“I smell trouble,” said O’Leary to the warden.
“Trouble, trouble?” Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the last decent job he would have in his life. “Trouble?
What
trouble?”
O’Leary shrugged. “Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This afternoon he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.”
The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded:
“O’Leary, what did you want to worry me for? There’s nothing wrong with playing ball in the yard. That’s what recreation periods are for!”
“No. You don’t see what I mean, warden. Lafon was a professional on the outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes don’t mix, it isn’t natural. And there are other things.” O’Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that it didn’t
smell
right? “For Instance—Well, there’s Aunt Mathias in the women’s block. She’s a pretty good old girl—that’s why she’s the block orderly, she’s a lifer, she’s got no place to go, she gets along with the other women. But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn’t understand. Now, Mathias wouldn’t—”
The warden raised his hand. “Please, O’Leary,” he begged. “Don’t bother me about that kind of stuff.” He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O’Leary, then dropped a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring its temperature.
He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and more assured.
“O’Leary,” he said, “you’re a guard captain, right? And I’m your warden. You have your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now, your job is just as important as my job,” he said piously, staring gravely at O’Leary.
“Everybody’s
job is just as important as everybody else’s, right? But we have to stick to our own jobs. We don’t want to try to
pass.”
O’Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was that for the warden to talk to him.
“Excuse the expression, O’Leary,” the warden said anxiously. “I mean, after all, ‘Specialization is the goal of civilization,’ right?” He was a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier.
“You
know, you don’t want to worry about my end of running the prison. And I don’t want to worry about yours. You see?” And he folded his hands and smiled like a civil-service Buddha.
O’Leary choked back his temper. “Warden, I’m telling you that there’s trouble coming up. I smell the signs.”
“Handle it, then!” snapped the warden, irritated at last.
“But suppose it’s too big to handle? Suppose—”
“It isn’t,” the warden said positively. “Don’t borrow trouble with all your supposing, O’Leary.” He sipped the remains of his coffee, made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not noticing what he himself was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into it this time.
He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.
“Well, then,” he said at last. “You just remember what I’ve told you tonight, O’Leary, and we’ll get along fine. ‘Specialization is the—’ Oh, curse the thing.”
His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably—that was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O’Leary; they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge. “Hello,” barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. “What the devil do you want? Don’t you know I’m—What? You did
what?
You’re going to WHAT?”
He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.
Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like clamshells in a steamer.
“O’Leary,” he said faintly, “my mistake.”
And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his fingers.
The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.
Five minutes before he hadn’t been anywhere near the phone, and it didn’t look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good. Because five minutes before he was in his cell, with the rest of the hard-timers of the Green Sleeves.
His name was Flock.
He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him, thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the face of an agonized man.
The outside guard bellowed: “Okay, okay. Take ten!”
Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the Green Sleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment. “Rest period” it was called—in the rule book; the inmates had a less lovely term for it.
At the guard’s yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.
Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields had a way of making metal
smoke-hot. She gasped, but didn’t cry out. Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly. The eddy currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.
The guard peered genially into her cell. “You’re okay, auntie.” She proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds. At least he didn’t have to untie her, and practically stand over her while she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was grateful. At least, she didn’t have to live
quite
like a fig—like an underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.
Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” He opened the door of the cell with an asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.
Flock was in that cell, and he was doubled over.
The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe. Couldn’t it? But he could see Flock’s face, and the agony in it was real enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: “Cramps. I—I—”
“Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.” The guard lumbered around Flock to the drawstrings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people didn’t believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning. Scorching—almost like meat scorching.
It wasn’t pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to get all the way around Block O, and the inmates complained like crazy if he didn’t make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was pretty good at snow-shoeing through the tangler field. He was a little vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability to make the rounds in two minutes, every time … .
Every time but this.
For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.
The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was Flock—astonishing, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn’t been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there was something that glinted and smoked.
“All right,” croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut with pain.
But it wasn’t the tears that held the guard, it was the shining, smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though it had been made out of a bedspring, ripped loose from its frame God knows how, hidden inside the green-sleeved jacket God knows how—nied, filed to sharpness over endless hours. No wonder Flock moaned! For the eddy-currents in the shiv were slowly cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen where the shiv had rested during other rest periods felt like raw acid.
