The Penal Colony Page 9

  He half smiled, almost amused by the irrelevance of his upbringing. Sert was not quite cricket either. Instead of teaching him the dates of distant battles they would have done better to have prepared him for this, for the new Dark Ages, for a Britain wallowing out of control.

  The bolts slid along a V-shaped groove faced with marbled grey plastic laminate: of exactly the same pattern, Routledge realized, as that on the cupboards in the bungalow reception room. Had the crossbow been made in the Village?

  Almost certainly. The intelligence and craftsmanship revealed in its construction far surpassed anything he had seen in Old Town. Even the tool-roll, made of oil-cloth or something similar, was a professional, competent piece of work. Besides the bolts and the stirrup, it contained two spare strings in their own small compartment.

  Resting the butt in the pit of his stomach, he engaged the string in the stirrup and pulled. The bow was stronger than he had thought. He carefully hooked the string behind the trigger nib and, even more carefully, slid one of the bolts into place.

  There was nothing particular to aim at. He did not want to lose the bolt. Fifty metres away to the left he saw a relatively large heap of seaweed. That would do, assuming the bolt got there.

  Even as he squinted along the sights and made the first tentative squeeze on the trigger, the crossbow went off. He was taken completely by surprise, shocked as much by the violence of its release as by the power and efficiency of the bolt. Its trajectory was impossible for him to follow, except in the last moment before impact, when his labouring eye finally caught up: thirty metres beyond the seaweed and fifteen degrees to the left, the steel tip smashed into the shoulder of a large rock. The spray of chips and fragments registered before the clang: the bolt was sent spinning, several metres into the air, and fell to earth beyond his vision.

  “Bloody hell!” And he had thought the sheath-knife an impressive piece of technology! He whispered the words again, unable to believe that Sert could have produced anything like this.

  Martinson, the ignorant Martinson, dark Britain personified, was the prince of Old Town. Theft was the only way he could have got his hands on it.

  Yes. Without doubt, the crossbow had been made in the Village.

  And if Obie could be believed, the men in the Village had radios and a television set.

  Getting to his feet, Routledge began to wonder what else they had.

  10

  After breakfasting with Appleton and Thaine, and attending to the most urgent of the papers on his desk, Franks could contain his patience no longer. He had to know what decision Godwin had reached. Informing the guard, he left the bungalow at the rear and went out into the clean, fresh air of this sunny Sunday morning.

  The aluminium-framed French windows of his office opened on an area of crazy paving, from which a patch of lawn extended for twenty or so paces and enclosed the overgrown crater of an ornamental pond. No water remained, for the polythene liner had long ago been put to better use elsewhere.

  Even in the days when the house had been inhabited by the warden of Sert the nature reserve, the back garden could not have amounted to much. Fifteen metres wide and about thirty deep, surrounded for the most part by a chest-high stone wall lined with hedges, it seemed to have been planned with the interests of wild rather than human life in mind. The original hedges had been of cotoneaster, berberis, buddleia, and other shrubs likely to attract migrant birds or butterflies, but they had since been invaded by the more vigorous thorns and brambles from outside.

  The lawn was the only one on the island. Franks had retained it out of a sneaking nostalgia for elements of his former life, although it was now kept cropped, not by a suburban husband and father, but by a couple of Mitchell’s sheep.

  At the end of the garden stood a belt of coniferous trees – larch, mostly, and Monterey pine – put there as a windbreak and, like the various plantations elsewhere, to supply timber at some future date. Franks had resolutely resisted the temptation to take the wood. Luckily, the best of the planted timber was on this side of the border. Before Houlihan had adopted the lighthouse as his headquarters, Franks had not hesitated to remove the windbreak there, and the results of that felling were now to be found seasoning in the Village woodyard.

  Visible from the lawn, through gaps in the trees, were the slate-covered roof and the long window, set in a stone wall, of Godwin’s workshop.

  The gate at the end of the garden had been scrounged, as had the posts and hinges. Franks passed through the opening and, turning onto the needle-strewn path under the larches, mounted the stone step at the threshold. As he had expected, he found Godwin and Fitzmaurice already hard at work.

