After O’Leary and the medic left, the warden tottered to a chair—but not for long. His secretary appeared, eyes bulging. “The governor!” he gasped.
Warden Schluckebier managed to say: “Why, Governor! How good of you to come—”
The governor shook him off and held the door open for the men who had come with him. There were reporters from all the news services, officials from the township governments within the city-state. There was an air GI with the major’s leaves on his collar—“Liaison, sir,” he explained crisply to the warden, “just in case you have any orders for our men up there.” There were nearly a dozen others.
The warden was quite overcome.
The governor rapped out: “Warden, no criticism of you, of course, but I’ve come to take personal charge. I’m superseding you under Rule Twelve, Para. A, of the Uniform Civil Service Code. Right?”
“Oh,
right!
” cried the warden, incredulous with joy.
“The situation is bad—perhaps worse than you think. I’m seriously concerned about the hostages those men have in there. The guards, the medic—and I had a call from Senator Bradley a short time ago—”
“Senator Bradley?” echoed the warden.
“Senator
Sebastian
Bradley. One of our foremost civil servants,” the governor said firmly. “It so happens that his daughter is in Block O, as an inmate.”
The warden closed his eyes. He tried to swallow, but the throat muscles were paralyzed.
“There is no question,” the governor went on briskly, “about the propriety of her being there—she was duly convicted of a felonious act, namely conspiracy and incitement to riot. But you see the position.”
The warden saw. All too well the warden saw.
“Therefore,” said the governor, “I intend to go in to Block O myself. Sebastian Bradley is an old and personal friend—as well,” he emphasized, “as being a senior member of the Reclassification Board. I understand a medic is going to Block O. I shall go with him.”
The warden managed to sit up straight. “He’s gone. I mean—they already left, Governor. But I assure you, Miss Brad—Inmate Bradley—that is, the young lady is in no danger. I have already taken precautions,” he said, gaining confidence as he listened to himself talk. “I, uh, I was deciding on a course of action as you came in. See, Governor, the guards on the walls are all armed. All they have to do is fire a couple of rounds into the Yard—and then the copters could start dropping tear gas and light fragmentation bombs and—”
The governor was already at the door. “You will
not,”
he said; and, “Now, which way did they go?”
O’Leary was in the Yard, and he was smelling trouble, loud and strong.
The first he knew that the rest of the prison had caught the riot fever was when the lights flared on in Cell Block A. “That Sodaro!” he snarled; but there wasn’t time to worry about that Sodaro. He grabbed the rest of his guard detail and double-timed it toward the New Building, leaving the medic and a couple of guards walking sedately toward the Old. Block A, on the New Building’s lowest tier was already coming to life; a dozen yards, and Blocks B and C lighted up.
And a dozen yards more, and they could hear the yelling; and it wasn’t more than a minute before the building doors opened.
The cons had taken over three more blocks. How? O’Leary didn’t take time even to guess. The inmates were piling out into the Yard. He took one look at the rushing mob. Crazy! It was Wilmer Lafon leading the rioters, with a guard’s gun and a voice screaming threats! But O’Leary didn’t take time to worry about an honor prisoner gone bad, either. “Let’s get out of here!” he bellowed to the detachment, and they ran … .
Just plain ran. Cut and ran, scattering as they went.
“Wait!” screamed O’Leary, but they weren’t waiting. Cursing himself for letting them get out of hand, O’Leary salvaged two guards and headed on the run for the Old Building, huge and dark, all but the topmost lights of Block O. They saw the medic and his escort disappearing into the bulk of the Old Building; and they saw something else. There were inmates between them and the Old Building! The Shops Building lay between—with a dozen more cell blocks over the workshops that gave it its name—and there was a milling rush of activity around its entrance, next to the laundry shed—
The laundry shed.
O’Leary stood stock still. Lafon talking to the laundry cons; Lafon leading the breakout
from Block A. The little greaser who was a trusty in the Shops Building sabotaging the Yard’s tangler circuit. Sauer and Flock taking over the Green Sleeves with a manufactured knife and a lot of guts. Did it fit together? Was it all part of a plan?
That was something to find out—but not just then. “Come on,” O’Leary cried to the two guards, and they raced for the temporary safety of the main gates.
The whole prison was up and yelling now.
