Sauer said coaxingly, “Wilmer, won’t you leave me have O’Leary for a while? If it wasn’t for me and Flock you’d still be in A Block, and”
“Shut up,” Lafon said again, gently enough, but he waved the gun muzzle. He drew a deep breath, glanced around him and grinned. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock,” he mimicked. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock! Sauer, you wipe clown, do you think it took brains to file down a shiv and start things rolling? If it wasn’t for me, you and Flock would have beat up a few guards, and had your kicks for half an hour, and then the whole prison would fall in on you! It was me, Wilmer Lafon, that set things up, and you know it!” He was yelling, and suddenly he realized he was yelling. And what was the use, he demanded of himself contemptuously, of trying to argue with a bunch of lousy wipes and greasers? They never understand the long, soul-killing hours of planning and sweat; they wouldn’t realize the importance of the careful timing of arranging that the laundry cons would start a disturbance in the Yard right after the Green Sleeves hard-timers kicked off the riot; of getting the little greaser Hiroko to short-circuit the Yard field so the laundry cons could start their disturbance. It took a professional to organize and plan yes, and to make sure that he himself was out of it until everything was ripe, so that if anything went wrong he was all right It took somebody like Wilmer Lafona professional, who had spent six years too long in the Jug And who would shortly be getting out.
Any prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in process of going off.
From the Green Sleeves where the trouble had started, clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers who didn’t dare risk their early discharge. But for every man in his cell, a dozen were out and yelling.
A torch, licking as high as the hanging helicopters, blazed up from the Yard that was the laundry shed. Why burn the laundry? The cons couldn’t have said. It was burnable, and it was there burn it!
The Yard lay open to the wrath of the helicopters, but the helicopters made no move. The cobblestones were solidly covered with milling men. The guards were on the walls, sighting down their guns; the helicopter bombardiers had their fingers on the bomb trips. There had been a few rounds fired over the heads of the rioters, at first.
Nothing since.
In the milling mob, the figures clustered in groups. The inmates from Honor Block A huddled under the guards’
guns at the angle of the wall. They had clubs, as all the inmates had clubs, but they weren’t using them.
Honor Block Aon the outside, civil service and professionals. On the inside, the trusties, the “good” cons.
They weren’t the type for clubs.
With all of the inmates, you looked at them and you wondered what twisted devil had got into their heads to land them in the Jug. Oh, perhaps you could understand it a little bit at least in the case of the figgers in Blocks B and C, the greasers in the Shop Buildingthat sort. It was easy enough for some of the Categoried Classes to commit a crime, and thereby land in jail. Who could blame a wipe for trying to “pass,” if he thought he could get away with it? But when he didn’t get away with it, he wound up in the Jug, and that was logical enough. And greasers liked civil-service women, everyone knew that.
There was almost a sort of logic to it even if it was a sort of inevitable logic that made decent civil-service people see red. You had to enforce the laws against rape if, for instance, a greaser should ask an innocent young female postal clerk for a date. But you could understand what drove him to it. The Jug was full of criminals of that sort.
And the Jug was the place for them.
But what about Honor Block A?
Why would a Wilmer Lafona certified public architect, a Professional by category draw a portrait in oils and get himself jugged for malpractice? Why -would a dental nurse practically a medic sneak back into the laboratory at night and cast an upper plate for her mother? Greasers’ work was greasers’ work; she knew what the penalty was. She must have realized she would be caught.
But she had done it. And she had been caught; and there she was, this wild night, huddled under the helicopters, feebly waving the handle of a floor mop.
It was a club. And she wasn’t the type for clubs.
She shivered and turned to the stock convict next to her. “Why don’t they break down the gate?” she demanded, “How long are we going to hang around here, waiting for the guards to get organized and pick us off?”
The convict next to her sighed and wiped his glasses with a beefy hand. Once he had been an Income-Tax Accountant, disbarred and convicted on three counts of impersonating an attorney when he took the liberty of making changes in a client’s lease. He snorted, “Damn wipes!
Do they expect us to do their dirty work?”
The two of them glared angrily and fearfully at the other convicts in the Yard.
And the other convicts, huddled greaser with greaser, wipe with wipe, glared ragingly back. It wasn’t their place to plan the strategy of a prison break.
Captain Llam O’Leary muttered groggily, “They don’t want to escape, all they want is to make trouble. I know cons.” He came fully awake, sat up and focused his eyes.
His head was hammering.
That fgil, that Bradley, was leaning over him. She looked scared and sick. “Sit still! Sauer is just plain crazy listen to them yelling out there!”
O’Leary sat up and looked around, one hand holding his drumming skull.
“They do so want to escape,” said Sue-Ann Bradley.
“Listen to what they’re saying!”
O’Leary discovered that he was in a cell. There was a battle royal going on outside. Men were yelling, but he couldn’t see them.
He jumped up, remembering. “The governor!”
Sue-Ann Bradley said, “He’s all right. I think he is, anyway. He’s in the cell right next to us, with a couple guards. I guess they came up with you.” She shivered, as the yells in the corridor rose. “Sauer is angry at the medic,” she explained. “He wants him to fix Flock up so they can’ crush out,’ I think he said. The medic says he can’t do it. You see, Flock got burned pretty badly with a knife he made something about the tanglefoot field”
“Eddy currents,” said O’Leary dizzily.
“I guess so. Anyway, the medic”
“Never mind the medic. What’s Lafon doing?”
“Lafon? The black one?” Sue-Ann Bradley frowned.
“I didn’t know his name. He started the whole thing, the way it sounds. They’re waiting for the mob down in the Yard to break out, and then they’re going to make a break”
“Wait a minute,” growled O’Leary. His head was be-ginning to clear. “What about you? Are you in on this?”
She hung between laughter and tears. Finally: “Do I look like I’m in on this?”
O’Leary took stock. Somehow, somewhere, the girl had got a length of metal pipe from the plumbing, maybe.
She was holding it in one hand, supporting him with the other. There were two other guards in the cell, both out cold one from O’Leary’s squad, the other, O’Leary guessed, a deck guard who had been on duty when the trouble started. “I wouldn’t let them in,” she said wildly.
“I told them they’d have to kill me before they could touch that guard.”
O’Leary said suspiciously, “What about you? You belonged to that Double-A-C, didn’t you? You were pretty anxious to get in the Green Sleeves, disobeying Auntie Mathias’ orders. Are you sure you didn’t know this was going to”
It was too much. She dropped the pipe, buried her head in her hands. He couldn’t tell if she laughed or wept, but he could tell that it hadn’t been like that at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, and touched her on the shoulder. He turned and looked out the little barred window, because he couldn’t think of any other way to apologize. He heard the wavering beat in the air, and saw them bobbing a hundred yards up, their wide metal vanes fluttering and hissing from the jets at the tips. The 01 copters. Waiting as everyone seemed to be waiting.