  “Don’t get up,” he said, entering.

  “Good morning, Father,” Godwin said.

  “Please,” Franks said. “Be seated.”

  Fitzmaurice, like Godwin, resumed his place at the workbench, though he obviously felt uncomfortable to be sitting while Franks stood. Fitzmaurice was twenty-six, one of those who had made the bomb that had all but demolished the Knightsbridge Barracks. Godwin, over twice his age, a quiet, puffy-looking man with sparse grey hair, was here for poisoning his wife and sister-in-law. On the mainland he had been employed as a design engineer by the Fairburn electronics conglomerate.

  His workbench always reminded Franks of a shrine, a personal altar where he observed his mysterious rites. Every pair of pliers, every screwdriver, had its own silhouette on the wall; the shelves were lined with boxes and screwtop jars, graded in size, each one labelled and inventoried in Godwin’s small, crabbed script. “Grommets”. “2.5 mm Jacks”. “Capacitors”. “Thermistors”. Except when in use, each of his soldering irons was always in its allotted place on the rest, its lead snaking down to a power socket on the accumulator bank. The accumulators and soldering irons Godwin had made himself. The generator had been designed by him and built by Thaine, likewise the contraption – a wooden bicycle without wheels – at which Fitzmaurice, Godwin’s acolyte, could sit pedalling in order to drive it. Normally, however, the accumulators were kept recharged at the windmill on the cliffs.

  This bench, running under its pleasant window beneath the trees, more even than Franks’s own desk, now represented the focal point of the entire Community. The Tilleys here burned late into the night, with no restriction on the amount of paraffin they consumed. Fitzmaurice was excused all other duties, his only brief being to learn from Godwin, to guard him and attend to his every need.

  Yesterday an area of Godwin’s bench had been cleared, and on it a large sheet of cartridge paper had been unrolled and pinned out. For much of the evening, Godwin, Appleton, Fitzmaurice, and Franks himself had been in discussion. Godwin had agreed to work on the question overnight and, if possible, give his answer in the morning.

  “Well?” Franks said gently.

  “First, the bit you’ll want to hear. We’ve found a way to do without those transistors.”

  Morgan’s new tape recorder, delivered on last Tuesday’s drop, should have yielded the necessary parts, but its circuitry had been redesigned and produced as a number of integrated modules, a bitter disappointment to Godwin and everyone else involved.

  “We’ve altered part of the gating unit and freed those elements for the oscillator. It should work. In fact, it’ll be more reliable than the other design.”

  In his search for components, Godwin had requisitioned every electrical appliance on the island and, except, of necessity, at Peto’s hotel, had scavenged every last millimetre of cable. The most fruitful source by far had been the lighthouse, where much of the heavier equipment had been smashed and then abandoned, including one diesel and two petrol generators, three obsolete shortwave radios, and the fixed instruments at the weather-recording station. Godwin had even unearthed, deep in a rubbish dump behind the bungalow, an old toaster, and had lovingly stripped it of everything useful.

  Tuesday’s drop had also brought Loosley’s flat-screen television and a pocket radio for Kennard. Withi
n half an hour Godwin had reduced both gadgets to a heap of bits and pieces. The same with Carr’s flashlight, which Godwin had simply wanted for the particular batteries it used, and with Meadows’s walkman set. Despite his complaints, Godwin could even find a use for integrated circuitry. He had wanted the walkman both for its headphones and its amplifier; and so, last February, Meadows had been asked to write to his mother for it.

  The sheet of cartridge paper had been divided into a grid of faint pencil-lines one centimetre apart. Superimposed on the grid was what seemed to Franks an impossibly complicated maze of tiny symbols representing the prototype of the device that had confirmed Godwin in his mind as a genius. “Give him a box of paperclips and he’ll make you a 3-D telly,” Appleton had said; and hadn’t been so far short of the truth.

  About a third of the circuit, originally drafted in pencil, had now been gone over in ink. The inked elements had been found on the island, fabricated, or cannibalized from the various mechanical and electrical devices brought over on the helicopter during the past five years.

