"Want me with you, sir?"
"No, I don't think I'll need you. Keep going and finish up in here."
"Right, sir. You've got your pistol."
The old master sergeant was stating a fact, not asking a question.
"Ha!"
Bennington's barked reply arose from memory of his first argument with
Thornberry. The assistant warden-chief psychologist had been astounded
to learn that the general did not trust the conditioning process as a
solid basis for prison security. Beginning there, the opening
engagement in the battle of ideas, their contrasting philosophies had
deployed and made the entire prison a battleground.
But Bennington dismissed his chief assistant from his thoughts as soon
as he stood in the darkness on the little knoll outside his house. He
concentrated on orienting himself.
* * * * *
The camp had not been changed much when it had been made over from a
ground-to-air missile station, protecting the freight yards of
Harrisburg, into the processing prison for six states.
They had tapped the Juniata a few hundred yards northwest of where it
joined the Susquehanna, for the water that filled the moat encircling
three sides of the prison. The union of the two rivers formed the
water barrier on the east.
_What was it Thornberry had said about the moat? Oh, yes, not to keep
the poor misguided inmates imprisoned, but to keep unwanted people
out...._
When his eyes were accustomed to the darkness, Bennington walked east
and came to the first of the two new additions to the camp. A long
building, used by psychological and medical men to determine the total
amount of usefulness to society left in a man convicted of a crime.
Beyond it, the second addition, a barbed-wire-enclosed building called
The Cage, where prisoners where first received and conditioned.
He turned and began retracing his steps, at the same time mentally
following what happened to a prisoner in each of the two buildings.
When the official party accompanying him to his new post had arrived
late yesterday, for the second time he had followed a man through the
procedure.
The quick frisking and the slow interview with two purposes, by
visual, oral and written tests determining the amount of
suggestibility to hypnotic conditioning plus the quicker giving of a
card to denote a temporary classification.
Light gray for minor offenses; yellow for major crimes; pink for
lifers, psychos and killers; blues for juvenile delinquents; green for
all females, with a colored clip-tab denoting the weight of the
offense.
A temporary classification it had to be, Bennington decided, for the
weight of the offense in itself never measured the man. How many
repeaters, men inevitable to a life of crime, had come here to be
handed a light gray card in The Cage, while other, different men,
once-upon-a-timers, had come out carrying the yellow or pink?
Could and did happen, the general knew, could and did happen even in
his former military life, where consideration of a man's record was a
prerequisite to deciding the sentence, with review and review and
review automatic not a matter of initiated appeal.
However, here, in the psycho-med building, was what might be called
re-judgment, for here, assisted by the latest advances that could
trickle down through the long bureaucracy above--and aided by ideas
that yeasted up, not down--Dr. Thornberry's staff went back to basics
with the question, what is re-claimable, for the man and for us, in
this man?
But not the first day ... that was routine.
Strip and change to prison clothes.
_Mental memo: What happened to the civilian clothes that the prisoners
surrendered? Was there the smell of a small but lucrative racket
here?_
Then, on the basis of that preliminary in The Cage, through one of two
doors. A few went into the room where a massive injection of sedatives
made them virtually vegetables. Most of them, however, were sent into
the room where Judkins, the new technician who had also arrived only
yesterday, would fit the "tank," the big helmet, down over the
prisoner's head and conditioned the man with mechanical and oral
hypnosis.
The results, from drugging or hypnosis, were the same. From either
room the prisoner came with his face a blank.
[Illustration]
Mud-faces, or in a new use of the words from the Original World War,
"doughboys".
Those two rooms were harder to get into than to leave. The security
precautions of The Cage extended to the moment the prisoner was led to
the door and started out of those rooms. But from there on....
No, Bennington decided, let's drop security for a moment. Something
had happened in the rest of the processing he and the committee had
watched and the meaning of that something had emerged only tonight at
the party.
Not in the physical ... and that had been good, as complete as the
most expensive clinic Bennington had ever seen, a thorough probing for
a structural reason behind the crime or crimes....
