"I can't spare the water. The bird's almost dead," Ransom said firmly.

"That's wrong, doctor!" Philip steadied himself in the skiff, the bird sliding in a helpless sprawl out of his black gleaming arms. "I know swans-they come back when they're nearly dead." He released the bird and let it flop between his feet. "Look, all I need is one bucket and some soap."

Involuntarily, Ransom glanced up at Catherine Austen's villa. In addition to the water tank in the roof, there was a second tank containing two hundred gallons in the pontoon of the houseboat. Some inner caution had prevented him from revealing its existence to Philip Jordan, for which he now despised himself.

"Philip, I'm sorry." He gestured at the sky. "The drought may well go on for another two or three months, perhaps forever. There's got to be an order of priorities."

"There is, doctor!" His face stiff, Philip Jordan seized his aft line and jerked it loose. "All right, I'll find some water. This river still has plenty in it."

Ransom watched him as he paddled off, his strong arms sweeping the skiff in deep surges through the water. Standing in the stern with his legs astride, his back bending, the outstretched wings of the dying bird dipping into the water from the bows, he reminded Ransom of some landlocked mariner and his stricken albatross, deserted by the sea.

In the sunlight the white carcasses of the fish hung from their hooks in the drying sheds, rotating slowly in the warm air. The boathouses were deserted, and the untended fishing craft were beached side by side in the shallows, their nets dragged across the dust. Below the last of the wharfs a huge quantity of smaller fish had been tipped out on to the bank, and the slope was covered with the putrefying silver bodies.

Turning his face from the stench, Ransom looked up at the quay. In the shadows at the back of the boathouse two silent faces watched him, their eyes hidden below the peaks of their caps. All the other fishermen had gone, but these two seemed content to sit there unmovingly, separated from the draining river by the dusty boat across their knees.

Ransom stepped through the fish, his feet sliding on their jellied skins. Fifty yards ahead he found an old dinghy on the bank that would save him the effort of crossing the motorbridge. Pushing off, he reached the opposite shore without needing to paddle, and then retraced his steps along the north bank toward Larchmont.

The image of the fishermen, sitting with their boat like two widows over a coffin, remained in his mind. Across the surface of the lake the pools of evaporating water stirred in the sunlight. Along its southern margins, where the open water had given way before the drought to the creeks and marshes of Philip Jordan's water-world, the channels of damper mud lay among the white beaches like gray fingers. The tall columns and gantries of an experimental distillation unit operated by the municipal authorities rose above the dunes. At intervals along the shore the dark plumes of reed fires lifted into the tinted blue sky from the deserted settlements, like the calligraphic signals of some primitive desert folk.

At the outskirts of Larchmont, Ransom climbed the bank and left the river, crossing an empty waterfront garden to the road behind. Unwashed by the rain, the streets were covered with dust and scraps of paper, the sidewalks strewn with garbage. Tarpaulins had been draped over the swimming pools, and the tattered squares lay about on the ground like ruined tents. The trim lawns shaded by. willows and plane trees, the avenues of miniature palms and rhododendrons had all vanished, leaving a clutter of ramshackle gardens. Already Larchmont was a desert town, built on an isthmus of sand between a drained lake and a forgotten river, sustained only by a few meager water holes.

Two or three months beforehand, many of the residents had built wooden towers in their gardens, some of them thirty or forty feet high, equipped with small observation platforms from which they had an uninterrupted view of the southern horizon. From this quadrant alone were any clouds expected to appear, generated from moisture evaporated off the surface of the sea. As he made his way down Columbia Drive, Ransom looked up at the towers, but none were occupied. Most of his neighbors had left to join the exodus to the coast.

Halfway down Columbia Drive a passing car swerved in front of Ransom, forcing him on to the sidewalk. It stopped twenty yards ahead. The driver opened his door and hailed him.

"Ransom, is that you? Do you want a lift?"

Ransom crossed the road, recognizing the burly, grayhaired man in a clerical collar-the Reverend Howard Johnstone, minister of the Presbyterian Church at Larchmont.

Johnstone opened the door and moved a heavy shotgun along the seat, peering at Ransom with a sharp eye.

"I nearly ran you down," Johnstone told him, beckoning him to shut the door almost before he had climbed in. "Why the devil are you wearing that beard? There's nothing to hide from here."

"Of course not, Howard," Ransom agreed. "It's purely penitential. Actually, I thought it suited me."

"It doesn't. Let me assure you of that."

