Finally, he pushed his plate away, went to a cupboard in the corner of the square room and took out a military-style rifle. The weapon was almost a hundred years old, but had been maintained in excellent condition. It was a good 23rd century copy of a late 20th century Armalite, and Tarrant had chosen it because it represented the highest point of one branch of technology. He had a fondness for good machines, whatever their purpose. From an upper shelf in the cupboard he took a box of cartridges he knew to be of practically the same quality as the rifle’s original ammunition, and filled the magazine. He pulled on a lightweight jacket, slung the rifle over his shoulder and went out into the warm, heavy air of the evening.
It was growing dark, and yellow glimmers of electric light marked the positions of dwellings among the shrubs and trees. Tarrant walked quickly down the deserted hill, his long strides covering the ground silently and without effort. When he reached the jetties on the island’s northern shore he was surprised to see there was still some activity on Will Somerville’s blue-painted boat, The Rose of York, which was moored three berths along from his own. He paused for a moment, wondering why Somerville was working so late.
“Will?” he shouted. “Is that you? What are you doing down there?”
There was a sound of movement and a clinking of glass below deck, then Somerville’s bearded face appeared in the hatchway. “I’m trying to save you some time and money,” he said gruffly, feigning annoyance at the interruption. He was a thick-set man of fifty who affected a piratical red bandana in place of a hat to protect his balding head from the sun. A white shirt cut very full in the sleeves added an extra touch of the Hollywood buccaneer to his appearance.
“You’re trying to save me money?” Tarrant was puzzled. “I don’t get…. Oh, you’re still working on this salinity thing.”
“Definitely. I took more samples today. It’s up to almost thirty parts per thousand, and that’s a gain of three points in the last couple of weeks.”
“That’s really interesting, Will.” Hearing the fervour in the old man’s voice, Tarrant began to wish he had not stopped.
Somerville emerged further into view and sat on the edge of the hatchway, his white shirt gleaming in the dusk. “You don’t get it, do you, Hal? You don’t see the importance of all this.”
“Well … there’s a hell of a lot of salt in the sea. I mean, we weren’t in danger of running low.”
“That’s typical!” Somerville threw up his hands in exasperation. “I’m not talking about table salt. I’m talking about the other salts, the nitrates and nitrites—the stuff that makes your crop grow.”
“Are they on the increase as well?”
“If they remain at the new level we’ll all be able to thin out our nutrient sprays by about ten percent. I tell you, Hal, the sea is changing.”
Tarrant nodded, unimpressed, and turned to move on. “Keep up the good work.”
“What do you care?” Somerville sounded genuinely bitter. “It’s just a job to you youngsters, isn’t it? It doesn’t really matter to you if … Is that a rifle you’ve got there?”
“Yes.” Tarrant was now certain he should not have stopped. “Are you going to shoot something?”
“No, I’m going to paddle the boat with it.” Tarrant turned to walk away, but Somerville scrambled up on to the jetty with surprising agility and caught his arm.
“Listen, Hal, are you still sticking to this story about somebody sabotaging your booms?”
“It isn’t a story,” Tarrant said patiently. “When I got out there this morning I found another link undone. God knows how much soup I lost.”
“An old bottle-nose must have got tangled up with it.”
“Three nights in a row? I’m not buying that one, Will. How many of the other farmers have had dolphin trouble even once?”
“I don’t know,” Somerville replied, “but there’s one thing I can tell you—they don’t like you talking about sabotage. Some of us have been here twenty years and more, and we’ve always worked together.”
“Yeah, it’s a nice little club here in the inner sectors, but I’m on the outside.” Tarrant kept his voice low and even. “I’ll farm my spread by myself, and if I find anybody messing around with my booms I’ll deal with them by myself. You can pass the word along.”
“I still don’t see any need for guns,” Somerville grumbled. “It doesn’t seem right.”
Tarrant gently detached the other man’s hand from his arm. “Will, I’m going to scare off a few dolphins. Okay?”
“I suppose you’re entitled to do that much.” Somerville looked undecided. “I’m sorry you’ve been having trouble—would you like me to ride out with you? Keep you company?”
“No, but thanks.” Tarrant smiled, feeling grateful for the offer. “This could be an all-night job.”
He walked along the uneven planks of the jetty to his own berth and climbed down into the waiting boat, which was much smaller than Somerville’s comfortable cruiser. It took him only a short time to fold the solar energy panels down into their night-time stowage positions and to check the state of his batteries. Satisfied that the boat was seaworthy, he cast off and selected low forward speed. Impelled by silent electric motors, the docile little vessel made its way north past the other farm boats, whose masts were black brush-strokes on the banded copper of the western sky. Tarrant stood in the kiosk-like control house and steered across the broad stretch of open water which separated the inner algae beds from the shore. Two beacons marked the entrance to the main northwards channel. As soon as the boat had passed between them into the ultra-calm water of the channel he advanced the speed-control lever and settled down for the hour-long journey to the outer sectors of the farm.
Tarrant was a comparative newcomer to the Cawley Island farm and, in consequence, had been allocated one of the rim sectors. Its principal disadvantage was that it required him to schedule two hours of his working day for travelling—and four hours if he had to make a mid-shift return to the island—but this was something he accepted without any complaint. He had previously spent six years in the armed forces of the kingdom of South Newzealand, and had been unlucky enough to be an interceptor pilot during the period when the ruler was refusing to accept the fact that he could no longer maintain an air force.
There had been little menace from outside, because the various would-be warlords of Melanesia—defeated by distance and dwindling technical resources—lapsed into prehistoric silence. The real threat to Tarrant’s life had lain in the aircraft he was obliged to fly. Most of them had been copies of copies of copies, dangerous offspring of flawed messenger chains, and only the purest good fortune had enabled him to survive several crashes.
Like most other young airmen, Tarrant had been convinced of his own immortality, but when the prestige-conscious king had instituted a space programme—based on century-old ion-riders—he had begun to have doubts. After several training excursions in a space craft, in which some of the flight instruments were marked in German and others in Spanish, he had decided to find safer employment. It was not permitted for expensively groomed pilot officers to resign from the Air Force, so he had booked ten days’ leave, bought a trustworthy boat and sailed off into the northeast. That had been three years earlier, but he still found a sense of peaceful luxury in slow-speed water travel.
By the time Tarrant was halfway out to the rim of the farm all traces of sunlight had fled from the western horizon and he was steering between strings of dim marker lights. The booms which constrained the algae beds were in the form of inflated double tubes. To facilitate maintenance and repair they were in thirty-metre sections, and at the top of each joint was a small glowball powered by a cell which used the sea as an electrolyte. The glowballs guided Tarrant’s way as he sailed northwards, but he knew he could have managed almost as well by the light of the stars. They shone brilliantly overhead, seemingly close at hand, turning the night sky into an incredible cityscape. Tarrant had no difficulty in seeing each of them as a sun in its own right, and he experienced a pang of regret that man had proved unequal to the challenges of interstellar flight.