“Hey, Cap’n, wait!” Sodaro was looking alarmed. “This isn’t a first offense. Look at the rap sheet yesterday she pulled the same thing in the mess hall.” He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. “The block guard had to breakup a fight between her and another wench, and she claimed the same business said she didn’t understand when the other one asked her to move along.” He said virtuously, “The guard warned her then that next time she’d get the Green Sleeves for sure.”
Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly, “I don’t care. I don’t care!”
O’Leary stopped her. “That’s enough! Three days in Block 0,” he snapped, and waved her away. It was the only thing to do for her own sake as much as for his. He had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted to say “sir” every time she spoke to him; but he couldn’t keep it up forever, and he certainly couldn’t over-look hysteria. And hysteria was clearly the next step for her.
All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet to Sodaro and said absently, “Too bad a kid like her has to be here. What’s she m for?”
“You didn’t know, Cap’n?” Sodaro leered. “She’s in for conspiracy to violate the Categoried Class laws. Don’t waste your time with her, Cap’n she’s a figger-lover!”
Captain O’Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked “Civil Service.” But it didn’t wash the taste out of his mouth.
What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the yard, wondering about her. She’d had every advantage decent Civil Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If anything, she had had a better environment than O’Leary himself, and look what she had made of it.
“Evening, Cap’n.” A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and touched his cap as O’Leary passed by.
“Evening.” O’Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he’d noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn’t much to sweep the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate’s job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain’s job to notice when they didn’t.
There wasn’t anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a perfectly good civil-service position better than post-office clerk, not as good as Congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He was proud of it. It was right that he should be proud of it. He was civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to do a good, clean civil-service job. If he had happened to be born a figa clerk, he told himself; if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been proud of that too. There wasn’t anything wrong with being a clerk or a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer for that matter. Good laborers were the salt of the earth! They weren’t smart, maybe, but they had a well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O’Leary was a broadminded man, and many times he had thought almost with a touch of envy how comfortable it must be to be a wipe a laborer, he corrected himself. No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and loaf, work and loaf.
Of course, he wouldn’t really want that kind of life, because he was Civil Service, and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that weren’t meant to be “Evening, Cap’n.”
He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of maintaining the prison’s car pool, just inside the gate. “Evening, Conan,” he said. Conan, now he was a big buck greaser, and he would be there for the next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. Bat he kept the cars going and, O’Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.
So why didn’t this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?
Every prison has its Green Sleeves sometimes they are called by different names. Old Marquette called it “the canary”; Louisiana State called it “the red hats”; elsewhere it was called “the hole,” “the snake pit,” “the Klondike.” When you’re in it you don’t much care what it is called; it is a place for punishment.
And punishment is what you get.
Block 0 in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its inhabitants wore it was called the Green Sleeves.
It was a community of its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And like any other community, it had its leading citizens … two of them. Their names were Sauer and Flock.
Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Green Sleeves. She was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block 0 from the floor below, when she heard the yelling.
“Owoo-o-o,” screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block; and “Yow-w-w!” shrieked Flock at the other.
The inside deck guard of Block 0 looked nervously at the outside deck guard. The outside guard looked impassively back after all, he was on the outside. The inside guard muttered, “Wipe rats! They’re getting on my nerves.”
The outside guard shrugged.
“Detail, halt!” The two guards turned to see what was coming in as the three new candidates for the Green Sleeves slumped to a stop at the head of the stairs. “Here they are,” Sodaro told them. “Take good care of ‘em, will you? Especially the lady she’s going to like it here, because there’s plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her company.” He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block 0 guards.
The outside guard said sourly, “A woman, for God’s sake. Now, O’Leary knows I hate it when there’s a woman in here. It gets the others all riled up.”
“Let them in,” the inside guard told him. “The others are riled up already.” -
Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you could ignore the prisoners they simply could not move fast enough, against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm.
But it was a rule that even in Block 0 you didn’t leave the tangler fields on all the time only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner’s restraining garment removed.
Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate and fell flat on her face. It was like walking through molasses; it was her first experience of a tanglefoot field.
The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder.
‘Take it easy, auntie. Come on, get in your cell.” He steered her in the right direction and pointed to a green-sleeved straitjacket on the cell cot. “Put that on. Being as you’re a lady, we won’t tie it up but the rules say you got to wear it, and the rules Hey! She’s crying!” He shook his head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry in the Green Sleeves.
However, he was wrong. Sue-Ami’s shoulders were shaking, but not from tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she passed them by, and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge to retch.
Sauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves.
They were laborers”wipes,” for short or at any rate they had been once; they had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big, grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe five-footer, with the build of a water moccasin and the sad, stupid eyes of a calf.