The Penal Colony

by Richard Herley

  At the bungalow Talbot stood up long before Franks reached the veranda. They exchanged a few quiet words before Franks, clapping him lightly on the shoulder, left the sunshine behind and went inside to his desk.

  5

  In summer, routine work in the fields usually stopped at about eleven, continuing again in the late afternoon, leaving the middle part of the day for other work or simply for leisure. King gave Routledge lunch sitting in the sunshine outside his house, accompanied by Ojukwu, a large, phlegmatic and very black man of Nigerian parentage, King’s next-door neighbour and one of the Community’s carpenters. Like Daniels, King, and a number of others he had encountered, Routledge found that Ojukwu appeared to be impressed by his acquisition of the crossbow. As he ate, Routledge tried to plan the best way to capitalize on his reputation.

  Lunch consisted of sandwiches of cold mutton – or goat’s flesh: he did not ask which – between slices of brown bread, coarse in texture but with a fresh, not unpleasant flavour. The bread was made at the Village bakery, and the Village dairy provided the butter. To drink there was water or goat’s milk. Routledge opted for water.

  When they had finished eating, his guided tour began. Ojukwu decided to come along. They went first to the nearby woodyard, where a prodigious quantity of driftwood had been amassed. Most of it consisted of small oddments, variously warped, cracked, splintered, bleached grey by sun and sea, or bearing faded stencilling in Roman or Cyrillic characters. Few large or useful pieces remained: and none of them bore any metal or plastic fittings, which were always stripped, catalogued, and stored elsewhere. This scrap wood, King explained, was used to supply charcoal for the forge, and as a free source of any small pieces that anyone might need.

  Ojukwu said that driftwood was not suitable for serious structural use. Under polythene shelters, arranged in correctly sticked piles and left to season, the yard also held a supply of planks derived from the island’s scanty stock of trees. The yard was deserted for lunch, its workshop empty.

  Opposite the workshop a sawbench stood astride a heap of pale dust. Power was supplied by the horses which, working a windlass, could raise a huge boulder four metres into the air. As the boulder came down it turned an ingenious set of gears and hence the viciously jagged blade, providing enough force to cut a metre or more into a tree trunk.

  The sawbench had been built by a man named Randal Thaine, who had utilized cogs and sprockets from machinery in the lighthouse. Thaine was also master of the metalwork shop, where King sometimes worked. This was situated next to the woodyard, looking out over the scrub to the western cliffs. The forge was not in use today. Routledge noted with surprise the professional-looking range of blacksmith’s tools, many made on the island from recycled driftwood-fittings. There were two anvils, one the engine block of a tractor abandoned in the evacuation, the other a rounded boulder. Neither, according to King, was really satisfactory, but so far the Prison Service had failed to respond to the Father’s requests for a real one.

  Once on Sert, King said, there was no getting off. Nonetheless the Community had been interpreted on the mainland as an attempt at rehabilitation, if not repentance, and the unusually liberal governor of Dartmoor Prison, under whose authority the penal colonies of Sert and Lundy lay, regarded the project with a kindly and paternal eye. Had it been up to him, Franks’s original petition and subsequent requests would have been even more benevolently treated, but several tiers of regulations intervened. One of these, the Home Office rules dealing with Category Z, was anything but benevolent.

  Supplies from the mainland were strictly limited. There were allowances of such provisions as paraffin, matches, and medicines, but these were by no means generous. Special requests for seed, tools, and livestock were sometimes granted, more often not. For nearly everything else the prisoners had to depend on their own ingenuity, or on their personal requisitions, and these took weeks, months, to come through and even then were often lacking or inaccurately made up.

  All this King explained as they visited the recreation hut, a sort of common-room fitted with a bar, dartboard, and a number of makeshift armchairs. Here Routledge was introduced to several more men. One of them, Blackshaw, turned out to be the self-appointed chaplain. Middle-aged, bald and bespectacled, with a curiously braying voice, he wasted no time in inviting Routledge to visit the chapel, which was located on its own some little way from the Village.

