Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. “Hey, Flock,” he cried.
“What do you want, Sauer?” called Flock from his own cell.
“Didn’t you see, Rock?” bellowed Sauer. “We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so as not to disturb the lady!” He screeched with howling, maniacal laughter. “Anyway, if we don’t cut this out, they’ll get us in trouble. Flock!”
“Oh, you think so?” shrieked Flock. “Jeez, I wish you hadn’t said that, Sauer. You got me scared! I’m so scared I’m gonna have to yell!”
The howling started all over again.
The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. “Say, you want to take a turn in here for a while?”
“Uh-uh,” said the outside guard.
“You’re yellow,” the inside guard said moodily. “Ah, I don’t know why I don’t quit this lousy job. Hey, you!
Pipe down or III come in and beat your head off!”
“Ee-ee-ee!” shrieked Sauer. “I’m scared!” Then he grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes.
“Don’t you know you can’t hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, boss?”
“Shut up!” yelled the inside guard… .
Sue-Ann Bradley’s weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting under her skin. They weren’t even even human, she told herself miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the satisfaction of hearing her. They were animals!
Resentment and anger she could understand she told herself doggedly that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen’s rebellion against the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was good that Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to straggle against the vicious system
But did they have to scream so?
The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to weeping, and she didn’t even care who heard her any more. Senseless!
It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless, because noise hides noise. But then, she hadn’t been a prisoner very long.
“I smell trouble,” said O’Leary to the warden.
“Trouble, trouble?” Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his little round eyes looked terrifiedas perhaps they should have. Warden Godfrey Schlackebier 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 outsidean 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 every-body 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 0.
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.