A man of vigorous and uncertain temper, the Reverend Johnstone was one of those muscular clerics who intimidate their congregations not so much by the prospect of divine justice at some future date as by the threat of immediate physical retribution in the here and now. Well over six feet tall, his strong head topped by a fierce crown of gray hair, he towered over his parishioners from his pulpit, eying each of them in their pews like a bad-tempered headmaster obliged to take a junior form for one day and determined to inflict the maximum of benefit upon them. His long, slightly twisted Jaw gave all his actions an air of unpredictability, but during the previous months he had become almost the last surviving pillar of the lakeside community. Ransom found his befficose manner hard to take-something about the sharp eyes and lack of charity made him suspicious of the minister's motives-but nonetheless he was glad to see him. At Johnstone's initiative a number of artesian wells had been drilled and a local militia recruited, ostensibly to guard the church and property of his parishioners, but in fact to keep out the transients moving along the highway to the south. Recently a curious streak had emerged in Johnstone's character. He had developed a fierce moral contempt for those who had given up the fight against the drought and retreated to the coast. In a series of fighting sermons preached during the last three or four Sundays he had warned his listeners of the offense they would be committing by opting out of the struggle against the elements. By some strange logic he seemed to believe that the battle against the drought, like that against evil itself, was the local responsibility of every community and private individual throughout the land, and that a strong element of rivalry was to be encouraged between the contestants, brother set against brother, in order to keep the battle joined.

Notwithstanding all this, most of his flock had deserted him, but Johnstone stayed on in his embattled church, preaching his hellfire sermons to a congregation of barely half a dozen people. Although his efforts to preserve the status quo had failed, he was still determined to remain in the town.

"Have you been skulking somewhere for the last week?" he asked Ransom. "I thought you'd gone."

"Not at all, Howard," Ransom assured him. "I went off on a fishing trip. I had to get back for your sermon this Sunday."

"Don't mock me, Charles. Not yet. A last-minute repentance may be better than nothing, but I expect rather more from you." He reached out and held Ransom's arm in a powerful grip. "But it's good to see you. We need everyone we can muster."

Ransom looked out at the deserted avenue. Most of the houses were empty, windows boarded and nailed up, swimming pools emptied of their last reserves of water. Lines of abandoned cars were parked under the withering plane trees, and the road was littered with discarded cans and cartons. The bright flintlike dust lay in drifts against the blistered fences. Refuse fires smouldered unattended on the burnt-out lawns, their smoke wandering over the roofs.

"I'm glad I stayed out of the way," Ransom said. "Has everything been quiet?"

"Yes and no. We've had a few spots of trouble. I'm on my way to something now, as a matter of fact."

"What about the police rearguard? Has it gone yet?"

Despite the careful offhandedness of the question, Johnstone turned and smiled knowingly. "It leaves today, Charles. You'll have time to say goodbye to Judith. However, I think you ought to make her stay."

"I couldn't if I wanted to." Ransom sat forward and pointed through the windscreen. "What's this? It looks unpleasant."

They turned into Amherst Avenue and stopped by the church at the corner. A group of five or six men, members of Johnstone's parish militia, stood around a dusty green sedan, shouting and arguing with the driver. Tempers flared in the brittle light, and the men rocked the car from side to side, drumming on the roof with their rifles. Fists began to fly, and a sturdy square-shouldered little man wearing a dirty panama hat hurled himself at the men like a berserk terrier. As he disappeared from sight in the melee, a woman's voice cried out plaintively.

Seizing his shotgun from the car, Johnstone set off toward them, Ransom behind him. The owner of the sedan was struggling with three men who held him down on his knees. As someone shouted "Here's the Reverend!" he looked up from the ground with fierce determination, like a heretic forced to unwilling prayer. Watching from the front seat of the car was a small moonfaced woman with an expression of helpless panic in her tired eyes. Behind her, the white faces of three children, one a boy of eight, peered through the side window among the bundles and suitcases.

Johnstone pulled the men apart, the shotgun raised in the air.

"All right, that's enough! I'll deal with him now!" He lifted the driver to his feet with one hand. "Who is he? What's he been up to?"

Edward Gunn, owner of the local hardware store, stepped forward, an accusing finger raised in front of his beaked gray face. "I caught him in the church, Reverend, with a bucket. He was taking water from the font."

"The font?" Johnstone gazed down magisterially at the little driver. "Did you want to be baptized? Is that what you wanted, before all the water in the world was gone?"