  “You’re welcome any time, Mr Routledge. Come to evensong, why don’t you?”

  “Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.”

  Once they were outside, King said, “Are you a religious man, Mr Routledge?”

  “Not in Mr Blackshaw’s sense.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Ojukwu said.

  From the recreation hut they went in turn to the dairy, the bakery, and the animal sheds. Leaving the Village by the western track, they came to an exposed place on the cliffs where a wooden tower, reinforced with steel guy wires, looked out over the sea. At the top of the tower, about three metres up, set one above the other, were two longitudinal scoops cut from a pair of two-hundred-litre oildrums. Even in the light early-afternoon breeze the drums were revolving quite quickly, turning a vertical driveshaft connected to a generator. From this a cable led to a large storage battery set on a cart. The windmill, like the sawbench, had been made by Randal Thaine. Technically, King said, it was called a Savonious Rotor. Another, smaller, rotor was mounted on the roof of the metalwork shop back at the Village and was used to drive directly a combination grinder, lathe, and drill.

  Routledge asked whether it was Thaine who had made the crossbow.

  “Yes. He’s done quite a few now. We use them for border security.”

  After showing Routledge the interior of the hut where spares and batteries for the windmill were stored, King and Ojukwu led him along the western cliffs and so back to the fields.

  The soil was extremely poor. In the early days of the Village, large areas of scrub had been cleared by machete and by concentrated grazing with goats and pigs. Once cleared, the ground had been marked out with dry stone walling or with willow hurdles, along which thousands of hawthorn and blackthorn saplings had been planted to make hedges. The fields so formed were mainly pastures consisting predominantly of the coarse clifftop grasses, food for sheep and a few cows as well as the goats. With each year, though, more of the pasture was being improved and started on a cycle of rotation which would in time provide the Community with all the cereals and root crops it would ever need.

  Oil-seed rape and kale were also being grown as organic material to be ploughed back into the soil. The cleared vegetation of the scrub, King explained, had not been burned, but shredded and allowed to rot down. Quantities of guano were collected in winter from the seabird cliffs and used as fertilizer; every scrap of organic matter the Village produced, from potato peelings to the sawdust in the woodyard, was kept and composted in scientifically designed and tended heaps sited in the centre of the cultivated area. Even the bags from the latrines were brought here to be emptied.

  “Speakin’ of shitbags,” Ojukwu said, “let’s go wait for our good friends from the Service.”

  King acceded: Routledge had seen enough to get the general idea. The tour was over.

  “Our good friends from the Service?” Routledge said.

  “The only ones we ever see,” Ojukwu said. “The boys in helmets. The helicopter. It’s Tuesday today.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The drop zone was marked out with a broad circle of boulders on the turf at a place called the Warrens, on the eastern side of the peninsula. This was the least cultivated part of the headland, separated from the fields around the Village by a waste of heather and bracken. The Warrens consisted of a depression rather like the one above Old Town, but much larger and shallower, shelving down to the cliffs and extending, to the north-east, beyond the border.

  A number of villagers had already gathered on the landward slope. Some were shirtless; some wore shorts. All had been
working earlier in the fields or the workshops and would soon be returning there.

  This was the best vantage point, two hundred metres from the edge of the zone. If anyone went closer than that, Ojukwu said, the helicopter would not touch down.

  They joined the waiting men. Routledge acknowledged those he had already met and was introduced to a dozen more. He was again congratulated on surviving his period outside, and was again pressed for an account of Martinson and the crossbow. It was just as King had said last night: he had become something of a celebrity. But he was careful to play the matter down, and by his reticence indicated that he did not wish to discuss it further. This seemed to have its calculated effect, and he felt his standing with them rise accordingly. During the ensuing conversation no one ventured to address him directly. King did most of the talking. Many of the matters discussed meant little or nothing to Routledge: gossip about names he did not know, the weather and the crops, the Village darts league. A championship was in progress, and King had staked a bottle of whisky on the favourite, Gunter, whose abilities were being hotly debated by several of those present.

