Charles, charity shouldn't be too easy to give!’
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 shoe-marks 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-a-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 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 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
