Chapter V

Captain O’Leary dragged the scared little wretch into the warden’s office. He shook the con angrily. “Listen to this, Warden! The boys just brought this one in from the Shops Building. Do you know what he’s been up to?”

The warden wheezed sadly and looked away. He had stopped even answering O’Leary by now. He had stopped talking to Sauer on the interphone when the big convict called, every few minutes, to rave and threaten and demand a doctor. He had almost stopped doing everything except worry and weep. But--still and all, he was the warden. He was the one who gave the orders.

O’Leary barked: “Warden, this little greaser has bollixed up the whole tangler circuit for the prison. If the cons get out into the yard now, you won’t be able to tangle them. You know what that means? They’ll have the freedom of the yard, and who knows what comes next?”

The warden frowned sympathetically. “Tsk, tsk.”

O’Leary shook the con again. “Come on, Hiroko! Tell the warden what you told the guards.”

The con shrank away from him. Sweat was glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead. “I--I had to do it, Cap’n! I shorted the wormcan in the tangler subgrid, but I had to! I got a signal--’Bollix the grid tonight or some day you’ll be in the yard and we’ll static you!’ What could I do, Cap’n? I didn’t want to--”

O’Leary pressed: “Who did the signal come from?”

The con only shook his head, perspiring still more.

The warden asked faintly: “What’s he saying?”

O’Leary rolled his eyes to heaven. And this was the warden--couldn’t even understand shoptalk from the mouths of his own inmates!

He translated: “He got orders from the prison underground to short-circuit the electronic units in the tangler circuit. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t.”

The warden drummed with his fingers on the desk.

“The tangler field, eh? My, yes. That is important. You’d better get it fixed, O’Leary. Right away.”

“Fixed? Warden, who’s going to fix it? You know as well as I do that every mechanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards would do a thing like that--and I’d bust him myself if he did!--he wouldn’t know where to start. That’s mechanic work.”

The warden swallowed. He had to admit that O’Leary was right. Naturally nobody but a mechanic--and a specialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser class at that--could fix something like the tangler field generators.

He said absently: “Well, that’s true enough. After all, ‘Specialization is the goal of civilization,’ you know.”

O’Leary took a deep breath. He needed it.

He beckoned to the guard at the door. “Take this greaser out of here!”

The con shambled out, his head hanging.

O’Leary turned to the warden and spread his hands.

“Warden,” he said, “don’t you see how this thing is building up? Let’s not just wait for the place to explode in our faces! Let me take a squad into Block O before it’s too late.”

The warden pursed his lips thoughtfully and cocked his head, as though he were trying to find some trace of merit in an unreasonable request.

He said at last: “No.”

O’Leary made a passionate sound that was trying to be bad language, but he was too raging mad to articulate it. He walked stiffly away from the limp, silent warden and stared out the window.

At least, he told himself, he hadn’t gone to pieces. It was his doing, not the warden’s, that all the off-duty guards had been dragged double-time back to the prison, his doing that they were now ringed around the outer walls or scattered on extra-man patrols throughout the prison.

It was something, but O’Leary couldn’t believe that it was enough. He’d been in touch with half a dozen of the details inside the prison on the intercom and each of them had reported the same thing. In all of E-G, not a single prisoner was asleep. They were talking back and forth between the cells and the guards couldn’t shut them up. They were listening to concealed radios and the guards didn’t dare make a shakedown to find them. They were working themselves up to something. To what?

O’Leary didn’t want ever to find out what. He wanted to go in there with a couple of the best guards he could get his hands on--shoot his way into the Greensleeves if he had to--and clean out the infection.

But the warden said no.

O’Leary stared balefully at the hovering helicopters.

The warden was the warden. He was placed in that position through the meticulously careful operations of the Civil Service machinery, maintained in that position year after year through the penetrating annual inquiries of the Reclassification Board. It was subversive to think that the Board could have made a mistake!

But O’Leary was absolutely sure that the warden was a scared, ineffectual jerk.

The interphone was ringing again. The warden picked up the handpiece and held it bonelessly at arm’s length, his eyes fixed glassily on the wall. It was Sauer from the Greensleeves again. O’Leary could hear his maddened bray.

“I warned you, Warden!” O’Leary could see the big con’s contorted face in miniature, in the view screen of the interphone. The grin was broad and jolly, the snake’s eyes poisonously cold. “I’m going to give you five minutes, Warden, you hear? Five minutes! And if there isn’t a medic in here in five minutes to take care of my boy Flock--your guards have had it! I’m going to slice off an ear and throw it out the window, you hear me? And five minutes later, another ear. And five minutes later--”

The warden groaned weakly. “I’ve called for the prison medic, Sauer. Honestly I have! I’m sure he’s coming as rapidly as he--”

“Five minutes!” And the ferociously grinning face disappeared.

O’Leary leaned forward. “Warden, let me take a squad in there!”

The warden gazed at him for a blank moment “Squad? No, O’Leary. What’s the use of a squad? It’s a medic I have to get in there. I have a responsibility to those guards and if I don’t get a medic--”

A cold, calm voice from the door: “I am here, Warden.”

O’Leary and the warden both jumped up.

The medic nodded slightly. “You may sit down.”

“Oh, Doctor! Thank heaven you’re here!” The warden was falling all over himself, getting a chair for his guest, flustering about.

O’Leary said sharply: “Wait a minute, Warden. You can’t let the doctor go in alone!”

“He isn’t alone!” The doctor’s intern came from behind him, scowling belligerently at O’Leary. Youngish, his beard pale and silky, he was a long way from his first practice. “I’m here to assist him!”