The Penal Colony (23 page)

“You’re supposed to report to him at
half-past five.”

“Good night then, King. Sleep well.”

“You too, Routledge.”

“I like Lampert’s idea, Alex,” Obie said.
“Swap him for Des.”

“Just the lines I been thinkin’ along, Obie.
Have to clean him up a bit, though. Give him a bit of appeal.”

The new meat, naked and covered in blood and
grime, had been thoroughly abused even before being brought here to
Old Town and the hotel. Zombie, Curtis, and Reed, who had found
him, had gone first. Then they had hired him out, cheaply enough
for almost anyone to afford. After that they had lost interest and
sold him to Peto.

“Zombie reckons he was a virgin,” Obie
said.

“What’s your name, Sonny?” Peto said.

He did not speak. He was huddled in the
corner, on the floor of the old dining-room, hunched up like a
foetus, needlessly now trying to protect himself from the
onslaught. He had not merely been raped; he had been dehumanized.
His eyes, when they had been open, had registered nothing. This was
the worst case Obie had ever seen, and he had seen plenty. At the
lighthouse, with Houlihan, this blond-haired boy would not last
long. He was pretty, prettier than Desborough, and as a bargaining
counter would be worth a lot.

“If the stonks hadn’t got there first I
could’ve gone for him myself,” Peto said.

Obie felt his stomach turn. He was beginning
to regret having supported the idea of a swap. But then it was
vital for Peto’s standing in the town that he got Desborough
back.

This morning Obie had returned to Martinson’s
hut to find him much improved. The broken bone was giving him
somewhat less pain, and it looked as if the cleaning and setting
might even have worked. Obie had prepared Martinson a meal, emptied
his slop bucket, and generally made himself useful before coming
over to the hotel, as he usually did, towards noon. Often he would
just sit around with Jez or Bubbles or Penguin or Peto himself,
either outside on the terrace or in the dining-room. He might lend
a hand with the goats, or do a bit of digging in the vegetable
patch or among the stalks of oats or corn. Occasionally they would
swim in Town Bay, or go after birds and eggs. If the helicopter had
left new meat Obie might join in the hunt, though today he hadn’t
bothered.

The dining-room, with its old bay windows
overlooking the terrace and the beach, was the best preserved part
of the hotel and formed Peto’s main quarters. A driftwood grid
overhead was covered with fertilizer-bag plastic and turf. Most of
the floorboards remained intact and only a few, mainly those near
the windows, were rotten. The doors had disappeared, as had the
window frames and glass, while nearly all the plaster had fallen
out of the walls, revealing crumbling laths and here and there
strands of old wiring. In winter and at night Peto leaned sheets of
corrugated iron against the windows. The furniture was the best Old
Town could offer, extending to a pair of smelly armchairs and a
settee with springs and stuffing hanging out at all angles, as well
as to some hard chairs and a broken card-table from which Peto ate
his meals.

Peto was slumped in one armchair, while Obie
occupied the other. “Get Jez,” Peto said. “You two clean him up.
I’ll find him somethin’ to wear. Then you go over the light and
talk to Houlihan.”

“On my own?”

“Take a white flag.”

“I want people with me.”

“Penguin, then. And Jez.”

“Hard people. You come, Alex.”

“No chance. They’d bod me for sure.”

At that moment raised voices outside in the
sunshine preceded the sound of a scuffle on the steps, where Jez
Brookes and Eric Craddock had joined Bubbles and Lampert on guard.
There was a shriek: Obie glanced at Peto, who jumped up and grabbed
the iron bar he always left leaning against the wall. A second
later Dave Nackett, behind him Lampert and Bubbles and Craddock and
three more, appeared in the doorway.

Nackett was holding a machete. An anglo,
heavily built, with a grey beard, he had once been prominent on
Peto’s team. Obie saw that all his predictions were coming true;
only the speed and boldness of the move had been unforeseen.

“What about you, Walker?” he said to Obie,
when at last it had stopped. “You want some too?”

Obie had taken refuge by the fireplace,
ignoring Peto’s screams for help. While Craddock and Lampert had
held Peto’s arms, it was Nackett who had struck the first blow.

“I don’t want no bother, Dave,” Obie managed
to say.

