The Penal Colony (33 page)

Obie had amassed a lot of other information
about the Village, usually watching either from here on Pulpit Head
or from the cliffs at Vanston Cove, on the other side of the
Village peninsula. On a few occasions he had gone over the border,
but mostly he had left that to Martinson. He knew many of the
villagers by name, as many more by sight only. He was figuring out
who did what, who worked in the fields and who worked in the
compound.

Like everyone outside, Obie envied and
resented the men in the Village, and not just because they had
appropriated the helicopter. They were warm, well fed, secure. For
them the nightmare was not so bad.

In clear weather, from the eastern coast, you
could see the mainland as plain as you like. With the binocs you
could even see houses and sometimes the flash of sun on a
windscreen.

Obie had never received a letter here. Not
one. His girl friend had probably shacked up with someone else long
ago, probably had a kid, two kids, three. He didn’t care about her.
He only cared about his mum. He would never know when she died.
Still less would he be able to go to her funeral or put flowers on
her stone. She might already be dead.

“That’s enough,” he breathed. “No more of
that.”

If he went on with it the emptiness and
despair would get too bad to handle. He would end up jumping off
the cliff. A number of blokes had done that. Especially if they
weren’t already gay and couldn’t stomach the prospect of turning
queer. Especially when they learned what the rest of the
alternative to the Village was like.

He couldn’t blame them, had considered it
himself. The first time he had submitted to Peto he had felt his
flesh crawl. Anything he could do, anything, to help Martinson get
that Franks bastard, would be for Obie the sweetest imaginable
labour of love.

Appleton and the other one had reached the
end of the Point. They stopped walking. Obie altered the focus by a
fraction and blinked, trying to sharpen his eyesight. He saw the
other one setting the oil drum down. Appleton glanced up, almost
guiltily, at the sky, and quickly pulled something from inside his
coat – a stick, was it?

Obie had to look away and wipe his eyes. When
he looked back, Appleton was holding or steadying the top of the
oil drum. The other man was kneeling on the ground, his head
cocked. He seemed to be using the top of the drum like a gunsight,
squinting south-eastwards out to sea. Obie got a better view of his
face. With a beard it was difficult to be sure, but the general
build seemed familiar. A moment later the man stood up and
hurriedly took something from his pocket. One hand drew away from
the other with a rapid, smooth movement, and he bent over the drum.
A tape measure? Was he measuring something?

What in hell’s name were they doing? First
the daytime patrols. Then the activity in Star Cove. Now this. Were
the three connected?

Again the wind forced Obie to put the
binoculars down and wipe his eyes. Afterwards it took him a moment
to find the two men once more. The other one was again carrying the
oil drum. He and Appleton were walking back the way they had come.
They followed the path to the chapel and then, going behind the
Warrens, were lost to view.

Allowing the binoculars to range over the
rest of the Village headland, Obie tried to fit this new
observation into the vestigial framework of what he had already
seen. Something extraordinary and suspicious was going on. The
previous week, in the misty pre-dawn gloom, he had watched two
villagers carrying what had appeared to be a heavy wooden door down
the cliff path to Star Cove. They had disappeared under an overhang
of rock. So much time had elapsed before their re-emergence that
Obie had thought he had missed them coming out.

There was a cave down there, quite a big one,
as Obie recalled.

Patrols in daytime as well as at night.

Peculiar measurements on the cliff.

Appleton.

Obie suddenly remembered the name of the man
with the oil drum. Jenkins, that was it: the new meat that he, Jez
and Martinson had found last summer in Perdew Wood. Jenkins was
educated. Talked posh. Just like Appleton. Martinson would be
interested in this. He had asked Obie to keep a special watch for
Jenkins.

On the way back to Old Town, Obie turned what
he had seen over and over in his mind. The business with the oil
drum had intrigued him. Especially Appleton’s guilty, involuntary,
skyward glance. And what had Jenkins been peering at, away to the
south-east?

