As expected, Ransom felt little urge to visit his houseboat. It remained quietly at its mooring, the condensation of a distant private universe.

On Sunday, the last day of this short interregnum, Ransom visited the small Presbyterian church on the corner of Amherst Avenue to hear what he assumed to be the Reverend Johnstone's concluding sermon. During this period the minister had been busy with the few remaining members of his militia, driving about in his jeep with bales of barbed wire and crates of supplies, fortifying their houses for use as strongpoints in the Armageddon to come. Curious to see how Johnstone was responding to the transformation of Larchmont and the city, Ransom walked down to the church and entered the aisle just as the small manually operated organ groaned out its short voluntary.

He took his seat in one of the pews halfway down the nave. Johnstone left the organ, and began to read the lesson from the lectern. The church was almost empty, and Johnstone's strong voice, as belligerent as ever, reverberated off the empty pews. Below him, in the front row, sat his small dove-haired wife and three unmarried daughters, wearing their floral hats. Behind them were the two or three families who still remained, the men's shotguns discreetly out of view.

After the hymn, Johnstone mounted the pulpit and began his sermon, taking as his text chapter IV, verse 8, of the Book of Jonah: _And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live_. After a brief resume of the previous career of Jonah, whose desire for the early destruction of Nineveh and the gentiles he seemed generally to approve, Johnstone went on to compare the booth the Lord had built for Jonah to the east of Nineveh with the church in whose safety they now sat, waiting for the destruction of Mount Royal and the world beyond.

At this point, as Johnstone warmed to his theme, he glanced down the nave with a slight start. Ransom turned and looked over his shoulder. Standing between the pews at the rear of the church, caps in their hands, was a group of some twenty of the fishermen, their thin faces staring down the aisle at the pulpit. For a few moments they stood together, silently listening to Johnstone as he drew breath and continued his peroration. Then they shuffled together into the pews at the back, exposing the sky behind them through the open doors, the billows of smoke drifting across the rooftops from Mount Royal.

Surprised by their appearance in the church, in their black shabby clothes and old boots, Ransom moved down to the end of the pew, from where he could glance back at the fishermen. Their faces had the closed sullen expressions of a group of strikers or unemployed, biding their time until given the word to act.

Below the pulpit there were whispered exchanges, and a gun barrel moved uneasily, but the Reverend Johnstone took these new arrivals in his stride. His eyes roved along the lines of stony faces. Raising his voice, he recapitulated what he had said so far. Then he went on to expand upon his theme, comparing Jonah's wish for the destruction of Nineveh with mankind's unconscious hopes for the end of their present world. Just as the withering of Jonah's gourd by the worm was part of the Lord's design, so they themselves should welcome the destruction of their own homes and livelihoods, and even their very shelter from the drought, knowing that God's grace would come to them only through this final purging fire.

The fishermen watched Johnstone unmovingly, their eyes fixed steadily on his face. One or two leaned forward stiffly, hands clasping the pew in front, but most of them sat upright. Johnstone paused before his homily, and there was a brief shuffle. The entire group of fishermen rose to their feet, and without a backward glance made their way from the church.

The Reverend Johnstone stopped to let them go, quieting the front pews with a raised hand. He eyed the retreating figures with his head to one side, as if trying to sum up their motives for coming to the church. Then, in a lower voice, he called his depleted congregation to prayer, glancing through his raised hands at the open doors.

Ransom waited, and then slipped away down the aisle and stepped out into the sunlight. In the distance he caught a last glimpse of the black-clad figures moving quickly between the cars, the smoke clouds crossing the avenue over their heads.

At his feet, traced in the white dust on the sidewalk outside the porch, was a small fish-shaped sign.

"Doctor."

As he knelt down to examine the sign a hand like a bird's claw sat on his shoulder. He looked up to find the broad, dented face of Quilter gazing at him with his moist eyes.

"Lomax," he said by way of introduction. "He wants you. Now."

Ransom ignored him and followed the loop in the dust with his finger. Quilter leaned against the stump of a tree, listening with a bored expression to the faint sounds of the organ from the church. His ragged clothes were filthy, stained with tar and wine.

Ransom stood up, slowly brushing his hands. "What's the matter with Lomax?"

Quilter looked him up and down. "_You_ tell him," he said offensively. When Ransom refused to be provoked, his big broken face relaxed into a smile, first of grudging respect, which became more and more twisted until all humor had gone and only a bitter parody remained. He tapped his head slyly and said, sotto voce: "Perhaps… water on the brain?" With a cryptic laugh he made off down the avenue, beckoning Ransom after him and potting with his forefinger at the observation platforms on the watchtowers.