  “All right,” Franks said. “What about the bit I won’t want to hear?”

  “The DF is no problem, but as for the rest of it, we just can’t say. We still haven’t finalized the design of the pulsing unit. Or the transducers. Without a computer, the calculations alone could take us six months. And even if we come up with a workable solution, how are we going to get the transducer components? You can’t just put in a reck for something like that.”

  “But the basic notion? What you were saying last night: do you stand by it?”

  “Well, yes. The finished article should work, providing we can put it all together. Providing we hit on the right model in the calculations. Father, are you sure about that computer?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  Unknown to anyone, Franks had considered, in the first heady days of the Community, putting in a request for a portable computer. Perhaps, he had reasoned, the Prison Service had swallowed the story he had told about the aims and ideals of the Village, just as they’d sanctioned the request for the metalworking tools. But finally he had not dared to risk it. The granting of the tools alone had been an astounding blunder which had revealed not only that the Service were fallible, but also how greatly they underestimated the men on the island. Springing directly from it had come the scheme that was moving towards reality on Godwin’s bench.

  “I was talking to Mr Thaine this morning,” Franks said. “He wants to begin.”

  Godwin glanced at Franks in surprise. “What, already?”

  “Yes. Already.”

  “Is he happy with the design?”

  “That’s no longer the question,” Franks said. “Are you happy with it?”

  “The mechanics I leave to him and Mr Appleton, but I can vouch for the profile, unless someone’s changed the rules since I learned physics.”

  “Can’t you give me any idea of when you’ll be ready?”

  “To be honest, Father, no.”

  The unifying qualities of the project were almost as important as the end result. Without a firm word from Godwin, the whole enterprise could backfire in a welter of disappointment and despair. Already Franks feared that too many people outside the Committee knew what was afoot. Something so daring and marvellous had the power to split the Community apart. Godwin appeared to understand this; hence his caution, the detestable caution of the engineer. But without him, there was no chance at all, and in that moment Franks began to see why Fitzmaurice hero-worshipped this quietly spoken Englishman.

  “Well,” Franks said. “I’m glad about the transistors, at least. And I’m grateful to you for your honesty.” He extended his smile to include Fitzmaurice too.

  “Is there any more news from Old Town?” Fitzmaurice said.

  “Not this morning. Mr Foster’s out there now. We expect Peto to hit the light today.”

  “Those loonies,” Fitzmaurice said.

  “Mr Foster puts the toll at twelve dead, and about thirty injured. Most of them got it in the big battle on Thursday.”

  Godwin said, “Do we know yet what started them off again?”

  “Mr Foster thinks it may be a power struggle, if you can call it that, among Houlihan’s lot. Or it might just be the usual thing. Conditions outside couldn’t really get much worse.”

  “Madness,” Godwin said. “Utter madness.”

  Franks nodded. Privately, he was not so sure. “As long as they keep on killing each other,” he said, “we’ve little enough to worry about. But if they ever agree among themselves for ten minutes and decide to join forces, that’s when we’d better start saying our prayers.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Routledge could hear more thunder. Another storm was coming in from the west. Earlier the rain had been torrential, of almost tropical intensity, boiling the grey sea to white.

  It was now Sunday afternoon. Since Thursday, he had left his cave six times. On five occasions he had taken fresh water from a stream which discharged among the cliffs a short way to the north; and once, just before dawn on Saturday, unable to tolerate himself any longer, he had briefly ventured out to wash his clothes and to bathe in the sea.

  Otherwise he had remained in hiding, in the damp, stony darkness, preferring boredom and inactivity to the terrors awaiting him in the open air. Of his fellow islanders there had been no sign.

  Martinson’s sheepskin waistcoat had proved invaluable, especially at night. At regular intervals in the day, Routledge had performed stretching exercises and made himself walk on the spot, counting the steps until he had reached two thousand. Occasionally he had sat near the mouth of the cave, hypnotized by the waves, looking out for passing seals or birds.