  Ojukwu was not interested in darts. He had plucked a grass stalk and was chewing it while he reclined, head in hands, full length on the turf. Routledge, following his example, was also chewing a grass stalk, but remained leaning on one elbow, with his free hand foiling the efforts of an ant to pursue the direction it wanted to take.

  The sun felt hot. The breeze from the south was soft and balmy. He gave scant attention to the talk around him. He was among people, but he was utterly alone. They were his countrymen, his peers, sharing further the common bond of Sert, but still he was alone.

  From time to time in his life he had known moments of a strangely heightened, cold, and detached defiance. This was one of them. His position was hopeless. He would never leave the island alive. All his former plans and expectations had been reduced to this present moment of unreality, to this feeling of alienation and despair, and yet, and yet, somehow it did not matter. He remembered once being caught practising on a golf course by an electric storm. Counting by seconds, the lightning had been only a mile away and coming closer. The received wisdom would have required him to humiliate himself by lying down on the ground, preferably in a bunker, getting himself not only wet but also covered in orange sand. He should also have distanced himself from his golf bag, and especially from the steel stem of his multi-coloured umbrella. But he had continued walking along the open fairway with the umbrella raised skywards. In that torrential downpour he had not been sure that the faint vibration of the handle had been caused by the rain; equally it might have been caused by the expectation that at any instant he would be hit with a couple of million joules. Rationality had urged him to take cover. Something else, deeper, more essentially himself, had refused to listen. “Go on, you old bastard,” he had breathed, “go on, do your worst. Do your worst! See if I care!”

  Well, now the worst had been done and he was still here. It was Routledge alone who had disposed of Gazzer and Tortuga, who had escaped from Martinson and employed superior intelligence and nerve to eliminate the man at the ruins. The old bastard had had nothing to do with it.

  “He’s comin’,” Ojukwu said, without opening his eyes.

  Routledge heard it then, the faint sound of approaching rotors.

  The general conversation ceased.

  Near the centre of the circle lay a pile of empty paraffin canisters and buttercup-yellow mail crates, brilliant in the full glare of the sun. Mitchell was in charge of the drop, and earlier he and his gang had brought the crates and canisters from the bungalow precinct.

  “There it is,” Carter said, pointing a kilometre out to sea, where Routledge now discerned, gunmetal grey against ultramarine, the shape of the approaching helicopter. It was less dragonfly-like than most of its kind, with a humped back, windshields rather than a dome, and a sharp, somewhat downturned snout. Seen from this elevation, it did not even break the horizon.

  “Where’s it based?” Routledge said.

  “Dartmoor,” Ojukwu said.

  All eyes were raised as the intensifying racket heralded the sweep across the cliffs and then, turning on its axis, the deceleration of the helicopter, the yellow bands on the rear rotor making a blurred circle which vanished and reappeared as the machine reached the drop zone and prepared to land.

  The engines seemed impossibly loud and intrusive. Routledge made out the words H M Prisons and the numerals 3-947, painted in white on the length of the tail. The tyres hanging from the cowled main undercarriage reached for and made contact with the turf, and were followed a moment later by the nosewheel.

  The pilot, sitting behind his Plexiglas, could be seen checking the controls even as the hatch in the left-hand side slid open and two white-helmeted crewmen jumped out, wearing fluorescent yellow lifejackets and grey flying-suits. While the rotors kept the grass bent flat, the crewmen hurriedly unloaded the full canisters and crates and loaded the empty ones. When the loading was finished, they brought out a stretcher bearing a fair-haired man, left its contents supine on the ground and, almost as an afterthought, dumped the cardboard box containing his issue.

  Just as Routledge had been, exactly a week ago, the newcomer was out cold. As far as the brain inside that head was aware, he was still a prisoner on the mainland. He had an unpleasant surprise in store.

