The Penal Colony Read Online Free PDF

room, Louise beside him on the sofa,
the pale blue display of the video blinking discreetly in the soft,
lamplit gloom under the screen, what would have been his thoughts
had he known what he was really watching?
    He wished he had taken more of it in. Now all
he remembered was that the vegetation of the island, this vista of
impoverished scrub, was a legacy of too many sheep and too much
grazing. And rabbits, introduced no doubt by the monks.
    His survey had not lasted long: he had been
too frightened of being seen. He had made out the border fence
disappearing across the hill, the gateway, the roof of the
bungalow, and the form of a number of other buildings in the
Village. Most looked pretty crude, like King’s shack. The Village
was larger than he had thought, and was probably larger still, with
much of it hidden by the contours of the land.
    Unless he had been mistaken, he had glimpsed
the movement of two or three men patrolling inside the border,
approaching his vantage point. He had not waited to see more.
    During the night he had feared that he would
be unable to find water, but, almost immediately after his brief
survey, he had come across a tiny rill springing from the rock and
making its way down to the cliffs. The rill was scarcely more than
a trickle, and at first he had not known how to get enough to
drink. He had tried lying full length with his mouth open and his
cheek pressed hard against the stone, but that had not worked.
Then, despite the cold, he had started to take off his shirt, in
order to soak the water up and squeeze it into a depression made in
the back of his PVC jacket; when a better idea had occurred to him.
Using the cuff of the jacket as a scoop, and with the sleeve
twisted higher up, he had simply collected as much as he had
wanted. Contaminated as it had been by the flavour of plastic, the
first full gulp of water had seemed to Routledge the most wonderful
he had ever tasted.
    The most pressing of his problems, water, had
thus been solved. Food was not so important. If necessary, he could
survive for the whole six-day period without eating anything at
all, although he felt that this would not do his cause much good
when he returned to the Village. In order to score maximum points,
in order to win the greatest possible respect and thereby the best
chance of advancing himself in the Community, he had guessed that
he had not merely to survive the ordeal, but to survive it with
ease and style.
    Going over what he had discovered during his
time in the Village, he saw that he had actually, despite
Appleton’s efforts, learned quite a lot. The mere fact that
Appleton, doubtless following the rules laid down by the “Father”,
had tried to send Routledge out in total ignorance of the
conditions awaiting him, this fact alone was extremely revealing
about the mentality of the people he was, in the long term, up
against.
    From King’s demeanour in front of the
triumvirate, as well as from differences in clothing and a number
of other clues, Routledge had surmised that, in the Community,
status was all. The high status – measured by his clothing and by
his failure to call Stamper “Mr” – of the guard at the bungalow
door seemed to show that status was achieved principally, if not
solely, by closeness or usefulness to the Father. Repellent as the
idea was, Routledge saw that his only chance of future comfort was
indeed to gain admittance to the Community and once there to do
everything in his power to achieve high status.
    If the inmates of the Village really lived by
their own code, then he could assume that none of them had told him
a lie. It followed that the figures Mitchell had given of the
island’s population could be believed. He had said that one hundred
and eighty-three men lived in the Village out of a population of
about five hundred in all. That meant there were something like
three hundred and twenty convicts living outside the Community, a
fact which Routledge had seized upon the