Yet this stopping of the clock had gained them nothing. The beach was a zone without time, suspended in an endless interval as flaccid and enduring as the wet dunes themselves. Often Ransom remembered the painting by Tanguy that he had once treasured. Its drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time, in some ways seemed a photographic portrait of the salt world of the shore. But the similarity was misleading. On the beach, time was not absent but immobilized, what was new in their lives and relationships they could form only from the residues of the past, from the failures and omissions that persisted into the present like the wreckage and scrap metal from which they built their cabins.
Ransom looked down at Judith as she gazed blankly into the stove. Despite the five years together, the five arctic winters and fierce summers when the salt banks gleamed like causeways of chalk, he felt few bonds between them. The success, if such a term could be used, of their present union, like its previous failure, had been decided by wholly impersonal considerations, above all by the zone of time in which they found themselves.
He stood up. "I'll bring one of the fish down. We'll have some breakfast."
"Can we spare it?"
"No. But perhaps there'll be a tidal wave tonight."
Once every three or four years, in response to some distant submarine earthquake, a huge wave would inundate the coast. The third and last of these, some two years earlier, had swept across the saltflats an hour before dawn, reaching to the very margins of the beach. The hundreds of shacks and dwellings among the dunes had been destroyed by the waist-high water, the reservoir pools washed away in a few seconds. Staggering about in the sliding salt, they had watched everything they owned carried away. As the luminous water swilled around the wrecked ships, the exhausted beachdwellers had climbed up onto the salt tips and sat there until dawn.
Then, in the first light, they had seen a fabulous spectacle. The entire stretch of the draining saltflats was covered with the expiring forms of tens of thousands of stranded fish, every pool alive with crabs and shrimps. The ensuing bloodfeast, as the gulls dived and screamed around the flashing spears, had rekindled the remaining survivors. For three weeks, led by the Reverend Johnstone, they had moved from pool to pool, and gorged themselves like beasts performing an obscene eucharist.
However, as Ransom walked over to the fish tank he was thinking, not of this, but of the first great wave, some six months after their arrival. Then the tide had gathered for them a harvest of corpses. The thousands of bodies they had tipped into the sea after the final bloody battles on the beaches had come back to them, their drowned eyes and blanched faces staring from the shallow pools. The washed wounds, cleansed of all blood and hate, haunted them in their dreams. Working at night, they buried the bodies in deep pits below the first salt tips. Sometimes Ransom would wake and go out into the darkness, half-expecting the washed bones to sprout through the salt below his feet.
Recently Ransom's memories of the corpses, repressed for so many years, had come back to him with added force. As he picked up his paddle and flicked one of the herrings onto the sand, he reflected that perhaps his reluctance to join the settlement stemmed from his identification of the fish with the bodies of the dead. However bitter his memories of the halfwilling part he had played in the massacres, he now accepted that he would have to leave the solitary shack and join the Reverend Johnstone's small feudal world. At least the institutional relics and taboos would allay his memories in a way that he alone could not.
To Judith, as the fish browned in the frying pan, he said: "Grady is going to join the settlement."
"What? I don't believe it!" Judith brushed her hair down across her temple. "He's always been a lone wolf. Did he tell you himself?"
"Not exactly, but-"
"Then you're imagining it." She divided the fish into two equal portions, steering the knife precisely down the midline with the casual skill of a surgeon. "Jonathan Grady is his own master. He couldn't accept that crazy old clergyman and his mad daughters."
Ransom chewed the flavorless steaks of white meat. "He was talking about it while we waited for the tide. It was obvious what was on his mind-he's sensible enough to know we can't last out on our own much longer."
"That's nonsense. We've managed so far."
"But, Judith… we live like animals. The salt is shifting now, every day it carries the sea a few yards further out."
"Then we'll move along the coast. If we want to we can go a hundred miles."
"Not now. There are too many blood feuds. It's an endless string of little communities, trapping their own small pieces of the sea and frightened of everyone else." He picked at the shreds of meat around the fish's skull. "I have a feeling Grady was warning me."
"What do you mean?"
"If he joins the settlement he'll be one of Jordan 's team. He'll lead them straight here. In an obscure way, I think he was telling me he'd enjoy getting his revenge."
"For his father? But that was so far in the past. It was one of those terrible accidents that happen."
"It wasn't really. In fact, the more I think about it the more I'm convinced it was simply a kind of coldblooded experiment, to see how detached from everyone else I was." He shrugged. "If we're going to join the settlement it would be best to get in before Grady does."
Judith slowly shook her head. "Charles, if you go there it will be the end of you. You know that."
An hour later, when she was asleep, Ransom left the cabin and went out into the cold morning light. The sun was overhead, but the dunes remained gray and lifeless, the shallow pools like clouded mirrors. Along the shore the rusting columns of the half-submerged stills rose into the air, their shafts casting striped shadows on the brilliant white slopes of the salt tips. The hills beyond were bright with desert colors, but as usual Ransom turned his eyes from them.
He waited for five minutes to make sure that Judith remained asleep, then picked up his paddle and began to scoop the water from the tank beside the ship. Swept out by the broad blade, the water formed a pool some twenty feet wide, slightly larger than the one he had brought home that morning.
Propelling the pool in front of him, Ransom set off across the dunes, taking advantage of the slight slope that shelved eastwards from the beach. As he moved along he kept a careful watch on the shore. No one would attempt to rob him of so small a pool of water, but his departure might tempt some roving beachcomber to break into the shack. Here and there a set of footprints led up across the firmer salt, but otherwise the surface of the dunes was unmarked. A mile away, toward the sea, a flock of gulls sat on the wet saltflats, but except for the pool of water scurrying along at Ransom's feet, nothing moved across the sky or land.
Chapter 9 – The Stranded Neptune
Like a huge broken-backed lizard, a derelict conveyer crossed the dunes, 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.