Three hundred yards to his right he caught a glimpse of Jonathan Grady propelling his pool through the winding channels toward his shack below a ruined salt-conveyer. Barely seventeen years old, he had been strong enough to take almost half the stolen water for himself, and drove it along untiingly.
The other four members of the band had disappeared among the saltflats. Ransom pushed himself ahead, the salty air stinging the weal on his face. By luck Jordan 's paddle had caught him with the flat of its blade, or he would have been knocked unconscious and carried off to the summary justice of the Johnstone settlement. There his former friendship with the Reverend Johnstone, long-forgotten after ten years, would have been. little help. It was now necessary to go out a full mile from the shore to trap the sea-the salt abandoned during the previous years had begun to slide off the inner beach areas, raising the level of the offshore flats-and the theft of water was becoming the greatest crime for the communities along the coast.
Ransom shivered in the cold light, and tried to squeeze the moisture from the damp rags beneath his suit of rubber strips. Sewn together with pieces of fishgut, the covering leaked at a dozen places. He and the other members of the band had set out three hours before dawn, following Jordan and his team over the gray dunes. They hid themselves in the darkness by the empty channel, waiting for the tide to turn, knowing that they had only a few minutes to steal a small section of the lake. But for the need to steer the main body of water to the reservoir at the settlement, Jordan and his men would have caught them. One night soon, no doubt, they would deliberately sacrifice their catch to rid themselves forever of Ransom.
As Ransom moved along beside the pool, steering it toward the distant tower of the wrecked lightship whose stern jutted from the sand a quarter of a mile away, he automatically counted and recounted the fish swimming in front of him, wondering how long he could continue to prey on Jordan and his men; By now the sea was so far away, the shore so choked with salt, that only the larger and more skillful teams could muster enough strength to trap a sizable body of water and carry it back to the reservoirs. Three years earlier, Ransom and the young Grady had been able to cut permanent channels through the salt, and at high tide enough water flowed down them to carry small catches of fish and crabs. Now, however, as the whole area had softened, the wet sliding salt made it impossible to keep any channel open for more than twenty yards, unless a huge team of men were used, digging the channel afresh as they moved ahead of the stream.
The remains of one of the metal conveyers jutted from the dunes ahead. Small pools of water gathered around the rusting legs, and Ransom began to run faster, paddle whirling in his hands as he tried to gain enough momentum to sweep some of this along with him. Exhausted by the need to keep up a brisk trot, he tripped on to his knees, then stood up and raced after the pool as it approached the conveyer.
A fish flopped at his feet, twisting on the salt slope. Leaving it, Ransom rushed on after the pool, and caught up with it as it swirled through the metal legs. Lowering his head, he whipped the water with the paddle, and carried the pool over the slope into the next hollow.
Despite this slight gain, less than two-thirds of the original pool remained when he reached the lightship. To his left the sunlight was falling on the slopes of the salt tips, lighting up the faces of the hills behind them, but Ransom ignored these intimations of warmth and color. He steered the pool toward the small basin near the starboard bridge of the ship. This narrow tank, twenty yards long and ten wide, he had managed to preserve over the years by carrying stones and pieces of scrap metal down from the shore, and each day beating the salt around them to a firm crust. The water was barely three inches deep, and a few edible kelp and water anemones, Ransom's sole source of vegetable food, floated limply at one end. Often Ransom had tried to breed fish in the pool, but the water was too saline, and the fish invariably died within a few hours. In the reservoirs at the settlement, with their more dilute solutions, the fish lived for months. Ransom, however, unless he chose to live on dried kelp five days out of six, was obliged to go out almost every morning to trap and steal the sea.
He watched the pool as it slid into the tank like a tired snake, and then worked the wet bank with his paddle, squeezing the last water from the salt. The few fish swam up and down in the steadying current, nibbling at the kelp. Counting them again, Ransom followed the line of old boiler tubes that ran from, the tank to the fresh-water still next to his shack. He had roofed it in with pieces of metal plate from the cabins of the lightship, and with squares of old sacking. Opening the door, he listened for the familiar bubbling sounds, and then saw with annoyance that the flame under the boiler was set too low. The wastage of fuel, every ounce of which had to be scavenged with increasing difficulty from the vehicles buried beneath the shore, made him feel sick with frustration. A can of gasoline sat on the floor. He poured some into the tank, then turned up the flame and adjusted it, careful, despite his annoyance, not to overheat the unit. Using this dangerous and unpredictable fuel, scores of stills had exploded over the years, killing or maiming their owners.
