Two or three months beforehand many of the residents had built wooden towers in their gardens, some of them thirty or forty feet high, equipped with small observation platforms to give them an uninterrupted view of the southern horizon. From this quadrant alone were any clouds expected to appear, generated from moisture evaporated off the surface of the sea.
Halfway down Columbia Drive, as he looked up at the deserted towers, a passing car swerved in front of Ransom, forcing him on to the pavement. It stopped twenty yards ahead.
‘Ransom, is that you? Do you want a lift?’
Ransom crossed the road, recognizing the grey-haired man in a clerical collar—the Reverend Howard Johnstone, minister of the Presbyterian Church at Hamilton.
Johnstone opened the door and moved a shot-gun along the seat, peering at Ransom with a sharp eye.
‘I nearly ran you down,’ he told Ransom, beckoning him to shut the door before he had seated himself. ‘Why the devil are you wearing that beard? There’s nothing to hide from.’
‘Of course, not, Howard,’ Ransom agreed. ‘It’s purely penitential. Actually, I thought it suited me.’
‘It doesn’t. Let me assure you of that.’
A man of vigorous and stubborn temper, the Reverend Johnstone was one of those muscular clerics who intimidate their congregations not so much by the prospect of divine justice at some future date but by the threat of immediate physical retribution in the here and now. Well over six feet tall, his strong head topped by a fierce crown of grey hair, he towered over his parishioners from his pulpit, eyeing each of them in their pews like a bad-tempered headmaster obliged to take a junior form for one day and determined to inflict the maximum of benefit upon them. His long twisted jaw gave all his actions an air of unpredictability, but during the previous months he had become almost the last pillar of the lakeside community. Ransom found his bellicose manner hard to take—something about the suspicious eyes and lack of charity made him doubtful of the minister’s motives—but none the less he was glad to see him. At Johnstone’s initiative a number of artesian wells had been drilled and a local militia recruited ostensibly to guard the church and property of his parishioners, but in fact to keep out the transients moving along the highway to the south.
Recently a curious streak had emerged in Johnstone’s character. He had developed a fierce moral contempt for those who had given up the fight against the drought and retreated to the coast. In a series of fighting sermons preached during the last three or four Sundays he had warned his listeners of the offence they would be committing by opting out of the struggle against the elements. By a strange logic he seemed to believe that the battle against the drought, like that against evil itself, was the local responsibility of every community and private individual throughout the land, and that a strong element of rivalry was to be encouraged between the contestants, brother set against brother, in order to keep the battle joined.
Notwithstanding all this, most of his flock had deserted him, but Johnstone stayed on in his embattled church, preaching his sermons to a congregation of barely half a dozen people.
‘Have you been in hiding for the last week?’ he asked Ransom. ‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘Not at all, Howard,’ Ransom assured him. ‘I went off on a fishing trip. I had to get back for your sermon this Sunday.’
‘Don’t mock me, Charles. Not yet. A last-minute repentance may be better than nothing, but I expect rather more from you.’ He held Ransom’s arm in a powerful grip. ‘It’s good to see you. We need everyone we can muster.’
Ransom looked out at the deserted avenue. Most of the houses were empty, windows boarded and nailed up, swimming pools emptied of their last reserves of water. Lines of abandoned cars were parked under the withering plane trees and the road was littered with discarded cans and cartons. The bright flint-like dust lay in drifts against the fences. Refuse fires smouldered unattended on the burnt-out lawns, their smoke wandering over the roofs.
‘I’m glad I stayed out of the way,’ Ransom said. ‘Has everything been quiet?’
‘Yes and no. We’ve had a few spots of trouble. I’m on my way to something now, as a matter of fact.’
‘What about the police rearguard? Has it gone yet?’
Despite the careful offhandedness of Ransom’s question, Johnstone smiled knowingly. ‘It leaves today, Charles. You’ll have time to say goodbye to Judith. However, you ought to make her stay.’
‘I couldn’t if I wanted to.’ Ransom sat forward and pointed through the windscreen. ‘What’s this?’
They turned into Amherst Avenue and stopped by the church at the corner A group of five or six men, members of Johnstone’s parish militia, stood around a dusty green saloon car, shouting at the driver. Tempers flared in the brittle light, and the men rocked the car from side to side, drumming on the roof with their rifles. Fists began to fly, and a sturdy square-shouldered man wearing a dirty panama hat hurled himself at the men like a berserk terrier. As he disappeared from sight in the mêlée a woman’s voice cried out.
Seizing his shot-gun, Johnstone set of towards them, Ransom behind him. The owner of the saloon was struggling with three men who held him down on his knees. As someone shouted ‘Here’s the Reverend!’ he looked up from the ground with fierce determination, like a heretic forced to unwilling prayer. Watching helplessly from the front seat of the car was a small moon-faced woman. Behind her, the white faces of three children, one a boy of eight, peered through the side window among the bundles and suitcases.
Johnstone pulled the men apart, the shot-gun raised in the air. His burly figure was a good head taller than the others.
