The Penal Colony (36 page)

Thaine barely suppressed a smile.

Franks also seemed amused. “That idea is
repugnant and exceedingly unsporting, Routledge,” he said.
“Shameful to admit, I regret to say that it has already occurred to
us. For some months we have even kept aside a drum of weedkiller
with the exact properties you describe. But there are difficulties.
If large numbers of outsiders in both camps were to die
mysteriously, the Service might well break with tradition and
investigate, and then we would lose the privileges we have worked
so long and hard to acquire. If we restricted the poison to one
camp, so making it look more like an epidemic, the survivors might
well, eventually, join the other camp and an invasion would then be
almost certain. So far our tactics have consisted in preserving the
status quo. If, however, we come under prolonged and serious attack
and all else fails, we will not hesitate to use poison.” Franks
looked round the table. “Right, then,” he said. “We’re agreed. We
do nothing. We concentrate on the defence of the Community. Any
dissenting voices?”

There were none.

“The final decision today concerns the ketch.
Mr Thaine, I believe there was something further you wanted to say
on this topic.”

Routledge noticed grease under Thaine’s
fingernails. His hands had been but hastily cleaned. Routledge
wondered what he had been doing.

“I can’t add much to what Mr Appleton said. I
just agree with him and think it would be wrong to let the
outsiders dictate what we can do and what we can’t. If you postpone
the launch, Courtmacsherry goes and the whole project might as well
be cancelled. I may be biased because I’m guaranteed a place, but
that’s the way I see it.”

Foster, Sibley and Mitchell now voiced
similar opinions.

“And what about you, Routledge?” Franks said.
“What do you think? You’re heavily involved with the work, after
all.”

“I think it would be a tragedy to postpone
the launch. When I first arrived on Sert and Mr Appleton explained
the advantages of living in the Community, he said that foremost
among them was the opportunity to be a man. He said it was one of
your sayings. At the time I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Once I went outside I damn soon understood. The first thing they
did was try to rape me. I decided I wouldn’t have it, and I didn’t.
Next they tried to auction me off for a gang-bang. I wouldn’t have
that either. Finally some caveman in animal skins forced a
showdown. He was determined that it should be him or me. In the end
I had a choice. I decided it would be him. That is not the way for
men to live. What we have here in the Village is an oasis of peace
and order. Once we let the outsiders breach the hedge we might as
well forget about being men. They don’t necessarily have to breach
it physically. If we let them dictate to us they’ve breached it
just the same. There’s not a man in the Village who wouldn’t agree,
and there’s not one of them who’d resent the ketch leaving, even
under threat of an attack. Not one. Whatever else happens, the
project must go ahead. It must.”

Routledge had surprised even himself with the
vehemence of his delivery. In his argument he had somehow
crystallized the whole of his attitude to the Village and the
island, previously vague, formless, half-conscious. For perhaps the
first time in his life he found that he cared deeply enough to get
truly angry. As he finished speaking, he became aware of the
startled silence in which his words had been received.

Then Thaine said, “Bravo, Routledge.”

“Yes,” Appleton said. “That’s it. That’s
exactly it.”

“Very well,” Franks said, after a moment. “If
that’s the sentiment, who am I to demur? The project
continues.”

The meeting broke up. Routledge put his chair
back on its stack and was about to leave the laboratory when Franks
called out to him. “A word with you, please, Routledge.”

Once the Council members had dispersed,
Franks led Routledge into the adjoining office. Routledge felt as
if he should pinch himself: he could not believe that the events of
the morning were really happening to him. It seemed not to be an
hour or two, but several days, since he had been out on Beacon Head
with Appleton and the others, since he had plotted the positions of
the lightships.

The map and its perspex sheet had been
hurriedly dumped inside the door. “Shall I put it back on the
wall?” Routledge said, almost overwhelmed by a sense of the
privilege of being invited alone into the Father’s office.

“I’ll give you a hand,” Franks said. In his
desk drawer he found a small screwdriver.