“All right,” whispered Flock, “just walk out the door, and you won’t get hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won’t get hurt—so tell him not to, you hear?” He was nearly fainting with the pain.
But he hadn’t let go.
He didn’t let go. And he didn’t stop.
And it was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing the two bound deck guards.
Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. “Hey, warden!” he said—and the voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and hating. “Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt himself real bad and he needs a doctor.” He gestured playfully at the guards with the shiv. “I tell you, warden. I got this knife, and I got your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick—you hear?”
And he snapped the connection.
O’Leary said, “Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!”
The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated, and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison operator: “Get me the Governor—fast!”
Riot!
The word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots. It snatched the City Governor out of a friendly game of Seniority with his Manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole. It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a Red Alert that was real. It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.
Riot. And yet, fewer than half a dozen men were actually involved.
A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in every limb and class. It was like a quarrel of fleas on the hide of a rhino!
But a flea-bite can kill a rhino with the slow agony of communicated disease; and the city-state around the prison leaped in fear. In its ten million homes, in its hundreds of thousands of public places, the city-state’s people shook under the impact of the news from the prison.
For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a barroom fight of greasers relaxing from a hard day at the plant—the riot was down among the corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes, and no one cared; but in the Jug all classes were cast together.
Thirty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn’t any alert scheduled for tonight; no, they didn’t know where Daddy was going; no, the kids couldn’t get up yet—it was the middle of the night!
And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the Briefing Area to hear.
They caught the words from a distance—not quite correctly. “Riot!” gasped an air-craftswoman
first-class, mother of three. “The wipes! I
told
Charlie they’d get out of hand, and—Alys, we aren’t safe. You know how they are about GI women! I’m going right home and get a club and stand right by the door and—”
“Club!” snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two children querulously awake in her nursery at home. “What in God’s name is the use of a club? You can’t hurt a wipe hitting him on the head. You’d better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun—you’ll need it before this night is out!”
But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison. So the rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a whistling roar; and last of all the helicopters took off … and they were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers in each copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.
They were ready for the breakout.
But—there wasn’t any breakout.
The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.
The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again. They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed. The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of the guard squadrons surrounding the walls. North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded tenements of the laborers’ quarters, the wipes shouted from window to window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.
“The whole bloody thing’s going to blow up!” a helicopter bombardier yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the whirling blades. “Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first break-out from the Jug’s going to start a fight like you never saw—and we’ll be right in the middle of it!”
He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of It—for every man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of it; there was no place anywhere that would be spared.
No Mixing.
That was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There’s no harm in a family fight—and aren’t all mechanics a family, aren’t all laborers a clan, aren’t all clerks and office workers related by closer ties than blood or skin? But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and once they spread the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The break-out would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever known … .
But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn’t seeming to come.
The Jug itself was coming to a boil.
Honor Block A, relaxed and comfortable at the end of another day, found itself shaken alert by strange goings-on. First there was the whir and roar of the Air Force overhead.
Trouble.
Then there was the sudden arrival of extra guards, doubling the normal
complement—day-shift guards, summoned away from their comfortable civil-service homes at some urgent call.
Trouble for sure.
Honor Block A wasn’t used to trouble. A Block was as far from the Green Sleeves of O Block as you could get and still stay in the Jug. Honor Block A belonged to the prison’s halfbreeds—the honor prisoners, the trusties who did guards’ work because there weren’t enough guards to go around. They weren’t Apaches or Piutes; they were camp-following Injuns who had sold out for the white man’s firewater. The price of their services was privilege—many privileges. Item: TV sets in every cell. Item: Hobby tools, to make gadgets for the visitor trade—the only way an inmate could earn an honest dollar. Item: In consequence, an exact knowledge of everything the outside world knew and put on its TV screens (including the grim, alarming reports of “trouble at Estates-General”) and the capacity to convert their “hobby tools” to—other uses.
An honor prisoner named Wilmer Lafon was watching the TV screen with an expression of rage and despair.
Lafon was a credit to the Jug—he was a showpiece for visitors. Prison rules provided for prisoner training—it was a matter of “rehabilitation.” Prisoner rehabilitation is a joke, and a centuries-old one at that; but it had its serious uses, and one of them was to keep the prisoners busy. It didn’t much matter at what.