O’Leary could hear scattered shots from the beat guards on the wall—
Over their heads, over their heads!
he prayed silently. And there were other shots that seemed to come from inside the walls—guards shooting, or convicts with guards’ guns, he couldn’t tell which. The Yard was full of convicts now, in bunches and clumps; but none near the gate. And they seemed to have lost some of their drive. They were milling around, lit by the searchlights from the wall, yelling and making a lot of noise … but going nowhere in particular. Waiting for a leader, O’Leary thought, and wondered briefly what had become of Lafon.
“You Captain O’Leary?” somebody demanded.
O’Leary turned and blinked. Good Lord, the governor! He was coming through the gate, waving aside the gate guards, alone. “You him?” the governor repeated. “All right, glad I found you. I’m going in to Block O with you!”
O’Leary swallowed, and waved at the teeming cons. True, there were none immediately nearby—but there were plenty in the Yard! Riots meant breaking things up; already the inmates had started to break up the machines in the laundry shed and the athletic equipment in the Yard lockers; when they found a couple of choice breakables like O’Leary and the Governor they’d have a ball! “But Governor—”
“But my foot! Can you get me in there or can’t you?”
O’Leary gauged their chances. It wasn’t more than fifty feet to the main entrance to the Old Building—not at the moment guarded, since all the guards were in hiding or on the walls, and not as yet being invaded by the inmates at large.
He said, “You’re the boss! Hold on a minute—” The searchlights were on the bare Yard cobblestones in front of them; in a moment the searchlights danced away.
“Come on!” cried O’Leary, and jumped for the entrance. The governor was with him, and a pair of the guards came stumbling after.
They made it to the Old Building.
Inside the entrance they could hear the noise from outside and the yelling of the inmates who were still in their cells; but around them was nothing but gray steel walls and the stairs going up to Block O. “Up!” panted O’Leary, and they clattered up the steel steps.
They nearly made it.
They would have made it—if it hadn’t been for the honor inmate, Wilmer Lafon, who knew what he was after and had headed for the Green Sleeves through the back way. In fact, they did make it—but not the way they planned. “Get out of the way!” yelled O’Leary at Lafon and the half-dozen inmates with him; and “Go to hell!” screamed Lafon, charging; and it was a rough-and-tumble fight, and O’Leary’s party lost it, fair and square.
So when they got to Block O it was with the governor marching before a convict-held gun, and with O’Leary cold unconscious, a lump from a gun-butt on the side of his head.
As they came up the stairs, Sauer was howling at the medic: “You got to fix up my boy! He’s dying, and all you do is sit there!”
The medic said patiently, “My son, I’ve dressed his wound. He is under sedation, and I must rest. There will be other casualties.”
Sauer raged, and he danced around; but that was as far as it went. Even Sauer wouldn’t attack a medic! He would as soon strike an Attorney, or even a Director of Funerals. It wasn’t merely that they were professionals—even among the professional class, they were special; not superior, exactly, but
apart.
They certainly were not for the likes of Sauer to fool with, and Sauer knew it.
“Somebody’s coming!” cried one of the other freed inmates.
Sauer jumped to the head of the steps, saw that Lafon was leading the group, stepped back, saw who Lafon’s helpers were carrying, and leaped forward again. “Cap’n O’Leary!” he roared. “Gimme!”
“Shut up,” said Wilmer Lafon, and pushed the big redhead out of the way. Sauer’s jaw dropped, and the snake eyes opened wide.
“Wilmer,” he protested feebly. But that was all the protest he made, because the snake’s eyes had seen that Lafon held a gun. He stood back, the big hands half outstretched toward the unconscious guard captain, O’Leary, and the cold eyes became thoughtful.
And then he saw who else was with the party. “Wilmer!” he roared. “You got the governor there!”
Lafon nodded. “Throw them in a cell,” he ordered, and sat down on a guard’s stool, breathing hard. It had been a fine fight on the steps, before he and his boys had subdued the governor and the guards; but Wilmer Lafon wasn’t used to fighting. Even six years in the Jug hadn’t turned an architect into a laborer; physical exertion simply was not his métier.