Had it been this morning, in the laboratory,
when Franks, perhaps impressed by Routledge’s single-minded
devotion to the project, had decided to mark him out for elevation?
Or had he been watching him for longer than that, for the entire
time he had been in the Community?

They laid the map on the sheet and raised it
into place. While Routledge held the perspex steady, Franks got on
a chair and fixed the three uppermost screws. Without warning, as
he stood down, he said, “I want you to serve on the Council. You
will be subordinate to Mitchell. Is that all right by you?”

Routledge scarcely knew how to answer. “I’m
honoured,” he managed to say. Such a phrase had never passed his
lips in earnest before.

“You shouldn’t be. Make no mistake,
Routledge, if what Walker says is true, we’re up the creek. We’re
going to need all the brain-power we can get. Mr Godwin first drew
you to my attention. He thinks pretty highly of you.”

“Really?”

“And I see Thaine has finally taken a bit of
a shine to you.”

“He has?”

“Didn’t you notice the way you were
addressed?”

“I … yes.” He remembered now.

Franks gestured at the smaller and shabbier
of the two armchairs in the room. Routledge nervously sat down,
wishing that the moulded soles of his workboots were not quite so
encrusted with the red clifftop mud.

“Drink? It’s nearly lunchtime.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Beer? Whisky?”

“Whatever you’ve got, Father.”

“Whisky, then.”

As Franks went to a steel cabinet and poured
the drinks, Routledge looked out of the French windows at the
garden, where Godwin, balding and round-shouldered, wearing his
waxed cotton jacket, was even now heading back towards his
workshop. So he had recommended Routledge to the Father. As with
King, as with so many others in the Village, Routledge now felt
ashamed of his first impression of the man.

“Just a general chat about the way the
Council works,” Franks said, once he had given Routledge a glass
and sat down himself. “Normally the meetings are a bit more lively
than the one you saw this morning. But, as I say, these are
difficult times.”

Routledge’s anxiety got the better of him and
he interrupted with the single most important question he wanted to
ask. “Father, when you said we were going to concentrate on the
defence of the Community, what exactly did you mean?”

“You’re wondering how we can defend ourselves
against the potential force of both the towns.”

“Yes.”

“You’re thinking the crossbows are all we
have, those and better discipline?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true we’re in trouble if the outsiders
get together. Deadly serious trouble.” Franks sampled his whisky.
“But all is not lost if they do. Thanks to Randal Thaine, we’ve got
another ace up our sleeve besides that weedkiller.”

Routledge was sitting with his feet up
against the edge of the fireplace, head back, half dozing,
listening to the sleet on the roof and on the shutters of his
house. The suggestion of a smile crossed his lips as he replayed in
his mind what he could remember of the closing moves: he had
finally drawn a game of chess with King. Only just. But he had
drawn it all the same.

For once he had lit the fire. While playing,
he and King had eaten a hot supper and drunk tea. At nine o’clock
King had retired to his own house. After that Routledge had re-read
today’s letter from Louise and examined the photos of Christopher
she had sent. She had written the previous week as well, and the
one before that. It seemed after all that she was going to keep her
promise and continue writing. Her wedding had been three weeks ago,
at the beginning of February.

In the firelight Routledge examined his
watch. Ten-forty.

He looked round once more and saw that now at
last he was being observed. The man in the sleeping-bag, his new
ward, had regained consciousness. Twenty-six years of age, pale and
gaunt, he had been convicted of murder during the execution of an
armed robbery.

Routledge stood up.

The new man was regarding him with dread, but
made no attempt to struggle. What was going on behind those eyes?
What did he make of his host? What impression had he gained of the
room, the fire, the smell of stale fulmar oil which Routledge
himself no longer even noticed? As Routledge approached he was
struck by the comparison between the way he himself was now and the
way he must have been last July when he had awoken at King’s. Had
he been like this man? Yes, looking back, he realized he had.
Except that he had been, if anything, even worse, even more
frightened.

“It’s all right,” Routledge said. “Don’t
worry. You’re safe.”