What, Obie asked himself, lay to the
south-east of Azion Point? Apart from salt water, nothing but the
lightship!

The lightship. They were planning something
nasty for the lightship!

Like hijacking the helicopter, this was a
recurring fantasy among everyone on the island. Never mind the
radar: just get a bunch of hard geezers together, swim out to one
of the lightships, storm it, hold the crew hostage. Make them weigh
anchor and sail to the mainland, to France, anywhere.

There were three good reasons why it had
never been attempted. First, each ship was several kilometres
offshore, and to get there you had to negotiate the reefs. An even
better reason was the fact – made clearly known to the pioneering
prisoners who had come over on the boat – that the men on the
lightships, like the helicopter crews, were armed with riot gas and
machine guns. Finally, no one knew for sure whether the lightships
had engines. They might have been merely towed into place.
Certainly they never went anywhere, never altered their positions.
Just before the onset of really heavy weather the helicopter
usually came to evacuate the crews.

Even so, planning an attack on a lightship
had been a favourite topic of conversation in Peto’s council. No
one outside the Village had the balls to try it. But Franks. Franks
was another matter!

That explained Star Cove. They weren’t going
to swim. They were building a boat, perhaps a raft. That’s how
they’d do it. A raft. And they were building it under cover because
of the Eye.

In his excitement, Obie nearly failed to
think this through; he remembered himself just in time.

Martinson returned at noon. He had nothing of
interest to report. “You?”

“Not much,” Obie said. “I seen that Jenkins.
The one what ligged your crossbow.”

“Where was he?” Martinson said, with sudden
relish.

“In the fields.”

“Doing what?”

“Diggin’ parsnips, far as I could make out.
You’re goin’ to get him back, ain’t you, Jim?”

“No one pulls holes in my roof. No one steals
my stuff. No one makes me look a herbert in front of the whole
town. Specially no jumped-up little pratt-faced stonk-fodder faggot
like that.”

“That’s just what I thought.” Obie sat down
on Martinson’s sofa and with a hopeful eye scanned the vacant
larder shelves. “Got any scoff?”

* * *

“Eight two seven,” Routledge said, stretching
Thaine’s steel tape between the two outer pins of the
protractor.

“Eight two seven,” Appleton said, writing the
number down.

They, together with a guard party consisting
of Myers, Bourne, and Wilson, had come to the end of Beacon Point
to take the second fix on the southern lightship. For this they
were using a protractor of Routledge’s design, made of two laths of
plywood, hinged at one end like a pair of dividers. A wire nail ran
vertically through the hinge. Another wire nail, precisely fifty
centimetres from the inner or hinge nail, had been driven through
the end of each limb. The inner and left-hand outer nail had been
lined up with the lightship, the inner and right-hand outer nail
with the tip of Azion Point, some four kilometres west. A fortnight
ago Routledge and Appleton had taken a similar reading from Azion
Point, with Beacon Point as the reference, giving a value of 291
millimetres.

The map of Sert in the bungalow did not show
the position of the lightships. However, it did have a scale.
Provided with these two readings, Routledge would be able to
pinpoint the position of the southern lightship. The fixes on the
northern lightship had been taken earlier: its position would be
determined in the same way, hence establishing the distance between
the two lightships.

Godwin had estimated the Magic Circle as
effective to a range of no more than five kilometres from the
island coast. Allowing as much margin for error as possible, this
meant the ketch could not be allowed to surface any nearer than
seven kilometres out.

Once round the Village headland, the course
of the ketch would be due west. The course would be plotted by
compass: but without a log the helmsman would have no way of
measuring the distance covered. What was needed was a rangefinder,
quick and foolproof in use and guaranteed accurate.

Thaine had devised one, but Routledge had
suggested another, even simpler, consisting of a T-shape in
plywood. The perpendicular of the T would be thirty centimetres
long; the width of the bar would be determined by schoolboy
trigonometry based on the distance between the lightships. Held
horizontally, with the bottom of the T touching the chin, the bar,
its tips stained white on the observer’s side, would be aligned
with the two flashing lights. If the lights fell between the tips
the ketch would be over seven kilometres from the coast and so
could safely surface.

