“Is your world made of salt water?” he said to Lennar, who was watching him closely.
Lennar nodded. “It is the same water as in your sea.”
“Then what did you drink?”
“We collected ice from the surface and melted it inside bags of skin.”
“What good would that do? Frozen sea water is just as salty as unfrozen sea water.”
“On Earth—maybe.” Lennar had begun to sound tired. “But on my world the sun changes the surface water to mist during the day. At night the mist becomes water again and then turns to ice. We gather the ice near dawn, and it makes good water for drinking.”
Tarrant nodded, suddenly convinced that all he had been told was true. If Bergmann’s watery planetoid was rotating its inhabitants would experience day and night. Water would evaporate to form a cloud layer on the sunward hemisphere, and when the vapour was carried around to the night side it would condense and freeze. The ice would indeed yield drinkable water, but the difficulty with which it would be obtained was indicative of the general hardships of life in the artificially created world. It dawned on Tarrant that the people he had taken from the sea had just come through one of the most shattering experiences imaginable, and he began to feel a deep respect for their fortitude.
“Would you like some fresh water to drink now?” Tarrant looked along the row of faces and felt a feathery breath of uncanniness when all five, including the semi-conscious redhead, nodded once in perfect unison. His thoughts on the matter remained half-formed under the continuing visual impact of three female bodies reflecting the sunlight like miniature snowcapes. He was in the grip of what Kircher had referred to as animal arousal and could not disguise the fact, but he had a distinct impression that such things were unimportant, or unremarkable, among the unearthly men and women. Fetching a jerrycan of spring water from the cockpit, he gave Lennar a drink from a plastic cup, supporting his head as he did so. Lennar took a cautious sip, then eagerly drained the cup.
“It’s good,” he whispered. “I didn’t know water could be so good. There was always a little salt.”
“Have some more.”
Lennar shook his head. “Give some to Geean.”
Tarrant moved to the red-haired girl, lifted her up a little and let her drink. Her back and shoulders felt too frail, and he detected a rasping vibration each time she breathed. He raised his eyes to Lennar, who nodded significantly.
“This girl needs medical attention,” Tarrant said. “I’d better get her ashore as soon as possible.”
He refilled the cup and turned to the brunette, who raised her shoulders unaided to allow him to slip his arm underneath. The movement, identical to a preliminary for love, sent hot gusts of unreason billowing into Tarrant’s head. While she was drinking, the girl moved closer to him and—apparently to improve her balance—placed one hand squarely on his crotch and allowed it to remain there. Tarrant almost gasped aloud with the pleasurable shock. He held perfectly still, afraid to move, until she had finished the water.
“Thank you.” Her lips were glistening wet as she looked up at him. Suddenly he was certain he was being invited to kiss her, and that, furthermore, none of her companions would consider his action the least bit out of the ordinary. This has to be one of those dreams, he thought. He began lowering his face to hers, acting out his part in the erotic fantasy, then became aware that the others were watching intently. Shame flooded through him on the instant, and he drew away from the girl. The look of disappointment on her face was unmistakable, and it haunted him all the while he was giving water to the older woman and the youth.
“Look,” he said finally, “this has all happened too fast for me. I guess I’d better take you to the island.”
Lennar looked alarmed. “We’re not ready. It’s too much….”
“Then we’ve got to have a talk and decide what we’re going to do.”
“We’ll tell you as much as we can,” Lennar replied in his strange, flat-vowelled English, “but can we cover our eyes? The light hurts.”
“I’ll see what I’ve got.” Tarrant thought for a moment, then opened his equipment locker and produced a wide roll of black insulation tape, from which he tore off five pieces and improvised eye shades. While he was working another boat emerged from the mouth of the channel, a hundred or so metres away. Its owner exchanged salutes with Tarrant before swinging round to the west, heading for his own sector. Tarrant was glad the man had not pulled alongside him for a chat—he would not have relished trying to explain the presence of nude men and women in his boat. He could foresee all kinds of problems when he brought them ashore to encounter the staid and conservative populace of Cawley Island. To forestall visits from other farmers, he started his electric motor and headed due north at low speed. While the boat was cruising he learned as much as he could about his passengers.
The exchange of information was hampered by language difficulties and basic incompatibilities in outlook. Some of the words in Lennar’s restricted vocabulary had no meaning at all for him, and others proved to be debased Spanish and French, but he slowly gained a general idea of what life must have been like in a space-borne globe of sea water. His sense of wonder increased as he heard that there were almost two hundred men, women and children living in a conglomeration of nets and the hulls of old ships … that they had lost all knowledge of their origins … that they lived far below the surface to avoid extremes of temperature … that respiratory diseases were endemic and kept life expectancy to about thirty years….
In return, Tarrant tried to impart information which would help the group adjust to the change in their environment, but he was handicapped in that so many essential cornerstones of knowledge were missing. They had, for example, no conception of astronomy, and this made it virtually impossible for him to explain anything about the distances they had covered, apparently instantaneously, or about the size of the Earth as compared to the world they had known. Also, the rudimentary edifice of their physics—born of conditions in which gravity was almost non-existent—had little room for the concept of weight, the suddenly-acquired property which made it so difficult for them to move when not buoyed up by water.
During the halting discussions the red-haired girl, Geean, gradually came out of her state of shock and soon afterwards complained of skin pains. It took Tarrant only a few seconds to diagnose incipient sunburn, and he cursed himself for not having realised that skin which had never known direct sunlight would be highly sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. He unfurled the boat’s canopy and stretched it taut between the four uprights of the solar panel array, creating a prism of shade.
“I should have thought of that sooner,” he said ruefully, and was on the point of sitting down again when he noticed a boat overtaking him from the south. There was no question but that the boat was purposefully aiming for a rendezvous. Tarrant stared at it, both surprised and resentful, then he recognised the broad beam and chipped blue paintwork of Will Somerville’s cruiser, The Rose of York. His resentment promptly faded—there was no man he would rather have had join him at that particular time—but he was at a loss to know why Somerville should have chosen to sail out this far in search of his company.