Sauer said coaxingly, “Wilmer, won’t you leave me have O’Leary for a while? If it wasn’t for me and Flock you’d still be in A Block, and—”
“Shut up,” Lafon said again, gently enough, but he waved the gun muzzle. He drew a deep breath, glanced around him and grinned. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock,” he mimicked. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock! Sauer, you wipe clown, do you think it took brains to file down a shiv and start things rolling? If it wasn’t for
me
, you and Flock would have beat up a few guards, and had your kicks for half an hour, and then the whole prison would fall in on you! It was me, Wilmer Lafon, that set things up, and you know it!” He was yelling, and suddenly he realized he was yelling. And what was the use, he demanded of himself contemptuously, of trying to argue with a bunch of lousy wipes and greasers? They never understand the long, soul-killing hours of planning and sweat; they wouldn’t realize the importance of the careful timing—of arranging that the laundry cons would start a disturbance in the Yard right after the Green Sleeves hard-timers kicked off the riot; of getting the little greaser Hiroko to short-circuit the Yard field so the laundry cons could start their disturbance. It took a
professional
to organize and plan—yes, and to make sure that he himself was out of it until everything was ripe, so that if anything went wrong
he
was all right. It took somebody like Wilmer Lafon—a
professional,
who had spent six years too long in the Jug—
And who would shortly be getting out.
Any prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in process of going off.
From the Green Sleeves where the trouble had started, clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells—the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers who didn’t dare risk their early discharge. But for every man in his cell, a dozen were out and yelling.
A torch, licking as high as the hanging helicopters, blazed up from the Yard—that was the laundry shed. Why burn the laundry? The cons couldn’t have said. It was burnable, and it was there—burn it!
The Yard lay open to the wrath of the helicopters, but the helicopters made no move. The cobblestones were solidly covered with milling men. The guards were on the walls, sighting down their guns; the helicopter bombardiers had their fingers on the bomb trips. There had been a few rounds fired over the heads of the rioters, at first.
Nothing since.
In the milling mob, the figures clustered in groups. The inmates from Honor Block A huddled under the guards’ guns at the angle of the wall. They had clubs, as all the inmates had clubs, but they weren’t using them.
Honor Block A—on the outside, civil service and professionals. On the inside, the trusties, the “good” cons.
They weren’t the type for clubs.
With all of the inmates, you looked at them and you wondered what twisted devil had got into their heads to land them in the Jug. Oh, perhaps you could understand it—a little bit at least—in the case of the figgers in Blocks B and C, the greasers in the Shop Building—that sort. It was easy enough for some of the Categoried Classes to commit a crime, and thereby land in jail. Who could blame a wipe for trying to “pass,” if he thought he could get away with it? But when he didn’t get away with it, he wound up in the Jug, and that was logical enough. And greasers liked civil-service women, everyone knew that. There was almost a sort of logic to it—even if it was a sort of inevitable logic that made decent civil-service people see red. You
had
to enforce the laws against rape if, for instance, a greaser should ask an innocent young female postal clerk for a date. But you could understand what drove him to it. The Jug was full of criminals of that sort. And the Jug was the place for them.
But what about Honor Block A?
Why would a Wilmer Lafon—a certified public architect, a Professional by category—draw a portrait in oils and get himself jugged for malpractice? Why would a dental nurse—practically a medic—sneak back into the laboratory at night and cast an upper plate for her mother? Greasers’ work was greasers’ work; she knew what the penalty was. She must have realized she would be caught.
But she had done it. And she had been caught; and there she was, this wild night, huddled under the helicopters, feebly waving the handle of a floor mop.
It was a club. And she wasn’t the type for clubs.
She shivered and turned to the stock convict next to her. “Why don’t they break down the gate?” she demanded. “How long are we going to hang around here, waiting for the guards to get organized and pick us off?”
The convict next to her sighed and wiped his glasses with a beefy hand. Once he had been an Income-Tax Accountant, disbarred and convicted on three counts of impersonating an attorney when he took the liberty of making changes in a client’s lease. He snorted, “Damn wipes! Do they expect us to do
their
dirty work?”
The two of them glared angrily and fearfully at the other convicts in the Yard.
And the other convicts, huddled greaser with greaser, wipe with wipe, glared ragingly back. It wasn’t
their
place to plan the strategy of a prison break.
