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 took out 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 shotgun. "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 neighborhood!"
The stocky man spat in disgust. "My own neighborhood is six hundred miles away; it's nothing but dust and dead cattle!"
Ransom stepped over to him. "Quiet 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 ground, straightened the brim, and dusted it off. Nodding pugnaciously to Johnstone, he climbed into the car and drove off.
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. He should have stayed where he was. 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 head of cattle dead in the fields, to these poor farming people it must seem like the end of the world."
"Well, it isn't!" Johnstone drummed a fist on the wheel. "That's not for us to decide! There are too many people now living out their fantasies of death and destruction, that's the secret appeal of this drought. I was going to give the fellow some water, Charles, but I wanted him to show a little more courage first."
"Of course," Ransom said noncommittally. He was relieved when Johnstone let him out at the end of the avenue. On their right, facing the minister's house, 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 brilliant 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 clipped voice calling ironically to someone in the water.
"Magnificent, isn't he?" Johnstone commented. "Much as I detest Lomax, he does prove my point."
Waving to Johnstone, Ransom walked home along the deserted avenue. In the drive outside the house, his car stood by the garage door where he had left it; 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 lay on the seats inside, 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, dimming 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 some forgotten nomad had once made his home.
He let himself into the house, noticing the small shoe marks that carried the dust outside across the carpet, fading as they reached the stairs like the footprints of someone returning from the future. For a moment, as he looked around 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 a terre_.
On the hall floor below the mail slot, he found a thick envelope of government circulars. Ransom carried them into the lounge. He sat down in an armchair and stared through the french windows at the bleached dustbowl that had once been his lawn. Beyond the withered hedges his neighbor's watchtower 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 seawater, 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 ran greasily off the edge of its tray and dripped onto the limp salad below. The smells of sour milk and bad meat made him close the door. An ample stock of canned food 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 moat 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 now a perfect model of a spatio-temporal vacuum, a hole 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 phonograph sat inertly beside the empty fireplace. Ransom switched it on and off, and then remembered an old transistor radio that 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 center 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 some 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 sedan, hat in his hands.
"Come in," Ransom said. With a nod, the little man 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 patiently as Ransom filled a two-gallon can from the sink tap. There was no pressure and the water dribbled in slowly. 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 to the coast."
Grady nodded skeptically. "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 seawater. Getting down onto 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, believe me. You pull out now while you can."
Ransom smiled. "I already have pulled out. Anyway, keep a place for me on the sand." He watched Grady wrap the can in his coat and then bob off down the drive, his eyes moving quickly from left to right as he slipped away between the cars.
Tired by the empty house, Ransom went out into the drive, deciding to wait for Judith there. The fine ash settled slowly 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 of the progress of the drought broadcast from the few radio stations still operating.
The worldwide 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 foodstuffs 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 organized global weather control. A survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization showed that everywhere river levels and water tables were falling. The two-and-a-half million square miles 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 rain forest 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 worldwide 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 from which it should have been evaporating. It needed only the briefest scientific examination to show that here were the origins of the drought.