up to her studio. There I found a dozen of her paintings mounted on trestles in the windows, looking out on the desert below. Sentinels watching for Hope's phantom mariner, they revealed in monotonous detail the contours and texture of the empty landscape.

By comparison, the two portraits developing in the library were far more interesting. As always, they recapitulated in reverse, like some bizarre embryo, a complete phylogeny of modern art, a regression through the principal schools of the twentieth century. After the first liquid ripples and motion of a kinetic phase, they stabilized into the block colours of the hardedge school, and from there, as a thousand arteries of colour irrigated the canvas, into a brilliant replica of Jackson Pollock. These coalesced into the crude forms of late Picasso, in which Hope appeared as a Junoesque madonna with massive shoulders and concrete face, and then through surrealist fantasies of anatomy into the multiple outlines of futurism and cubism. Ultimately an impressionist period emerged, lasting a few hours, a roseate sea of powdery light in which we seemed like a placid domestic couple in the suburban bowers of Monet and Renoir.

Watching this reverse evolution, I hoped for something in the style of Gainsborough or Reynolds, a standing portrait of Hope wearing floral scarlet under an azure sky, a paleskinned English beauty in the grounds of her county house.

Instead, we plunged backwards into the netherworld of Balthus and Gustave Moreau.

As the bizarre outlines of my own figure emerged I was too surprised to notice the equally strange elements in Hope's portrait. At first glance the painting had produced a faithful if stylized likeness of myself seated on the sofa, but by some subtle emphasis of design the scene was totally transformed. The purple curtain draped behind the sofa resembled an immense velvet sail, collapsed against the deck of a becalmed ship, while the spiral bolster emerged as an ornamental prow. Most striking of all, the white lace cushions I lay against appeared as the plumage of an enormous seabird, hung around my shoulders like the anchor fallen from the sky. My own expression, of bitter pathos, completed the identification.

'The Ancient Mariner again,' Hope said, weighing my copy of Maldoror in her hand as she sauntered around the canvas. 'Fate seems to have typecast you, Robert. Still, that's the role I've always seen you in.'

'Better than the Flying Dutchman, Hope?'

She turned sharply, a nervous tic in one corner of her mouth. 'Why did you say that?'

'Hope, who are you looking for? I may have come across him.'

She walked away from me to the window. At the far end of the terrace Foyle was playing some rough game with the sandrays, knocking them from the air with his heavy hands and then pitching them out over the rock spires. The long stings whipped at his pockmarked face.

'Hope...' I went over to her. 'Perhaps it's time I left. There's no point in my staying here. They've repaired the yacht.' I pointed to the sloop moored against the quay, fresh tyres on its wheels. 'Besides..