Captain Liam O’Leary muttered groggily, “They don’t want to escape, all they want is to make trouble. I know cons.” He came fully awake, sat up and focused his eyes. His head was hammering.
That girl, that Bradley, was leaning over him. She looked scared and sick. “Sit still! Sauer is just plain crazy—listen to them yelling out there!”
O’Leary sat up and looked around, one hand holding his drumming skull.
“They do so want to escape,” said Sue-Ann Bradley. “Listen to what they’re saying!”
O’Leary discovered that he was in a cell. There was a battle royal going on outside. Men were yelling, but he couldn’t see them.
He jumped up, remembering. “The governor!”
Sue-Ann Bradley said, “He’s all right. I
think
he is, anyway. He’s in the cell right next to us, with a couple guards. I guess they came up with you.” She shivered, as the yells in the corridor rose. “Sauer is angry at the medic,” she explained. “He wants him to fix Flock up so they can—‘crush out,’ I think he said. The medic says he can’t do it. You see, Flock got burned pretty badly with a knife he made—something about the tanglefoot field—”
“Eddy currents,” said O’Leary dizzily.
“I guess so. Anyway, the medic—”
“Never mind the medic. What’s Lafon doing?”
“Lafon? The black one?” Sue-Ann Bradley frowned. “I didn’t know his name. He started the whole thing, the way it sounds. They’re waiting for the mob down in the Yard to break out, and then they’re going to make a break—”
“Wait a minute,” growled O’Leary. His head was beginning to clear. “What about you? Are you in on this?”
She hung between laughter and tears. Finally: “Do I
look
like I’m in on this?”
O’Leary took stock. Somehow, somewhere, the girl had got a length of metal pipe—from the plumbing, maybe. She was holding it in one hand, supporting him with the other. There were two other guards in the cell, both out cold—one from O’Leary’s squad, the other, O’Leary guessed, a deck guard who had been on duty when the trouble started. “I wouldn’t let them in,” she said wildly. “I told them they’d have to kill me before they could touch that guard.”
O’Leary said suspiciously, “What about you? You belonged to that Double-A-C, didn’t you? You were pretty anxious to get in the Green Sleeves, disobeying Auntie Mathias’ orders. Are you sure you didn’t know this was going to—”
It was too much. She dropped the pipe, buried her head in her hands. He couldn’t tell if she laughed or wept, but he could tell that it hadn’t been like that at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, and touched her on the shoulder. He turned and looked out the little barred window, because he couldn’t think of any other way to apologize. He heard the wavering beat in the air, and saw them—bobbing a hundred yards
up, their wide metal vanes fluttering and hissing from the jets at the tips. The GI copters. Waiting—as everyone seemed to be waiting.
Sue-Ann Bradley demanded shakily, “Is anything the matter?”
O’Leary turned away. It was astonishing, he thought, what a different perspective he had on those helicopter bombers from inside Block O. Once he had cursed the warden for not ordering tear gas, at least, dropped … . He said harshly, “Nothing. Just that the copters have the place surrounded.”
“Does it make any difference?”
He shrugged. Does it make a difference? The difference between trouble and tragedy, or so it now seemed to Captain O’Leary. The riot was trouble. They could handle it, one way or another—it was his job, any guard’s job, to handle
prison
trouble.
But to bring the GIs into it was to invite race riot. Not prison riot—race riot. Even the declassed scum in the Jug would fight back against the GIs. They were used to having the civil-service guards over them—that was what guards were for. Civil-service presidents presided, and civil-service governors governed, and civil-service guards guarded. What else? It was their job—as clerking was a figger’s job, and mechanics were a greaser’s, and pick-and-shovel strong-arm work was a wipe’s. But the armed services—their job was, theoretically, to defend the country against forces outside.
Race
riot. The cons wouldn’t stand still under attack from the GIs.
But how could you tell that to a girl like this Bradley? O’Leary glanced at her covertly. She
looked
all right. Rather nice-looking, if anything. But he hadn’t forgotten why she was in E-G. Joining a terrorist organization, the Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes. Advocating desegregation—actually getting up on a street corner and proposing that greasers’ children be allowed to go to school with GIs’, that wipes intermarry with civil service. Good Lord, they’d be suggesting that doctors eat with laymen next!
The girl said evenly, “Don’t look at me that way. I’m not a monster.”