  All he had to do was burn off the hours until Monday night, one by one, and he would be safe. It was like school detention, the “twang” errant pupils had incurred on Saturday mornings, only on an adult scale. In the darkness, his thoughts had wanted to dwell more and more on his early life, on the clean, innocent days of his boyhood. He had taken it all for granted then, everyone had.

  Again and again Routledge found himself edging towards despair. He still could not believe that he was really marooned for ever, that he would never see his family again.

  At the age of eighteen, taking his A-level exams, he had imagined no aspiration of which he was incapable. He had planned a dazzling future, and had accepted an offer from the University of Edinburgh to read engineering science. The offer had been conditional on his examination grades. He remembered opening the envelope containing his results. Maths and physics he had passed with distinction, but in chemistry he had scored only an E, not the B they had wanted.

  They had agreed to keep his place open while he resat chemistry, studying at a technical college in Harrow. Three weeks after starting the course, he came home one afternoon to find that his father, a quantity surveyor, had collapsed in London and died. With two daughters still at school, a mortgage, and no insurance worth the name, and now faced with the prospect of finding work, Routledge’s mother had nonetheless wanted him to continue with his studies. But the financial position had been impossible, and so he had applied for, and, to his surprise, got, a job with his father’s former employers.

  Perhaps if he had passed his chemistry exam in the first place, things might have been different. Or perhaps not. That long manila envelope had been his first intimation of the gap between ambition and attainment. And although he was universally said to have “done well for himself”, he found the work of a quantity surveyor ridiculous and futile. Somebody had to do it, he supposed. A number of his colleagues drank more than was good for them. They kept dirty magazines in their desks and spent their time trying to get one over on the opposition, the client or the contractor, depending which side they happened to be on. It was worst of all in the Middle East, and especially in Kuwait, where, like the others, he had become lazy and indifferent, sapped by the heat, deeply resentful of the Arabs who were, after all, only spending the mone
y they had extorted from the West.

  He had worked a two-year contract there, building roads, trying to earn enough money to buy a house and get married. Louise had written to him every day. Just as she had in the first months of his incarceration. Her letters had become somewhat less frequent since the failure of the final appeal, but that was because she was so much busier now.

  The food had nearly run out. Eating the last of the salted fish, he wondered again about her photographs. They must still be in Exeter, he thought; otherwise he would have seen them on Appleton’s table. That was another reason he had to get into the Community. Outside the Village, there was no mail.

  Thinking about Louise was the worst possible thing he could do. At this distance, he found his need for her had only increased. The last time he had seen her, in June, had been on her first and, it now transpired, her only, conjugal visit. He could see why the visit had been granted. To give him something to remember her by. They’d known his fate for weeks beforehand.

  Routledge finished the salted fish, every scrap. He should have taken more. And he wished he had stolen some sort of pannikin as well as the food, although he had been able to use a plastic bag to mix the oatmeal with water. On Friday his bowel movements had begun again; he had made his midden near the back of the cave, covering it each time with a fresh layer of seaweed.

  He took a swig of water. Sunday afternoon in July. The date: the twentieth. He mustn’t forget that. As for the time, that would be about four o’clock, or five. Tea-time.

  He arose and went closer to the daylight. The sky was considerably darker. He smiled grimly. A few minutes away by helicopter, straight across there, in the shabby, second-rate resorts of the north Cornish coast, impecunious holidaymakers were at this moment huddling in public shelters, unable to return to their guest houses before the gong sounded for supper. That aspect of Britain at least, its grey, litter-strewn mediocrity, the small-mindedness typified by the seaside hotelier, he would never have to endure again. And as for the other Britain, that no longer existed, except in the pages of tourist guides. The countryside had been wrecked; every town looked like every other; self-consciousness had invaded and destroyed the atmosphere of every bit of remaining charm. In fact, at this remove, he could no longer understand why people chose to live in Britain at all. It was not even a particularly good place to make money. They lived there because they could think of nowhere else to go; and even if they could, the chances were it would be just as polluted and overpopulated as the land they were trying to escape.