  The whole operation had lasted no longer than three minutes: the helicopter was already airborne again, its hatch sliding shut as, nose down, it gained altitude and headed out to sea.

  Routledge had half expected an undisciplined rush for the mail crates. Instead, no one stirred except Mitchell and his five assistants, two of whom picked up the newly arrived convict and stretchered him off towards the Village. Mitchell himself examined the supplies. When satisfied that everything was in order, he issued a wave, and Routledge joined the group of twenty or so who went down to the drop zone. The mail crates remained sealed: Routledge found that he had volunteered to help carry everything back to the bungalow. He and King shared the weight of a hundred-litre plastic canister embossed with the words DANGER – HIGHLY INFLAMMABLE.

  Routledge was not as strong as King. At frequent intervals he had to ask to stop and rest, and soon they fell far behind. The sun was burning the back of his neck; his hands already reeked of paraffin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as they sat down beside the track. “I can see I’ve got a bit of toughening up to do.”

  “Don’t let it bother you.”

  “Why is the drop made where it is? Why not at the Village?”

  “Two reasons, really. First, at the Warrens the helicopter has an all-round view: they’re understandably nervous about anyone wanting a lift back to the mainland. At one time they used to drop at Half Moon Bay, but once the Village got going the Father persuaded them to do it here. Secondly, the official line is that supplies are shared equally among all the islanders, so we could hardly ask them to make a doorstep delivery.”

  “Is the island under surveillance?”

  “Of course. From a geostationary satellite.”

  “Meaning it stays in one place with respect to the planet surface?”

  King nodded. “It serves this place, Lundy, and Dartmoor for good measure. High-resolution optics, image intensifiers, the lot. The computers scan all movement and automatically alert the technicians to anything that happens. The image can be enhanced, magnified, and manipulated however they want. It’s all part of the security network. Have you been told about the Magic Circle yet?”

  “No,” Routledge said. “Not yet.”

  “There used to be two lighthouses on Sert, an unmanned one at Beacon Point and the main installation at Angara Point. At the evacuation they brought in two lightships instead, one north of the island and the other to the south. Each one is stuffed with electronics. Between them they monitor the entire coast and the sea round the island to a distance of several kilometres. They’re coordinated on the mainland. The
whole thing forms a circle round the island. It’s impossible to break it undetected. In fact, it’s impossible to do anything in the open and remain undetected, day or night.”

  “Has anyone ever escaped?”

  “I wondered when you’d ask me that. The answer’s no.”

  “Has anyone ever tried?”

  “No. There’s no way you could build a boat without them knowing. Even if you did, it’d show on the radar as soon as you got into open water.”

  “You could swim.”

  “It’s forty kilometres to the nearest land. The currents would make it nearer eighty. Assuming you survived the reefs. And exposure. Even in late summer you’d be unconscious in no time, and dead soon after that. But, just say you did manage to keep alive. Within a couple of minutes your body heat would register on the infrared. They have the very best equipment. However much money they spend, it still works out cheaper than running a maximum security prison for five hundred men. Outdoors, anywhere, the chances are you’re being watched. The cameras probably aren’t good enough to resolve faces, because the authorities rely on us to tell them who’s died. At least, they appear to rely on us. It may be that they accept our figures so they can send more prisoners than the regulations would otherwise permit. Mr Godwin says they’ve got cameras now that can resolve newspaper text. If that’s the case, they’re aware of even more than we think.”

  “So they know about the outsiders and the distribution of supplies?”

  “They must do. If the penal reform people found out they’d make a stink, as they would about the numbers, but then they’re not privy to that information either. Unofficially, I suppose the authorities don’t care. It’s probably pretty much the same on all the penal colonies.”

  “But the outsiders – don’t they object?”

  King shrugged.

  “Do they make trouble?”

  “All the time. But then they’d make trouble whatever happened, even if we handed them everything we produced. We waste most of our energies maintaining the border. You’ll find out. You’ll be on night patrol in a couple of months. When you’ve finished building your house.”