O’Leary coughed. “I, uh, sorry. I didn’t know I was staring.” She looked at him with cold eyes. “I mean,” he said, “you don’t
look
like anybody who’d get mixed up in, well, miscegenation.”
“Miscegenation! Dirty mind!” she blazed. “You’re all alike, you talk about the mission of the Categoried Classes and the rightness of segregation—and it’s always just the one thing that’s in your minds. Sex! You‘re—you’re trying to turn the clock back,” she sobbed. “I’ll tell you this for sure, Captain O’Leary! I’d rather marry a decent, hardworking clerk any day than the sort of low-grade civil-service trash I’ve seen around here!”
O’Leary cringed. He couldn’t help it. Funny, he told himself, I thought I was shockproof—but this goes too far!
A bull-roar from the corridor. Sauer. O’Leary spun. The big redhead was yelling: “Bring the governor out here. Lafon wants to talk to him!”
O’Leary went to the door of the cell, fast.
A slim, pale con from Block A was pushing the governor down the hall, toward Sauer and Lafon. The governor was a strong man, but he didn’t struggle. His face was as composed and remote as the medic’s; if he was afraid, he concealed it extremely well.
Sue-Ann Bradley slipped beside O’Leary. “What’s happening?”
He kept his eyes on what was going on. “Lafon is going to try to use the governor as a shield, I think.” The voice of Lafon was loud, but the noises outside made it hard to
understand. But O’Leary could make out what the dark ex-professional was saying: “—know damn well you did something. But what?
Why don’t they crush out?
” Mumble-mumble from the governor; O’Leary couldn’t hear the words. But he could see the effect of them in Lafon’s face, hear the rage in Lafon’s voice. “Don’t call me a liar, you civvy punk! You did something. I had it all planned, do you hear me? The laundry boys were going to rush the gate, the Block A bunch would follow—and then I was going to breeze right through. But you loused it up. You must’ve!” His voice was rising to a scream. O’Leary, watching tautly from the cell, thought: He’s going to break. He can’t hold it in much longer.
“All
right!
” shouted Lafon, and even Sauer, looming behind him, looked alarmed. “It doesn’t matter what you did. I’ve got you now, and
you
are going to get me out of here. You hear? I’ve got this gun, and the two of us are going to walk right out, through the gate, and if anybody tries to stop us—”
“Hey,” said Sauer, waking up.
“—if anybody tries to stop us, you’ll get a bullet right in—”
“Hey!”
Sauer was roaring loud as Lafon himself now. “What’s this talk about the
two
of you? You aren’t going to leave me and Flock!”
“Shut up,” Lafon said conversationally, without taking his eyes off the governor.
But Sauer, just then, was not the man to say “shut up” to, and especially he was not a man to take your eyes away from.
“That’s torn it,” O’Leary said aloud. The girl started to say something.
But he was no longer there to hear.
It looked very much as though Sauer and Lafon were going to tangle. And when they did, it was the end of the line for the governor.
O’Leary hurtled out of the sheltering cell and skidded down the corridor. Lafon’s face was a hawk’s face, gleaming with triumph; as he saw O’Leary coming toward him, the hawk sneer froze. He brought the gun up, but O’Leary was a fast man.
O’Leary leaped on the lithe black honor prisoner. Lafon screamed, and clutched; and O’Leary’s lunging weight drove him back against the wall. Lafon’s arm smacked against the steel grating and the gun went flying. The two of them clinched and fell, gouging, to the floor.
O’Leary had the advantage; he hammered the con’s head against the deck, hard enough to split a skull. And perhaps it split Lafon’s, because the dark face twitched, and froth appeared at the lips; and the body slacked.
One down!
And Sauer was charging. O’Leary wriggled sidewise, and the big redhead blundered crashing into the steel grate. Sauer fell, and O’Leary caught at him. He tried the hammering of the head, he swarmed on top of the huge clown. But Sauer only roared the louder. The bull body surged under O’Leary, and then Sauer was on top and O’Leary wasn’t breathing. Not at all.
Everything was choking black dust.
Good-bye, Sue-Ann, O’Leary said silently, without meaning to say anything of the kind; and even then he wondered why he was saying it.
O’Leary heard a gun explode beside his head.