The Penal Colony (12 page)

From Old Town southwards, the east coast had
become gradually more rugged and desolate. He had passed several
groups of islets. The cliffs behind him, mazed with cracks and
fissures and outgrowths of scrub, rose to a height which, had he
not seen the cliffs on the west coast, he would have thought
imposing.

These cliffs, like the others, were of
stratified rock, the plates aligned in much the same direction.
Here and there the formation had collapsed, producing caves in the
undercliff. Most were small and shallow, easily invaded by the
tide, but some were large and extended a long way into the rock. At
one or two he had found traces of occupation: piles of bones and
shells, the remains of fires. Otherwise, except for large numbers
of seabirds, the east coast seemed deserted.

He had now gleaned an idea of the size of the
island. It was larger than he might have guessed. At this point the
coast had already begun trending towards the south-west, which
indicated that the north-south length was about eight kilometres.
Assuming the width of the island to be about the same, that gave an
area of roughly five thousand hectares. Not allowing for bays and
peninsulas, the coastline would be at least twenty-five kilometres
long.

After much debate with himself, he had
decided to remain as much as possible on the beach, making
occasional forays inland if need be. He would find a cave and spend
most of the time in hiding, emerging at dawn and dusk to collect
fresh water. It was now the 17th, Thursday. The Village gate would
open for him on Monday evening. That was the danger point. He would
have to be ready for the bell, and he did not know exactly when it
would ring: about eleven, perhaps. Again he gave thanks for the
fact that he had lied to Martinson about the length of his
ordeal.

Just offshore he noticed something round and
shiny-grey, rising and falling with the swell. It had large, dark
eyes, a flattened, dog-like face – a seal, watching him curiously,
letting itself be carried southwards on the tide.

He unscrewed the cap of the gin-bottle. “Your
health,” he said under his breath, raising the bottle and taking a
gulp. The seal, still watching, drifted gradually out of sight.

“Be like that, then,” Routledge
whispered.

He ate some cheese and meat, but postponed
sampling the salted fish. He then busied himself with the contents
of the haversack, sorting them into order. If he rationed himself,
there would be enough food for three days at least.

Taking occasional bites from a carrot, he
examined the knives and machete, and began to familiarize himself
with the crossbow.

It had been designed and executed with
astonishing skill. The stock had been fashioned, without
decoration, from a heavy plank of densely grained wood. Whoever had
made it – Martinson himself? – had had access to a comprehensive
variety of woodworking tools, as well as files, hacksaws, and a
vice, to make the metal parts. The propulsive power came from a
springy length of shaped steel, fitted in the stock with a wedge of
black heel-rubber and secured with three brass plates. The string
was made of braided twine, meticulously finished and waxed,
reinforced in the middle where it hooked over the nib of the
trigger release. The trigger mechanism showed an especially
remarkable degree of ingenuity. Spring loaded, it consisted of two
plates of case-hardened steel which, operating on two pivots,
allowed an apparently smooth and jerk-free release of the
string.

The trigger-nib was concealed by a shallow
wooden hood which carried an adjustable, beaded backsight in brass;
the brass foresight, mounted beyond the recoil of the string,
terminated in a semicircle which neatly coincided with the size of
the bead.

Each of the bolts was twenty-five centimetres
or so in length, cut from steel rod and flighted with small
tinplate vanes. These vanes, as much as the crossbow itself, gave
an overwhelming impression of ruthless utility. It was a horrible
thing. At school Routledge had been told about the medieval French
and the disdain and resentment their use of the crossbow had
excited among the English longbowmen. The history master had
regarded the crossbow as unsporting, unfair, not quite cricket.

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.

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. Within 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?”