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 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 some dozen captains, including Hendry, Jordan, and the Reverend Johnstone, a kind of ex officio rear-admiral-was a hangover from the first years when the nucleus of the original settlement had lived in the ship. The freighter sat where she had been sunk in the shallow water, the waves breaking her up, until the slopes of salt produced by the distillation units had driven the water back into the sea. At this stage thousands of emigrants were living in the cars and shacks on the beaches, and the distillation units, run by the citizens' cooperatives that had taken over from the military after the break-out battles, were each producing tons of salt every day. The large freighter had soon been inundated.
"Well, Charles, what have you brought now?" Seated at his desk in the purser's cabin, Hendry looked up as Ransom came in. Waving Ransom into a chair, he peered down the columns of an old leatherbound logbook that he used as a combined ledger and diary. In the intervening years the quiet humor had gone, and only the residue of the conscientious policeman remained. Dour and efficient, but so dedicated to securing the minimum subsistence level for the settlement that he could no longer visualize anything above that meager line, he summed up for Ransom all the dangers and confinements of their limbo.
"Judith sends her love, Captain," Ransom began. "How's the baby coming along?"
Hendry gestured vaguely with his pen. "As well as can be expected."
"Would you like some water for it? I have some outside. I was going to hand it over to the settlement, but I'd be delighted to give you and Julia the first cut."
Hendry glanced sharply at Ransom. "What water is this, Charles? I didn't know you had so much now you were giving it away."