He crossed the bridge and turned left into a side-road, knowing that sooner or later he would have to abandon the young woman. Her barely conscious determination to stay on reminded him of his own first hopes of isolating himself among the wastes of the new desert, putting an end to time and its erosions. But now a new kind of time was being imposed on the landscape.
"Catherine, I know how you-"
Thirty yards ahead a driverless car rolled across the road. Ransom pressed hard on the brakes, jerking the car to a sudden halt and throwing Catherine forward against the windshield.
He pulled her back onto the seat as a swarm of darksuited men filled the street around them. He picked up the revolver, and then saw a familiar hard plump face under its blond thatch.
"Get them out! Then clear the road!" A dozen hands seized the bonnet, and jerked it up into the air. A long knife flashed in the bosun's brightly scarred hand and cut through the top hose of the radiator. Behind him the tall figure of Jonas hove into view, long arms raised as if feeling his way through darkness.
Ransom restarted the engine and slipped the gear lever into reverse. Flooring the accelerator, he flung the car backwards. The hood slammed down onto the fingers that were tearing at the engine leads, sending up bellows of pain.
Steering over his shoulder, Ransom reversed down the street, hitting the parked vehicles as he swerved from left to right. Catherine leaned weakly against the door, nursing her bruised head with one hand.
Ransom misjudged the corner, and the car jolted to a halt against the side of a truck. Steadying Catherine with one hand, he watched the gang setting off after them. Jonas stood on the roof of a car, one arm pointing like a specter.
Ransom opened his door and pulled Catherine out into the road. She pushed her hair back with a feeble hand.
"Come on!" Taking her hand, he set off along a gravelcovered lane that ran down to the embankment. Helped by the sloping ground, they reached the slip road. Ransom pointed up to the motorbridge. Two men moved along the balustrade. "We'll have to wade across the river."
As the dust clouds rose into the air behind them, there was a shout from the bridge.
Catherine took Ransom's arm. "Over there! Who's that boy?"
"Philip!" Ransom waved vigorously. Philip Jordan was standing near the houseboat on the other side of the river, looking down at the outboard motor Ransom had abandoned. His skiff, secured by the pole, was propped against the shore. With a quick glance at the men signaling from the motorbridge, he sidestepped down the bank. Freeing his pole, he jumped aboard, the craft's momentum carrying it across the channel.
He helped Ransom and Catherine Austen into the craft and pushed off again. A shot rang out in warning. Four or five men, led by Jonas, crossed the slip road and made their way down the embankment. The bosun brought up the rear, a long-barreled rifle in his hands.
Jonas' stiff figure strode down the slope, black boots sending up clouds of dust. His men stumbled behind him, Saul cursing as he slipped and fell on his hands, but Jonas pressed on ahead of them.
The skiff stopped short of the bank as Philip Jordan scanned the river and approaches, uncertain which direction to take. Ransom leaned from the prow across the short interval of water. A bullet sang over their heads like a demented insect. "Philip, forget the boat! We've got to leave now!"
Philip crouched behind his pole as Saul reloaded the rifle. "Doctor, I can't… Quilter is-"
"Damn Quilter!" Ransom waved the pistol at Catherine, who was on her knees, holding tightly to the sides of the craft. "Paddle with your hands! Philip, listen to me-"
Jonas and his men had reached the water's edge, little more than a few boat-lengths away. Saul leveled the rifle at Philip, but Jonas stepped forward and knocked the weapon from his hands. His dark eyes gazed at the occupants of the skiff. He stepped onto a spur of rock, and for fully half a minute, oblivious of the pistol in Ransom's hand, stared down at the boat.
"Philip!" he shouted harshly. "Boy, come here!"
As his name echoed away across the drained river, Philip Jordan turned, his hands clenching the pole for support. He looked up at the hawkfaced man glaring down at him.
"Philip…!" Jonas' voice tolled like a bell over the oily water.
Philip Jordan shook his head slowly, hands nervously grasping at the pole. Above him, like a hostile jury, a line of dark faces looked down from the bridge. Philip seized the pole and lifted it horizontally from the water, as if to bar the way to Jonas.
"Doctor…?" he called tensely over his shoulder.
"The bank, Philip!"
"No!" With a cry, looking back for the last time at the dark figure of Jonas, Philip leaned on the pole and punted the boat upstream toward the drained lake. The men on the bank surged forward, shouting for the rifle, but the skiff darted behind the hulk of a lighter, then swung away again, its prow lifting like an arrow. Philip whipped the pole in and out, the water racing between his hands off the wet shaft.
"I'll go with you, doctor. But first…" he released the pole, then crouched down as the skiff surged across a patch of open water. "… first I must bring my father."
Ransom reached forward to take Catherine's hand. He watched the youth as he maneuvered them swiftly around the bend toward the lake, seeing in his face only the dark arrowlike mask of the black-garbed man standing alone on the shore behind them.
For an hour they followed the residue of the river as it wound across the lake. The channel narrowed, sometimes to little more than fifteen feet in width, at others dividing into thin streams that groped their way among the dunes and mudbanks. Stranded yachts lay on the dry slopes, streaked with the scum-lines of the receding water. The bed of the lake, almost completely drained, was now an inland beach of white dunes covered with pieces of blanched timber and driftwood. Along the bank the dried marshgrass formed a palisade of burnt bristles.
They left the main channel and followed one of the small tributaries. Here and there they passed the remains of an old shack, or a pier jutted out above the remains of grass that had seeded itself the previous summer when the level had already fallen several feet. Working his pole tirelessly, Philip turned the craft like a key through the nexus of creeks, his face hidden behind his shoulder as he avoided Ransom's gaze. Once they stopped, and he ordered them out, then ported the craft across a narrow saddle to the continuation of the stream. They passed the cylinder of an old distillation unit built out on the bed, its leaning towers rising like the barrels of some eccentric artillery in mutiny against the sky. Everywhere the bodies of voles and waterfowl lay among the dried weeds.
At length the stream wound between a series of scrubcovered dunes, and they emerged into a small drained lagoon. In the center, touched briefly by the stream as it disappeared beyond, was an ancient sailing barge, sitting squarely on the caked mud. All the craft they had passed had been stained and streaked with dirt, but the barge was immaculate, its hull shining in the -sunlight in a brilliant patchwork of colors. The brass portholes had been polished that morning. A white-painted landing stage stood by the barge, a trimly roped gangway leading to the- deck. The mast, stripped of its rigging and fitted with a cross-tree, had been carefully varnished to the brass annuhis at its peak.
"Philip, what on earth-?" Ransom began. He felt Catherine's hand warningly on his arm. Philip beached the craft ten feet from the landing stage and beckoned them aboard. He hesitated at the companion-head. "I'll need your help, doctor," he said, in a low, uncertain voice that reminded Ransom of his gruff waifs croak. He pointed to the cabin and deckwork, and added with a faint note of pride: "It's an old wreck, you understand. Put together from any scraps I could find." He led the way down into the dark cabin.