“Cut his head off,” Craddock said. “Like we
done to Brookes.”

“Christ’s sake, Dave,” Obie said. “Town’s
yours now. I don’t want it. I never did.”

“That’s right,” Nackett said. “It’s mine
now.” He turned to Craddock. “He was only Peto’s bumboy. He knows
what to expect if he makes trouble. You, Walker. Get rid of this
carrion.”

“Yes, Dave. Sure thing, Dave.” Obie grasped
Peto by what remained of his armpits and began pulling him towards
the door.

“When you done that, come back and clean up
the meat. We’re dealin’ with Houlihan now.”

* * *

Godwin’s workshop was much better finished
than King’s shack, with a flagstone floor and windows of real
glass. It consisted of one large and one small room, together with
Godwin’s bedroom and kitchen. For Fitzmaurice, Godwin’s assistant,
there was a folding bunk in the main workshop.

“This is where you’ll be sitting, Mr
Routledge,” Godwin said, indicating a small plywood table set
against the wall. “You can have that orange chair. Fetch it, will
you please.” Routledge went to the bench and collected the plastic
stacking chair, much faded and scuffed, taken no doubt from the
laboratory in the bungalow. “Extra paper’s in that cupboard. Waste
as little as possible.” Godwin motioned that Routledge should be
seated. Already waiting on the table were a propelling pencil, a
ruler, a solar-powered calculator, and a pile of scrap paper.

“Something relatively easy to start with. I
want you to draw some graphs. You’ll have to make your own graph
paper. Do it as accurately as you can. Then plot these equations.
There are twenty of them.”

“Right.” Routledge accepted the sheet of
paper and glanced at the equations, which had been numbered and
written out in blue ballpoint. Below them was another, unnumbered,
equation and a line of figures.

The light from the window flashed momentarily
in Godwin’s glasses. The style of the dark plastic frames, which
held the lenses in place with a single heavy bar, was distinctly
old-fashioned. He wheezed slightly when he spoke, as if he suffered
from asthma or emphysema. At one time he might have smoked a pipe
and worn cardigans with leather elbow-patches, and spent his
evenings tinkering in a basement den.

“Now, yesterday you said you were familiar
with the evaluation of definite integrals. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember Simpson’s Rule?”

“Finding the area enclosed by a curve?”

“That’s the one. Or you can use Dufton’s
Rules. However you do it, I want the areas of the curves between
the ordinates x equals zero and x equals thirty-six. Two per cent
accuracy will do for now. Then substitute each of the equations
generating the three smallest areas for theta in the master
equation. Evaluate alpha for these values of x. Got it?”

Routledge nodded.

“Any questions?”

“No, Mr Godwin. Not that I can think of.”

“Fine. Give me a shout if there are.”

Godwin returned to the bench, where
Fitzmaurice, leaning on one elbow and cradling his temple in his
fingers, had been using a pencil point to trace the flow of current
in a large circuit diagram.

“It’s here,” he said to Godwin. “Look.”

“All right. So what does that imply?”

“A glitch somewhere in the filter.”

“Got to be.”

They fell silent, both poring over the
diagram.

Routledge turned to the sheet of equations.
Theta was usually an angle. His suspicions about the nature of the
project began to take more definite form. Acoustics, electronics:
they were trying to build an echo sounder. Echo sounders were used
to identify obstacles on the sea bed. Rocks, for example. Or to
find clear channels for navigation. A boat. Franks was planning a
boat. There could no longer be the slightest doubt about it.

Routledge began work. It should have been
soothing beyond measure to return to the logical, clear-cut haven
of mathematics. Out there the sun was beating down; in here, in the
drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon, he was on safely familiar
territory. But a week ago, to the minute, he had been in the
bracken searching for his knife, almost out of his mind with guilt
and fear. He could not stop thinking about the events of that day
and, worse, of the following Monday. The images of Gazzer and
Tortuga he could perhaps, in time, manage to come to terms with and
absorb. The other one, the one at the chapel, was different. No
conversation had been exchanged, only the primeval communication of
intent between hunter and victim. The man would have killed him. It
had been a question of survival, pure and simple. Routledge’s
conscience should have been clear. But Routledge was not a caveman.
He could not rid himself in one week of five thousand years of
cultural conditioning. Where had the man been born? Where attended
school? Who were his parents? And who was Karen, the name in the
tattoo? Had she occupied Louise’s place in the man’s heart?