“Good,” Appleton said, putting his notebook
away. “Fine.” He retrieved the protractor from the top of the small
oil drum, brought specially by Routledge, which they had been using
as a base. Appleton closed the limbs and slipped the protractor
inside his coat: the fix had been accomplished in less than half a
minute. There was little chance that this fix, any more than the
others, had attracted the attention of the Service. For safety’s
sake the fixes had been spread over a period of a month.

Routledge picked up the drum and they set
off, Myers leading the way, following the western path along the
peninsula.

For Routledge this terrain held private
memories. Here, at this rock rising boatlike from the turf: this
was where he had shot the wild man. No bones were visible on the
top. The birds, or foxes, or other men, had removed them.

The place seemed different now, tamer,
smaller in scale. Routledge’s nightmares had ceased. In fact, he
found himself able to regard his former feelings about the incident
with what amounted almost to detachment. The wild man had played
and lost the fatal game he had himself insisted upon. As with
Gazzer and Tortuga, Routledge had not wanted any part of it; had
been innocent of malice. And, just as with Gazzer and Tortuga,
Routledge had taken the correct and necessary steps to win.

It was hard, but then Sert itself was hard.
The slack, ill-defined morality of his upbringing had no place
here. He understood now and approved of the way Franks ran the
Village. The initiation procedure was cruel and harsh, often,
doubtless, unfair. It was wasteful of men and abilities. But, like
natural selection, it worked.

In the same way, Franks’s right to the
helicopter drops could not be judged by fuzzy mainland standards.
He got the drops because he had won that particular game. Again,
hard: but not as hard as the consequences of losing.

Routledge glanced over to the right, up at
the ridge which hid the ruins from view.

“What’s on your mind?” Appleton said, drawing
level.

“The monastery.”

Appleton grunted. “There’s some stone there
we ought to take. Be handy for paving.”

Except during his patrol duties, Appleton
rarely left the Village. He had said he had come today for the
exercise. Routledge felt there was another motive. Appleton may
have been checking that this morning’s fix, like the ones last
month, was being correctly taken: his life, after all, might depend
on it.

Since that excursion to Azion Point he had
become much more friendly. He seemed, in tune with several others,
to be responding to the changes that, difficult to define,
Routledge had felt developing within himself. He had been admitted
to informal terms with Tragasch, with Fitzmaurice, even with the
undemonstrative Scammell.

In the past few weeks his status had risen:
he did not know how far. Neither his academic abilities nor his
contribution to the escape project had earned him any appreciable
points. What benefit he had accrued for working for Godwin and
Thaine had come because he had applied himself every day and
willingly done whatever had been required of him. Neither, it now
appeared, had it passed unnoticed how hard he had worked to finish
his house on time.

He had revised his opinion of Appleton. The
man was a stickler for what he believed to be right and true: for
the interests and welfare of the Village. He cared nothing for
popularity, yet was regarded with profound respect, almost
veneration, by the whole Community. And, hidden below dense layers
of reserve, visible only to those to whom he chose to show it,
Routledge had detected in Appleton a keenly observant sense of the
ridiculous.

When they got to the bungalow he accompanied
Appleton to the door of Franks’s office.

The visit had been arranged yesterday. Franks
was expecting them. With a gentle knock on the panel, Appleton went
inside and sought permission for Routledge to enter.

Franks was sitting by the window, in the
tapestry-covered armchair, pencil in hand, a file in his lap, more
files and papers on the low table beside him. “Good morning, Mr
Routledge.”

“Good morning, Father.”

Routledge had never been in this room before.
It adjoined the laboratory, where the Council met and new arrivals
were interviewed, and through its French windows gave Routledge an
unfamiliar perspective of the back garden, the line of larches,
Godwin’s workshop. Godwin was there now, his head bent over his
bench.