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winding off toward the hidden sea. Ransom changed course as he approached it,
and set off over the open table of shallow salt-basins that extended eastwards
along the coast. He moved in and out of the swells, following the long
gradients that carried the pool under its own momentum. His erratic course
also concealed his original point of departure. Half a mile ahead, when he
passed below a second conveyer, a stout bearded man watched him from one of
the gantries, honing a whalebone spear. Ransom ignored him and continued on
his way.
Below him a semicircle of derelict freighters rose from the saltflats.
Around them, like the hovels erected against the protective walls of a
medieval fortress, was a clutter of small shacks and out-buildings. Some, like
Ransom's, were built from the bodies of old cars salvaged from the beach, but
others were substantial wood and metal huts, equipped with doors and glass
windows, joined together by companionways of galvanized iron. Gray smoke
lifted from the chimneys, conveying an impression of quiet warmth and
industry. A battery of ten large stills on the fore-shore discharged its steam
toward the distant hills.
A wire drift fence enclosed the settlement. As Ransom approached the western
gate, he could see the open surfaces of the huge water reservoirs and breeding
tanks. Each was some two hundred feet long, buttressed by embankments of sand
and shingle. A team of men, heads down in the cold sunlight, were working
silently in one of the tanks, watched from the bank by an overseer holding a
stave. Although three hundred people lived together in the settlement, no one
moved around the central compound. As Ransom knew from his previous visits,
its only activity was work.
Ransom steered his pool over to the gateway, where a few huts gathered around
the watchtower. Two women sat in a doorway, rocking an anemic child. At
various points along the perimeter of the settlement a few subcommunities had
detached themselves from the main compound, either because they were the
original occupants of the site or were too lazy or unreliable to fit into the
puritan communal life. However, all of them possessed some special skill with
which they paid for their places.
Bullen, the gatekeeper, who peered at Ransom from his sentrybox below the
watchtower, carved the paddles used by the sea-trappers. In long racks by the
huts the narrow blades, wired together from pieces of whalebone, dried in the
sunlight. In return, Bullen had been granted proprietary rights to the
gateway. A tall, hunchbacked man with a sallow bearded face, he watched Ransom
suspiciously, then walked slowly across the waterlogged hollows below the
tower.
"Back again?" he said. Despite the infrequency of his visits, Ransom seemed to
worry him in some obscure way, part of the general withdrawal of the
settlement from the world outside. He pointed down at Ransom's pool with a
paddle. "What have you got there?"
"I want to see Captain Hendry," Ransom said.
Grudgingly, Bullen released the gate. As Ransom steered the pool forwards,
Bullen held it back with his paddle. Taking the hint, Ransom swept several
bladefuls of the water into the basin by the tower. Usually Bullen would have
expected a pair of small herring at the least, but from his brief glance at
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Ransom's appearance he seemed to accept that these few gallons of water were
the limit of his wealth.
As the gate closed behind him, Ransom set off toward the compound. The largest
of the freighters, its bows buried under the salt, formed the central tower of
the settlement. Part of the starboard side, facing the shore, had been
dismantled and a series of two- and three-story cabins had been built onto the
decks. The stern castle of the ship, jutting high into the air, was topped by
a large whalebone cross, and was the settlement's chapel. The portholes and
windows had been replaced by primitive stained-glass images of biblical
scenes, in which Christ and his disciples were surrounded by leaping fish and
sea horses.
The settlement's preoccupation with the sea and its creatures could be seen at
a glance. Outside every hut, dozens of small fish dried on trestle tables or
hung from the eaves. Larger fish, groupers and sharks that had strayed into
the shallow water, were suspended from the rails of the ships, while an
immense swordfish, the proudest catch of the settlement and the
Reverend Johnstone's choice of a militant symbol to signify its pride, was
tied to the whalebone mast and hung below the cross, its huge blade pointed
heavenwards.
On the seaward side of the ships, a second team of men was working in one of
the tanks, bending in the cold water as they harvested the edible kelp.
Swathed in rubber tubing, they looked like primitive divers experimenting with
makeshift suits in the shallow water.
Directly below the gangway of the freighter half a dozen round basins had been
cut in the salt dunes, temporary storage tanks for people moving with their
water up and down the coast. Ransom steered his pool into the second of them,
next to a visiting fisherman selling his wares to one of the foremen.
The two men argued together, stepping down into the water and feeling the
plump plaice and soles.
Ransom drove his paddle into the sand by his pool. Half the water had been
lost on the way, and there was barely enough to cover the floor of the basin.
He called up to the look-out on the bridge: "Is Captain Hendry aboard?
Ransom to see him."
The man came down the companionway to the deck, and beckoned Ransom after him.
They walked past the boarded-up portholes. Unpainted for ten years, the hulk
was held together by little more than the tatters of rust. The scars of
shellfire marked the decks and stanchions--the freighter, loaded with fresh
water and supplies, had been stormed by the insurgents breaking out from the
rear areas of the beach, and then shelled from the destroyer now reclining
among the dunes a hundred yards away. Through one of these tears, gaping like
an empty flower in the deck overhead, Ransom could see an old surplice drying
in the sun.
"Wait here. I'll see the Captain."
Ransom leaned on the rail, looking down at the yard below. An old woman in a
black shawl chopped firewood with an ax, another straightened the kelp drying
on a frame in the sunlight. The atmosphere in the settlement was drab and
joyless, like that of an early pilgrim community grimly held together on the
edge of some northern continent. Partly this was due to the vague sense of
remorse still felt by the survivors--the specters of the thousands who had
been killed on the beaches, or driven out in herds to die in the sea, haunted
the bitter salt. But it also reflected the gradual attrition of life, the slow
reduction of variety and movement as the residues of their past lives, the
only materials left to them, sank into the -sterile dunes. This sense of
diminishing possibility, of the erosion of all time and space beyond the
flaccid sand and the draining branches, numbed Ransom's mind.
"The Captain will see you."
Ransom followed the man into the ship. The nautical terminology--there were
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