The man did not reply.

Routledge said, “What’s your name?”

“Where am I?”

“I ask the questions. Your name.”

“Vic.”

“Vic what?”

“Vic Prine.”

“From where?”

“Lewisham.”

“From which prison?”

“Dartmoor. Dartmoor. I was at Dartmoor.”

“Well, Mr Prine, I’m afraid to tell you
you’ve landed up on Sert.”

Prine tried not to show any reaction. “Yeah,
well,” he said.

He allowed himself to be removed from the
sleeping-bag. A large, dark, and malodorous stain had spread from
the centre of the quilting. He had urinated in his sleep.

“I couldn’t help myself,” he said.

For a moment Routledge thought he was going
to offer resistance, but then his knees buckled and he half
collapsed on the floor. Routledge lifted him easily and sat him on
the edge of the spare bed. “Do you want to throw up?”

Prine shook his head.

Routledge introduced himself and brought
Prine a comb, the washbowl, and a pair of his own trousers, some
grey corduroys long past their best.

Like patrol duty, the work of acting as
guardian to new arrivals was shared equally throughout the
Community. Villagers who had once acted as guardian to a successful
entrant were, if they wished, thereafter exempted.

Because the new man had awoken before
midnight, Appleton agreed to conduct the initial interview straight
away. Routledge sat in the place Mitchell had occupied during his
own first interview and delivered Mitchell’s lines.

Now that he served on the Council,
Routledge’s eyes had been opened to the way the Village was
administered. As he had suspected, outgoing mail was indeed vetted.
This he regarded as a sensible and necessary precaution in the
endless struggle to keep the Prison Service and hence also the
outsiders at bay.

The interview procedure was part of this
struggle. Having selected suitable applicants, it recruited only
the cleverest, fittest, and luckiest arrivals and discarded the
rest. Properly fed and clothed, armed, and with a high morale, a
community of such men was more than a match for a larger and less
disciplined force. Unfortunately the combined size of the two
outsider camps had now outweighed even this advantage.

So far there had been only one report from
Obie, according to which Martinson was lying low before attempting
to assassinate both Nackett and Houlihan in the spring. Another
possibility was that he was lying low because the plot had been
invented by Obie purely to save his own neck. Nothing Foster had
observed had given any credence to Obie’s claims.

Nevertheless, for the past two months the
Village had been preparing for invasion. Franks had revealed to the
Council his thoughts on defence and detailed plans had been drawn
up. Every second man had been issued with a prong-barbed spear, the
shafts fashioned from willow or holly and the blades forged in the
metalwork shop using scrap steel. Some of these weapons, Routledge
learned, had been made as long as two years ago, and had been lying
in store in the bungalow roof-space. Spare hoes, axes, hatchets,
machetes, had been honed to extra sharpness. Thaine had designed
battle-hammers made of lumps of rock some fifteen centimetres in
diameter, held in barbed wire netting attached to a couple of
metres of nylon rope. Twenty of these had so far been
completed.

However many weapons the Village possessed,
Routledge knew, as did everyone else, that nothing could compensate
for lack of numbers. This was a problem Franks had foreseen right
from the start, but short of murdering failed applicants or risking
Service intervention by launching an unprovoked attack on Old Town
or the lighthouse, there had been no solution to it.

In recent weeks, though, another change in
the intake procedure had been made. The period outside, at first
reduced, had been reluctantly abandoned. Prine, though he did not
know it, no longer faced the experience that Routledge and most of
the villagers had endured. Instead, if he were otherwise qualified
and if he wished, he would serve a probationary period inside the
Village, working on the land, living in virtual isolation from
everybody but his guardian and fellow probationers and one or two
others selected by Appleton. At the end of this period the full
Council would meet and decide whether the newcomer should be
admitted to the Community, or expelled.

At a prearranged point near the end of the
interview, Routledge conducted Prine from the room and left him in
Talbot’s care. When Routledge returned to the laboratory, Appleton
and Stamper were already deeply in discussion.