The Penal Colony (13 page)

“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 money 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.

He had never thought in these terms before,
but he had at last discovered how much he loved England itself: the
landscape, the skies, the feel of the air. England was still there,
buried, inaccessible. It had taken Sert to make him see it. For
Sert was that great rarity, a bit of England left relatively
unmolested, a few square miles of how it all used to be. It was
difficult for him to find anything good in his present
circumstances, but there was this, the single glimmer of advantage
in his prospect of despair. For a few days, at least, or months, he
would have been alive in the landscape of the real England. No
layers of officialdom would have been interposed between him and
the “exigencies of survival”, as Appleton had called them. When his
end came, it would be genuine, and not the counterfeit death
allotted to him by the State.

Abruptly the rain began pelting the beach,
and beyond it the sea.

Late on Monday afternoon Routledge left the
cave and continued along the coastline in order to return to the
vicinity of the Village. The day was warm and humid, with frequent
spells of sunshine. Just south of the cave the beach narrowed and
disappeared, forcing him up the cliffs and back into the bracken
scrub, which presently became denser yet, mixed with a scattering
of stunted firs. He found himself following a faint path under the
trees, pioneered perhaps by goats and then used from time to time
by men. He decided to stay with it rather than make a completely
new trail.

Although he was no longer so frightened of
being caught by Martinson, he had nonetheless armed the crossbow
and was proceeding as stealthily as he could, often stopping to
listen and to look around. He had planned his return to the Village
with care, mapping out each foreseeable detail in the safety of the
cave. Only later, just before leaving, had he realized how
dangerous his sanctuary might have proved. The cave had no rear
exit. He had been extremely lucky to have had no need of one.

But being in the open was worse. He halted
again. At the moment most of Sert was lying beneath a particularly
large area of blue, herding before it vast formations of top-lit
cloud. Away to the left, beyond the tree trunks and through the
fresh, rain-washed green of the ferns, he could glimpse stretches
of the sea. From somewhere out of sight came the yelping cries of
gulls.

He felt as if someone were watching him.
Except for his time in Martinson’s hut and in the cave, he had had
the sensation almost continuously since landing on Sert. He had
attributed it to two main reasons. The first was the likelihood of
satellite surveillance. The second was the feeling he had brought
with him from the mainland, where it was virtually impossible to be
alone in any open space and one’s behaviour had to be modified
accordingly. Yet now the feeling of being observed had grown
stronger, as if there were real grounds for it.

How long had the gulls been calling? What
could they see that he could not? Was there somebody on the beach?
But there was no beach.

Irrational terror gripped his heart. For all
the imagined progress he had made since his arrival here, he was
again close to panic. He had eaten nothing since yesterday and was
light-headed. He had lost weight. It had not been himself, but a
bearded madman, confused and haggard, who had returned his gaze in
a rockpool near the cave. Last night he had suffered an attack of
diarrhoea and had awoken this morning with a chill. On more than
one occasion in the cave he had suspected himself of losing track
of time for greater or lesser periods; he had been making
increasingly stupid and absent-minded mistakes. Perhaps he had
already lost his marbles. Perhaps he was dead; perhaps this was the
afterlife.

“No,” he thought. “Not yet.”

Glancing over his shoulder once more, he went
on, moving slightly downhill. The path dwindled and vanished
altogether. The firs yielded to gorse, and then brambles, and then
to sparser scrub where he came across the first definite sign of
human settlement he had seen since leaving Old Town: a low stone
tower, severely decayed, standing among the remnants of walls and
foundations, all more or less overgrown. The site showed evidence
of having been turfed and mown, and not too many years since:
perhaps just before the evacuation. It faced the sea, almost
adjoining low, grassy cliffs which sloped straight down to the
rocks of the shore. The shore seemed to curve strongly round to the
right, and Routledge wondered whether he had unwittingly come
almost to the end of a peninsula.