Ransom followed him at a discreet interval, on the way collecting his valise from his house. Quilter's oblique comment on Lomax, probably a tip of some sort, might well contain more truth than most people would have given him credit for. Lomax was certainly an obsessed character, and the drought had no doubt inflamed his imagination beyond all limits.

At the guardhouse Quilter pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and opened the gates. He unleashed the two Alsatians fastened to the iron grille. Giving each of them a hard kick in the rump to quiet them down, he led the way up the long drive. Lomax's house, a glass and concrete folly, stood above them on its circular embankment, its jutting balconies and aerial verandas reflecting the sunlight like the casements of a jewelled glacier. The lines of sprinklers had been switched off, and the turf was streaked with yellow, the burnt ochre of the soil showing through at the edges of the colored tile pathways. The swimming pool was silent, and alongside it a large green tanker was pumping the remains of the water out through a convoluted metal hose. The diesel thumped with a low monotonous thirst, and the driver watched the ornamental floor appear with weary eyes.

The hallway, however, was still pleasantly cool, the marble floor crossed by a set of wet footprints.

Lomax was in his suite on the first floor. He sat back against the bolster on the gilt bed, fully dressed in his white silk suit, like a pasha waiting for his court to assemble. Without moving his head, he waved his silvertopped cane at Ransom.

"Do come in, Charles," he called in his clipped creamy voice. "How kind of you, I feel better already." He tapped the wicker rocking chair drawn up beside the bed. "Sit down here where I can see you." Still not moving his head or shoulders, he shook his cane at Quilter, who stood grinning in the doorway. "All right, my boy, away with you! There's work to be done. If you find any of those lackeys of mine, turn the dogs on them!"

When Quilter had gone, the Alsatians pawing frantically at the floor in the hall, Lomax inclined his head and peered down at Ransom. His small face with its arrogant features wore an expression of puckish charm.

"My dear Charles, I do apologize for sending Quilter to you, but the servants have left me. Can you believe it, the ingratitude! But the Gadarene rush is on, nothing will stop them…" He sighed theatrically, then winked at Ransom and confided coarsely: "Bloody fools, aren't -they? What are they going to do when they get to the sea-swim?"

He sat back with an affected rictus of pain and gazed limply at the decoated ceiling, like a petulant Nero overwhelmed by the absurdity and ingratitude of the world. Ransom watched the performance with a tolerant smile. The pose, he knew, was misleading. Under the soft, cupidlike exterior, Lomax's face was hard and rapacious, there was something almost reptilian about the gray hooded eyes.

"What's the matter?" Ransom asked him. "You look all right."

"Well, I'm not, Charles." Lomax raised his cane and gestured toward his right ear. "A drop of water from that confounded pool jumped into it, for a day I've been carrying the Atlantic Ocean around in my- head. I feel as if I'm turning into an oyster."

He waited patiently as Ransom sat back and laughed at the intended irony of this, eyes half-closed with pleasure. Ransom was one of the few people to appreciate his Fabergé style without any kind of moral reservation-everyone else was faintly shocked, for which Lomax despised them ("Mankind's besetting sin, Charles," he once complained, "is to sit in judgment on its fellows"), or viewed him uneasily from a safe distance. In part this reaction was based on an instinctive revulsion from Lomax's ambiguous physical makeup, and the sense that his whole personality was based on, and even exploited, precisely these areas.

Yet Ransom felt that this was to misjudge him. Just as his own rather stratified personality reflected his preoccupation with the vacuums and drained years of his memory, so Lomax's had been formed by his intense focus upon the immediate present, his crystallization on the razor's edge of the momentary impulse. In a sense, he was a kind of supersaturation of himself, the elegant cartouches of his nostrils and the pomaded waves of his blond hair like the decoration on a baroque pavilion, which seems to contain a greater ambient time than defined by its own space. Suitably pricked, he would probably begin to deliquesce, fizzing out in a brilliant sparkle of contained light.

Ransom opened his valise. "All right, let's have a look. Perhaps I'll find a pearl."

When Lomax settled himself, he examined the ear and syringed it, then pronounced it sound.

"I'm so relieved, Charles, it's your neutral touch. Hippocrates would have been proud of you." He eyed Ransom for a moment, and then continued, his voice more pointed: "While you're here there's another little matter I wanted to raise with you. I've been so busy recently with one thing and another, I haven't had a chance until now." Steadying himself with the cane, he lowered his short legs to the floor, accepting Ransom's hand with a flourish of thanks.