“He isn’t alone!” The doctor’s interne came from behind him, scowling belligerently at O’Leary. He was youngish, his beard pale and silky, a long way from his first practice. “I’m with him!”
O’Leary put a strain on his patience. “They’ll eat you up in there, Doc! Those are the worst cons in the prison.
They’ve got two hostages already what’s the use of giving them two more?”
The medic fixed him with his eyes. He was a tail man and he wore his beard proudly. “Guard, do you think you can prevent me from healing a sufferer?” He folded his hands over his abdomen and turned to leave.
The interne stepped aside and bowed his head. O’Leary surrendered.
“All right, you can go. But I’m coming with you with a squad!”
Inmate Sue-Ann Bradley cowered in her cell.
The Green Sleeves was jumping. She had never no, never, she told herself wretchedly thought that it would be anything like this. She listened unbelieving to the noise the released prisoners were making, smashing the chairs and commodes in their cells, screaming threats at the bound and terrified guards.
They were like like animals!
She faced the thought, with fear, and with the sorrow of a murdered belief that was worse than fear. It was bad that she was, she knew, in danger of dying right here and now; but what was even worse was that the principles that had brought her to the Jug were dying too.
Wipes were not the same as civil-service people!
A bull’s roar from the corridor, and a shocking crash of glass; that was Flock, and apparently he had smashed the TV interphone.
“What in the world are they doing?” Inmate Bradley sobbed to herself. It was beyond comprehension. They were yelling words that made no sense to her, threatening punishments that she could barely imagine on the guards.
Sauer and Flock, they were laborers; some of the other rioting cons were clerks, mechanic seven civil-service or professionals, for all she could tell. But she could hardly understand any of them. Why was the quiet little Chinese clerk in Cell Six setting fire to his bed?
There did seem to be a pattern, of sorts the laborers were rocketing about, breaking things at random; the mechanics were pleasurably sabotaging the electronic and plumbing installations; the white-collar categories were finding their dubious joys in less direct ways liking setting fire to a bed. But what a mad pattern!
The more Sue-Ann saw of them, the less she under-stood.
It wasn’t just that they talked different she had spent endless hours studying the various patois of shoptalk, and it had defeated her; but it wasn’t just that. It was bad enough when she couldn’t understand the words as when that trusty Mathias had ordered her in wipe shoptalk to mop out her cell.
But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.
Sue-Ann Bradley had consecrated her young life to the belief that all men were created free, and equal and alike. Or alike in all the things that mattered, anyhow.
Alike in hopes, alike in motives, alike in virtues. She had turned her back on a decent civil-service family and a promising civil-service career to join the banned and despised Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes
Screams from the corridor outside.
Sue-Ann leaped to the door of her cell to see Sauer clutching at one of the guards. The guard’s hands were tied but his feet were free; he broke loose from the clumsy clown with the serpent’s eyes, almost fell, ran toward Sue-Ann.
There was nowhere else to run. The guard, moaning and gasping, tripped, slid, caught himself and stumbled into her cell. “Please!” he begged. “That crazy Sauer he’s going to cut my hand off! For heaven’s sake, ma’am stop him!”
Sue-Ann stared at him, between terror and tears. Stop Sauer! If only she could stop Sauer. The big redhead was lurching stiffly toward them raging, but not so angry that the water-moccasin eyes showed heat.
“Come here, you figger scum!” he brayed.
The epithet wasn’t even close the guard was civil-service through and through but it was like a reviving whip-sting to Sue-Ann Bradley.
“Watch your language, Mr. Sauer!” she snapped, in-congruously.
Sauer stopped dead and blinked.
“Don’t you dare hurt him!” she warned. “Don’t you see, Mr. Sauer, you’re playing into their hands? They’re trying to divide us. They pit mechanic against clerk, laborer against armed forces. And you’re helping them! Brother Sauer, I beg”
The redhead spat deliberately on the floor.
He licked his lips, and grinned an amiable clown’s grin, and said in his cheerful, buffoon bray: “Auntie, go verb your adjective adjective noun.”
Sue-Ann Bradley gasped and turned white.
She had known such words existed but only theoretically. She had never expected to hear them. And certainly, she would never have believed she would hear them, applied to her, from the lips of a … a laborer. At her knees, the guard shrieked and fell to the floor.
“Sauer, Sauer!” A panicky bellow from the corridor; the redheaded giant hesitated. “Sauer, come on out here!
There’s a million guards coming up the stairs. Looks like trouble!”
Sauer said hoarsely to the unconscious guard, “I’ll take care of you.” And he looked blankly at the girl, and shook his head, and hurried back to the corridor.
Guards were coming, all right not a million of them, but half a dozen or more. And leading them all was the medic, calm, bearded face looking straight ahead, hands clasped before him, ready to heal the sick, comfort the aged or bring new life into the world.
“Hold it!” shrieked little Flock, crouched over the agonizing blister on his abdomen, gun in hand, peering insanely down the steps. “Hold it or”
“Shut up.” Sauer called softly to the approaching group: “Let the doc come up. Nobody else!”
The interne faltered; the guards stopped dead; the medic said calmly: “I must have my interne with me.” He glanced at the barred gate wonderingly.
Sauer hesitated. “Well all right. Bat no guards!”
A few yards away Sue-Aim Bradley was stuffing the syncoped form of the guard into her small washroom.
It was time to take a stand.
No more cowering, she told herself desperately. No more waiting. She closed the door on the guard, still unconscious, and stood grimly before it. Him, at least, she would save if she could. They could get him, but only over her dead body….
Or anyway she thought with a sudden throbbing in her throat over her body.
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 Gl 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 0, as an inmate.”
The warden closed his eyes. He tried to swallow, but the throat muscles were paralyzed.