He examined the condenser for any leaks, and then raised the lid of the water receptacle. An inch of clear water lay in the pan. He decanted it carefully into an old whisky bottle, raising the funnel to his lips to catch the last intoxicating drops.
He walked over to the shack, touching his cheek, conscious that the bruised skin would show through his coarse stubble. Overhead the sunlight shone on the curving sternplates of the wrecked lightship, giving the portholes a glassy opaque look like the eyes of dead fish. In fact, this stranded leviathan, submerged beyond sight of the sea in this concentration of its most destructive element, had rotted as much as any whale would have done in ten years. Often Ransom entered the hulk, searching for pieces of piping or valve gear, but the engine room and gangways had rusted into grotesque hanging gardens of corroded metal.
Below the stern, partly sheltered from the prevailing easterly winds by the flat blade of the rudder, was Ransom's shack. He had built it from the rusty motorcar bodies he had hauled down from the shore and piled on top of one another. Its bulging shell, puffed out here and there by a car's bulbous nose or trunk, resembled the carapace of a cancerous turtle.
The central chamber inside, floored with wooden deck planks, was lit by a single fish-oil lamp when Ransom entered. Suspended from a chassis above, it swung slowly in the draughts moving through the cracks between the cars.
A small gasoline, stove, fitted with a crude flue, burned in the center of the room. Two metal beds were drawn up against a table beside it. Lying on one of them, a patched blanket across her knees, was Judith Ransom. She looked up at Ransom, her dented temple casting an oblique shadow across the lace-like burn on her cheek. Since the accident she had made no further attempt to disguise the dent in her temple, and her graying hair was tied behind her neck in a simple knot.
"You're late," she said. "Did you catch anything?"
Ransom sat down, and slowly began to peel off the rubber suit. "Five," he told her. He rubbed his cheek painfully, aware that he and Judith now shared the same facial stigma. "Three of them are quite big-there must be a lot to feed on out at sea. I had to leave one behind."
"For heaven's sake, why?" Judith sat up, her face sharpening. "We've got to give three to Grady, and you know he won't take small ones! That leaves us with only two for today!" She glanced about the shack with wavering desperation, as if hoping that in some magical way a small herring might materialize for her in each of the dingy corners. "I can't understand you, Charles. You'll have to go out again tonight."
Giving up the attempt to pull off his thighboots-like his suit, made from the inner tubes of car ties-Ransom leaned back across the bed. "Judith, I can't. I'm exhausted as it is." Adopting the wheedling tone she herself had used, he went on: "We don't want me to be ill again, do we?" He smiled at her encouragingly, turning his face from the lantern so that she would not see the weal. "Anyway, they won't be going out again tonight. They brought in a huge lake of water."
"They always do." Judith gestured with a febrile hand. She had not yet recovered from Ransom's illness. The task of nursing him and begging for food had been bad enough, but faded into the merest trifle compared with the insecurity of being without the breadwinner for two weeks. "Can't you go out to the sea and fish there? Why do you have to steal water all the time?"
Ransom let this reproof pass. He pressed his frozen hands to the stove. "You can never reach the sea, can't you understand? There's nothing but salt all the way. Anyway, I haven't a net."
"Charles, what's the matter with your face? Who did that?"
For a moment her indignant tone rallied Ransom's spirits, a display of that self-willed temper of old that had driven her from the Johnstone settlement five years earlier. It was this thin thread of independence that Ransom clung to, and he was almost glad of the injury for revealing it.
"We had a brief set-to with them. One of, the paddle blades caught me."
"My God! Whose, I'd like to know? Was it Jordan 's?" When Ransom nodded she said with cold bitterness: "One of these days someone will have his blood."
"He was doing his job."
"Rubbish. He picks on you deliberately." She looked at Ransom critically, and then managed a smile. "Poor Charles."
Pulling his boots down to his ankles, Ransom crossed the hearth and sat down beside her, feeling the pale warmth inside her shawl. Her brittle fingers kneaded his shoulders and then brushed his graying hair from his forehead. Huddled beside her inside the blanket, one hand resting limply on her thin thighs, Ransom gazed around the drab interior of the shack. The decline in his life in the five years since Judith had come to live with him needed no underlining, but he realized that this was part of the continuous decline of all the beach settlements. It was true that he now had the task of feeding them both, and that Judith made little contribution to their survival, but she did at least guard their meager fish and water stocks while he was away. Raids on the isolated outcasts had now become more frequent.