J. Ballard - The Drought

The house reflected this domestic and personal vacuum. The neutral furniture and decorations were as anonymous and free of associations as those of a motel-indeed, Ransom realized, they had been unconsciousLy selected for just this reason. In a sense the house was now a perfect model of a spatio-temporal vacuum, a hole inserted into the continuum of his life by the private alternate universe in the houseboat on the river. Walking about the house, he felt more like a forgotten visitor than its owner, a shadowy and ever more evasive double of himself.

The phonograph sat inertly beside the empty fireplace. Ransom switched it on and off, and then remembered an old transistor radio that Judith had bought. He went upstairs to her bedroom. Most of her cosmetic bric-à-brac had been cleared away from the dressing table, and a single line of empty bottles was reflected in the mirror. In the center of the bed lay a large blue suitcase, crammed to the brim.

Ransom stared down at it. Although its significance was obvious, he found himself, paradoxically, wondering whether Judith was at last coming to stay with him. Ironic inversions of this type, rather than scenes of bickering frustration, had characterized the slow winding-down of their marriage, like the gradual exhaustion of some enormous clock that at times, relativistically, appeared to be running backwards.

There was a tentative tap on the kitchen door. Ransom went downstairs and found the owner of the green sedan, hat in his hands.

"Come in," Ransom said. With a nod, the little man stepped into the kitchen. He walked about stiffly, as if unused to being inside a house. "Are your family all right?" Ransom asked.

"Just about. Who's that crackpot down by the lake?"

"The concrete house with the swimming pool?-one of the local eccentrics. I shouldn't worry about him."

"He's the one who should be worrying," the little man retorted. "Anyone that crazy is going to be in trouble soon."

He waited patiently as Ransom filled a two-gallon can from the sink tap. There was no pressure and the water dribbled in slowly. When Ransom handed him the can he seemed to switch himself on, as if he had suspended judgment on the possibility of receiving the water until it made physical contact with his hands.

"It's good of you, doctor. Grady's the name, Matthew Grady. This'll keep the kids going to the coast."

"Drink some yourself. You look as if you need it. It's only a hundred miles to the coast."

Grady nodded skeptically. "Maybe. But I figure the last couple of miles will be really hard going. Could take us a whole two days, maybe three. You can't drink seawater. Getting down onto the beach is only the start." At the door he added, as if the water in his hand compelled him to reciprocate at least a modicum of good advice: "Doctor, things are going to be rough soon, believe me. You pull out now while you can."

Ransom smiled. "I already have pulled out. Anyway, keep a place for me on the sand." He watched Grady wrap the can in his coat and then bob off down the drive, his eyes moving quickly from left to right as he slipped away between the cars.

Tired by the empty house, Ransom went out into the drive, deciding to wait for Judith there. The fine ash settled slowly through the air from the unattended fires, and he climbed into the car, dusting the seats and controls. He switched on the radio and listened to the intermittent news reports of the progress of the drought broadcast from the few radio stations still operating.

The worldwide drought now in its fifth month was the culmination of a series of extended droughts that had taken place with increasing frequency all over the globe during the previous decade. Ten years earlier a critical shortage of world foodstuffs had occurred when the seasonal rainfall expected in a number of important agricultural areas had failed to materialize. One by one, areas as far apart as Saskatchewan and the Loire valley, Kazakhstan and the Madras tea country were turned into arid dust basins. The following months brought little more than a few inches of rain, and after two years these farmlands were totally devastated. Once their populations had resettled themselves elsewhere, these new deserts were abandoned for good.

The continued appearance of more and more such areas on the map, and the added difficulties of making good the world's food supplies, led to the first attempts at some form of organized global weather control. A survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization showed that everywhere river levels and water tables were falling. The two-and-a-half million square miles drained by the Amazon had shrunk to less than half this area. Scores of its tributaries had dried up completely, and aerial surveys discovered that much of the former rain forest was already dry and petrified. At Khartoum, in lower Egypt, the White Nile was twenty feet below its mean level ten years earlier, and lower outlets were bored in the concrete barrage of the dam at Aswan.

Despite worldwide attempts at cloud-seeding, the amounts of rainfall continued to diminish. The seeding operations finally ended when it was obvious that not only was there no rain, but there were no clouds. At this point attention switched to the ultimate source of rainfall-the ocean surface from which it should have been evaporating. It needed only the briefest scientific examination to show that here were the origins of the drought.

Covering the offshore waters of the world's oceans, to a distance of about a thousand miles from the coast, was a thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air-water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above. Although the structure of these polymers was quickly identified, no means was found of removing them. The saturated linkages produced in the perfect organic bath of the sea were completely nonreactive, and formed an intact seal broken only when the water was violently disturbed. Fleets of trawlers and naval craft equipped with rotating flails began to ply up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, and along the seaboards of Western Europe, but without any long-term effects. Likewise, the removal of the entire surface water provided only a temporary respite-the film quickly replaced itself by lateral extension from the surrounding surface, recharged by precipitation from the reservoir below.

The mechanism of formation of these polymers remained obscure, but millions of tons of highly reactive industrial wastes-unwanted petroleum fractions, contaminated catalysts and solvents-were still being vented into the sea, where they mingled with the wastes of atomic power stations and sewage schemes. Out of this brew the sea had constructed a skin no thicker than a few atoms, but sufficiently strong to devastate the lands it once irrigated.

This act of retribution by the sea had always impressed Ransom by its grim simple justice. Cetyl alcohol films had long been used as a means of preventing evaporation from water reservoirs, and nature had merely extended the principle, applying a fractional tilt, at first imperceptible, to the balance of the elements. As if further to tantalize mankind, the billowing cumulus clouds, burdened like madonnas with cool rain, which still formed over the central ocean surfaces, would sail steadily toward the blistered shorelines but always deposit their precious cargoes into the dry unsaturated air above the sealed offshore waters, never onto the crying land.

A police car approached along the avenue and stopped fifty yards away. After a discreet interval, stemming more from custom than any sense of propriety, Judith Ransom stepped out. She leaned through the window, talking to Captain Hendry. After checking her watch against his, she hurried up the drive. She failed to notice Ransom sitting in the dust-covered car, and went past into the house.