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 figlike 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.”
“Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.” The guard lumbered around Rock 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 0, 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 filed, 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 yon, 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 day rooms 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 aircrafts woman 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 Gl 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 break-out.
But there wasn’t any break-out.
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.