Routledge gave himself a conscious order to
attend to the business in hand.

Two per cent accuracy, Godwin had said.
Twelve strips, say. Routledge opened the calculator wallet and the
black bars of the liquid crystal display came instantly to life.
Clear it. Press % C to scroll the instructions. Eight
memory-registers. Not programmable, but plenty of functions. So.
Equation One. Let x equal zero.

All this had something to do with a sound
beam. Theta was the width of the beam. What could he remember about
sonar? Very little. Well, what problems were they up against? Range
would be a function of power. The transducers would need to be
small and hence operate at high frequency. But at high frequencies
there would also be high attenuation due to absorption by the
water, calling for higher power. At close quarters, say when
detecting a reef, that would increase reverberation. Then there
would be background noise caused by the waves, as well as thermal
noise and turbulence. And how would the signals be produced? How
would they be synchronized and regulated?

Routledge looked up. I’ve already guessed
what it’s about, he wanted to say. Tell me exactly what I’m
calculating and I’ll work better and faster. I might even be able
to suggest a few short-cuts.

Fitzmaurice glanced round. “Yes,” he said,
“is there something?”

“No – nothing. I was just thinking.”

Only after about ten days in the Village did
Routledge come to appreciate just what Franks’s organization had
achieved. He had never before had cause to give much thought to the
amount of care and labour needed to provide even the most basic
municipal services. To supply the Community with clean water, for
example, was a major undertaking involving hard work and strict
attention to hygiene. Drinking-water was taken from two wells, one
of which the Community itself had dug, while water for other
purposes came from a brook which discharged over the cliffs as a
small cascade. Above the cascade a pond had been hewn out of the
rock to act as a reservoir. Drinking-water was distributed by
donkey-cart and delivered daily to the door of each house, in a
variety of found plastic canisters. Water for washing was delivered
weekly; more could be collected from a central point, using one of
a fleet of special wheelbarrows fitted with drums and taps.

Fuel for cooking and heating was at a
premium. Much of the spare brush and driftwood was used to make
charcoal for the forge, leaving a limited supply for other
purposes. At a place called Mencaro Field, however, near the centre
of the island, was an extensive peat bog which the Community had
begun to exploit both for fuel and as a source of compost for
improving the soil. To provide warm water for laundry and showers,
Thaine had constructed a number of solar absorption bags from black
polythene, while the bungalow was served by solar panels and an
undersoil heat-exchanger inherited from its former occupants.

Besides candles and paraffin from the
mainland, which were allocated by Stamper, for lighting the
villagers used a spermaceti-like wax obtained from the stomach of
the fulmar. The smell permeated all clothing and furnishings and
papers wherever fulmar candles were burned; it was this odour which
had served Routledge, on first awakening in King’s house, as his
introduction to Sert.

The fulmar was also collected for meat.
Between April and July the cliffs around Pulpit Head, Porth Thomas
Bay, Beacon Point, and other parts of the south and south-eastern
coast still held large colonies of seabirds, especially fulmars,
kittiwakes, puffins, and guillemots. A little further north, at
Trellick Stack and Half Moon Bay, the colonies included razorbills
too; while the triangular area between Angara Point, Perdew Wood
and Old Town was home to a thousand pairs of Manx shearwaters.
Formerly there had been five thousand pairs: Sert had been a
seabird sanctuary of international scientific importance, but heavy
predation by the convicts had drastically reduced the numbers of
all the species and restricted the cliff-nesters to the less
accessible ledges. On Franks’s orders, only a quota of seabirds was
taken from the Village peninsula. The bulk of the birds was caught
outside the peninsula by large, armed expeditions formerly led by
Shoesmith, an expert cragsman whose mainland hobby had been
rock-climbing. King showed Routledge some of the ropes,
fowling-rods, and horsehair snares. Once each spring, at the neap
tide, the fowlers crossed the causeway to Trellick Stack. This
spring Shoesmith had slipped and fallen to his death: that, King
had said, was the price of fulmar light.