Lafon, for instance, was being “rehabilitated” by studying architecture. The guards made a point of bringing inspection delegations to his cell to show him off. There were his walls, covered with pin-ups—but not of women. The pictures were sketches Lafon had drawn himself; they were of buildings, highways, dams and bridges; they were splendidly conceived and immaculately executed. “Looka that!” the guards would rumble to their guests. “There isn’t an architect on the outside as good as this boy! What do you say, Wilmer? Tell the gentlemen—how long you been taking these correspondence courses in architecture? Six years! Ever since he came to the Jug.”
And Lafon would grin and bob his head, and the delegation would go, with the guard saying something like: “Believe me, that Wilmer could design a whole skyscraper—and it wouldn’t fall down, either!”
And they were perfectly, provably right. Not only could Inmate Lafon design a skyscraper, but he had already done so. More than a dozen of them. And none had fallen down.
Of course, that was more than six years back, before he was convicted of a felony and sent to the Jug. He would never design another. Or if he did, it would never be built. For the plain fact of the matter was that the Jug’s rehabilitation courses were like rehabilitation in every prison that was ever built since time and punishment began. They kept the inmates busy. They made a show of purpose for an institution that had never had a purpose that made sense. And that was all.
For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentence—how does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills paid by the state? Lafon’s punishment was that he, as an architect, was
through.
Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality. Chop-chop, and a man’s reputation comes off; chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows. The jail itself isn’t the punishment. The jail is only the shaman’s hatchet that performs the amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail worked—if it was
meant
to work—it would be the end of jails.
Rehabilitation? Rehabilitation for what?
Wilmer Lafon switched off the television set and silently pounded his fist into the wall.
Never again to return to the Professional class! For naturally, the conviction had cost him his membership in the Architectural Society, and
that
had cost him his Professional standing.
But still—just to be out of the Jug, that would be something! And his whole hope of ever getting out lay not here in Honor Block A, but in the turmoil of the Green Sleeves, a hundred meters and fifty armed guards away.
He was a furious man. He looked into the cell next door, where a con named Garcia was trying to concentrate on a game of Solitaire Splitfee. Once Garcia had been a Professional too; he was the closest thing to a friend Wilmer Lafon had. Maybe he could now help to get Lafon where he wanted—
needed
—to be … .
Lafon swore silently and shook his head. Garcia was a spineless milksop, as bad as any clerk—Lafon was nearly sure there was a touch of the inkwell somewhere in his family. Clever enough, like all figgers. But you couldn’t rely on him in a pinch.
He would have to do it all himself.
He thought for a second, ignoring the rustle and mumble of the other honor prisoners of Block A. There was no help for it; he would have to dirty his hands with physical activity.
Outside on the deck, the guards were grumbling to each other. Lafon wiped the scowl off his black face, put on a smile, rehearsed what he was going to say, and rattled the door of his cell.
“Shut up down there!” one of the screws bawled. Lafon recognized the voice; it was the guard named Sodaro. That was all to the good. He knew Sodaro, and he had some plans for him.
He rattled the cell door again and called: “Chief, can you come here a minute, please?”
Sodaro yelled, “Didn’t you hear me? Shut up!” But in a moment he came wandering by and looked into Lafon’s tidy little cell.
“What the devil do you want?” he grumbled.
Lafon said ingratiatingly, “Hey, chief, what’s going on?”
“Shut your mouth,” Sodaro said absently and yawned. He hefted his shoulder holster comfortably. That O’Leary, what a production he had made of getting the guards back! And here he was, stuck in Block A on the night he had set aside for getting better acquainted with that little blue-eyed statistician from the Census office.
“Aw, chief. The television says there’s something going on in the Green Sleeves. What’s the score?”
Sodaro had no reason not to answer him; but it was his unvarying practice to make a con wait before doing anything the con wanted. He gave Lafon a ten-second stare before he relented.
“That’s right. Sauer and Flock took over Block O. What about it?”
Much, much about it! But Lafon looked away to hide the eagerness in his eyes. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late … . He suggested humbly: “You look a little sleepy. Do you want some coffee?”
“Coffee?” Sodaro scratched. “You got a cup for me?”
“Certainly! I’ve got one put aside—swiped it from the messhall, you know, not the one I use myself.”
“Um.” Sodaro leaned on the cell door. “You know I could toss
you
in the Green Sleeves for stealing from the messhall.”