“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 well 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 break-out 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 0 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 Jughe 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 Wihner 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 bade, 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 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 0. 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.