‘That’s enough! I’ll deal with him now!’ He lifted the driver to his feet with one hand. ‘Who is he? What’s he been up to?’
Edward Gunn, owner of the local hardware store, stepped forward, an accusing finger raised in front of his beaked grey face. ‘I caught him in the church, Reverend, with a bucket. He was taking water from the font.’
‘The font?’ Johnstone gazed down magisterially at the little driver. With heavy sarcasm he bellowed: ‘Did you want to be baptized? Is that what you wanted, before all the water in the world was gone?’
The stocky man pushed Gunn aside. ‘No, I wanted water to drink! We’ve come three hundred miles today—look at my kids, they’re so dry they can’t even weep!’ He opened his leather wallet and spread out a fan of greasy bills. ‘I’m not asking for charity, I’ll pay good money.’
Johnstone brushed aside the money with the barrel of the shot-gun. ‘We take no cash for water here, son. You can’t buy off the droughts of this world, you have to fight them. You should have stayed where you were, in your own home.’
‘That’s right!’ Edward Gunn cut in. ‘Get back to your own neighbourhood!’
The stocky man spat in disgust. ‘My own neighbourhood is six hundred miles away, it’s nothing but dust and dead cattle!’
Ransom stepped over to him. Johnstone’s bullying presence seemed merely to aggravate their difficulties. To the owner of the saloon he said: ‘Quieten down. I’ll give you some water.’ He tore a sheet from an old prescription pad in his pocket and pointed to the address. ‘Drive around the block and park by the river then walk down to my house. All right?’
‘Well . . .’ The man eyed Ransom suspiciously, then relaxed. ‘Thanks a lot, I’m glad to see there’s one here, at least.’ He picked his panama hat off the groud straightened the brim and dusted it off. Nodding pugnaciously to Johnstone, he climbed into the car and drove away.
Gunn and his fellow vigilantes dispersed among the dead trees, sauntering down the lines of cars.
As he settled his large frame behind the wheel Johnstone said: ‘Kind of you, Charles, but begging the question. There are few places in this country where there aren’t small supplies of local water, if you work hard enough for them.
’
‘I know,’ Ransom said. ‘But see it from his point of view. Thousands of cattle dead in the fields—to these poor farming people it must seem like the end of the world.’
Johnstone drummed a fist on the wheel. ‘That’s not for us to decide! There are too many people now living out their own failures, that’s the secret appeal of this drought. I was going to give the fellow some water, Charles, but I wanted him to show more courage first.’
‘Of course,’ Ransom said noncommittally. Five minutes earlier he had been glad to see Johnstone, but he realized that the clergyman was imposiing his own fantasies on the changing landscape, as he himself had done. He was relieved when Johnstone let him out at the end of the avenue.
On the right, overlooking the mouth of the river as it entered the lake, was the glass-and-concrete mansion owned by Richard Foster Lomax. At one end of the outdoor swimming pool a fountain threw rainbows of light through the air. Taking his ease at the edge of the pool was the strutting figure of Lomax, hands in the pockets of his white silk suit, his ironic voice calling to someone in the water.
Johnstone pointed at Lomax. ‘Much as I detest Lomax, he does prove my point.’ As a parting shot, he leaned out of the window and called after Ransom: ‘Remember, Charles, charity shouldn’t be too easy to give!’
6
THE CRYING LAND
MUSING ON THIS callous but shrewd criticism of his own motives, Ransom walked home along the deserted avenue. In the drive outside the house his car stood by the garage door, but for some reason he found it difficult to recognize, as if he were returning home after a lapse not merely of a week but of several years. A light coating of dust covered the bodywork and seats, as if the car were already a distant memory of itself, the lapsed time condensing on it like dew. This softening of outlines could be seen in the garden, the fine silt on the swing-seats and metal table blurring their familiar profiles. The sills and gutters of the house were covered with the same ash, blunting the image of it in his mind. Watching the dust accumulate against the walls Ransom could almost see it several years ahead, reverting to a primitive tumulus, a mastaba of white ash in which a forgotten nomad had once made his home.
He let himself into the house, noticing the small shoemarks that carried the dust across the carpet, fading as they reached the stairs like the footprint of someone returning from the future. For a moment, as he looked at the furniture in the hall, Ransom was tempted to open the windows and let the wind inundate everything, obliterating the past, but fortunately, during the previous years, both he and Judith had used the house as little more than a pied à terre.
On the hall floor below the letter-box he found a thick envelope of government circulars. Ransom carried them into the lounge. He sat down in an armchair and looked out through the french windows at the bleached dust-bowl that had once been his lawn. Beyond the withered hedges his neighbour’s watch-tower rose into the air, but the smoke from the refuse fires veiled the view of the lake and river.
He glanced at the circulars. These described, successively, the end of the drought and the success of the rain-seeding operations, the dangers of drinking sea-water, and, lastly, the correct procedure for reaching the coast.
He stood up and wandered around the house, uncertain how to begin the task of mobilizing its resources. In the refrigerator melted butter dripped on to the tray below. The smells of sour milk and bad meat made him close the door. A stock of canned foods and cereals stood on the pantry shelves, and a small reserve of water lay in the roof tank, but this was due less to foresight than to the fact that, like himself, Judith took most of her meals out.
The house reflected this domestic and personal vacuum. The neutral furniture and decorations were as anonymous and free of associations as those of a motel—indeed, Ransom realized, they had been unconsciously selected for just this reason. In a sense the house was a perfect model of a spatio-temporal vacuum, inserted into the continuum of his life by the private alternate universe in the houseboat on the river. Walking about the house he felt more like a forgotten visitor than its owner, a shadowy and ever more evasive double of himself.
The radiogram sat inertly beside the empty fireplace. Ransom switched it on and off, and then remembered an old transistor radio which Judith had bought. He went upstairs to her bedroom. Most of her cosmetic bric-à-brac had been cleared away from the dressing table, and a single line of empty bottles was reflected in the mirror. In the centre of the bed lay a large blue suitcase, crammed to the brim.
Ransom stared down at it. Although its significance was obvious, he found himself, paradoxically, wondering whether Judith was at last coming to stay with him. Ironic inversions of this type, rather than scenes of bickering frustration, had characterized the slow winding-down of their marriage, like the gradual exhaustion of an enormous clock that at times, relativistically, appeared to be running backwards.
There was a tentative tap on the kitchen door. Ransom went downstairs and found the owner of the green saloon, hat in his hands. With a nod, he stepped into the kitchen. He walked about stiffly, as if unused to being inside a house. ‘Are your family all right?’ Ransom asked.
‘Just about. Who’s that crackpot down by the lake?’
‘The concrete house with the swimming pool?—one of the local eccentrics. I shouldn’t worry about him.’
‘He’s the one who should be worrying,’ the little man retorted. ‘Anyone that crazy is going to be in trouble soon.’
He waited as Ransom filled a two-gallon can from the sink tap. There was no pressure and the water dribbled in. When Ransom handed him the can he seemed to switch himself on, as if he had suspended judgment on the possibility of receiving the water until it made physical contact with his hands.
‘It’s good of you, doctor. Grady’s the name, Matthew Grady. This’ll keep the kids going to the coast.’
‘Drink some yourself. You look as if you need it. It’s only a hundred miles.’
Grady nodded sceptically. ‘Maybe. But I figure the last couple of miles will be really hard going. Could take us a whole two days, maybe three. You can’t drink sea-water. Getting down on to the beach is only the start.’ At the door he added, as if the water in his hand compelled him to reciprocate at least a modicum of good advice: ‘Doctor, things are going to be rough soon. You pull out now while you can.’
Ransom smiled at this. ‘I already have pulled out. Anyway, keep a place for me on the sand.’ He watched Grady wrap the can in his coat and bob off down the drive, eyes moving from left to right as he slipped away between the cars.
Unable to relax in the empty house, Ransom decided to wait for Judith in the drive. The fine ash settled through the air from the unattended fires, and he climbed into the car, dusting the seats and controls. He switched on the radio and listened to the intermittent news reports broadcast from the few radio stations still operating.
The world-wide drought now in its fifth month was the culmination of a series of extended droughts that had taken place with increasing frequency all over the globe during the previous decade. Ten years earlier a critical shortage of world food-stuffs had occurred when the seasonal rainfall expected in a number of important agricultural areas had failed to materialize. One by one, areas as far apart as Saskatchewan and the Loire valley, Kazakhstan and the Madras tea country were turned into arid dust-basins. The following months brought little more than a few inches of rain, and after two years these farmlands were totally devastated. Once their populations had resettled themselves elsewhere, these new deserts were abandoned for good.
The continued appearance of more and more such areas on the map, and the added difficulties of making good the world’s food supplies, led to the first attempts at some form of global weather control. A survey by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization showed that everywhere river levels and water tables were falling. The two-and-a-half million square mil
es drained by the Amazon had shrunk to less than half this area. Scores of its tributaries had dried up completely, and aerial surveys discovered that much of the former rainforest was already dry and petrified. At Khartoum, in lower Egypt, the White Nile was twenty feet below its mean level ten years earlier, and lower outlets were bored in the concrete barrage of the dam at Aswan.
Despite world-wide attempts at cloud-seeding, the amounts of rainfall continued to diminish. The seeding operations finally ended when it was obvious that not only was there no rain, but there were no clouds. At this point attention switched to the ultimate source of rainfall—the ocean surface. It needed only the briefest scientific examination to show that here were the origins of the drought.
Covering the off-shore waters of the world’s oceans, to a distance of about a thousand miles from the coast, was a thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air-water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above. Although the structure of these polymers was quickly identified, no means was found of removing them. The saturated linkages produced in the perfect organic bath of the sea were completely non-reactive, and formed an intact seal broken only when the water was violently disturbed. Fleets of trawlers and naval craft equipped with rotating flails began to ply up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, and along the sea-boards of Western Europe, but without any long-term effects. Likewise, the removal of the entire surface water provided only a temporary respite—the film quickly replaced itself by lateral extension from the surrounding surface, recharged by precipitation from the reservoir below.