But the second mental, that quick recheck of the completeness of the
drugging or the hypnosis.... It had been there that both Giles and
Culpepper had been very, very interested to learn if anything a
prisoner said at this point was admissible in a court of law.
The general now understood their relief at Thornberry's explanation:
Anything a man said while under the influence of psychological
conditioning was considered as obtained under duress.
* * * * *
Bennington was still meditating on what Rooney could reveal as he
walked around the mess hall in the center of the compound. Then he
turned to consider again his prison's routine.
He leaned against the south wall of the mess hall and looked across at
the four barrack buildings bulking against the darkness. They were the
two-story type the Army erects for temporary purposes and uses
permanently.
The smell from the overcrowded buildings hit his nose again as
strongly as it had in the afternoon.
And sounds hit his ears, soft sounds that had been muffled by the long
mess hall between him and their source, low sounds further kept from
him by the light wind from the north.
The lights in the barracks had been off since 2100, except, of course,
for the eerie-blue night lights, and the prisoners should be in their
bunks, asleep or at least silent, immobile.
_But why were all the lights off in the compound_, and Bennington
damned himself for not seeking the answer to the question before.
_Thornberry would tell me there is no need for light; that the
prisoners can't escape because their drugging has made them unable, or
their conditioning has made them afraid, to leave the prison._
The sounds, the flickering like fireflies or carefully thumbed
flashlights, didn't come from his near right, Number One, minor
crimes, or Number Two, major crimes exclusive of murder.
They came from between Three and Four.
Number Three. Psychos, sex deviates and murderers, with a couple of
padded cells and barred windows needed upstairs, even though the
inmates were conditioned.
Number Four changed by the addition of an extra latrine for the second
floor. Females on the first, juvenile delinquents on the second.
Bennington had learned to move like a ghost, move quietly or die, on
the almost forgotten battlefields of a police action in Korea. He had
had a post-graduate course in the South-East Asian jungles. On the
Chilean desert he had added to his skills.
He moved now as he had then.
But there was little reason for caution. The guards were too busy
collecting their fees, the juvenile delinquents were too busy acting
as ushers, with even the sex deviates from Number Three busy.
The customers, of course, were far too interested in what they were
buying.
And there was nothing to be done tonight. Bennington snarled to
himself, as he carefully made his way back to the house.
But tomorrow morning....
* * * * *
A good breakfast inside of him, the early morning sun brightening the
scene before him, not even combined could they dispel any of
Bennington's bitter anger at the memory of last night's saturnalia.
He marched across the twenty-five feet separating his house from the
Administration Building, a long, two-story structure on the western
end of the compound.
The entire end nearest his house was taken up by Message Center, the
one room which had had Bennington's full approval on his tour of
inspection both times he had seen the prison. Internally, the separate
parts of the prison were linked together by telephone, a P.A. system,
and intercom. The outside world could be reached or could come to them
by 'phone, radio, teletype, and facsimile reproduction.
Bennington opened the door, glanced up to check his wristwatch with
the big clock on the wall.
0800.
He stepped inside, closed the door, looked around.
The man on night duty was sound asleep.
Bennington coughed once, loudly. The man raised his head and looked
sleepily around.
"Are you the only one here?"
"The others come in around nine," the clerk said, yawning,
bleary-eyed.
"I see. Did anything come in last night?"
"That stuff." A wave toward a roll of yellow teletype paper.
Bennington stared at the man, continued to stare until the clerk
flushed a deep red. Finally the night man straightened in his chair,
then stood up. He picked up the roll of paper and came around his
desk.
"Sir," he said "this report came in last night. It is a list of the
prisoners we can expect to receive today and the probable time of
their arrival."
"Thank you," Bennington said, accepting the roll. "I will be in my
office if anyone is looking for me."
"Sir...." The clerk gulped, hesitated, forced out the words. "That's
the only copy."
Bennington looked the man directly in the eyes. "You must have been
very busy last night." He returned the roll of paper. "I'll be in my
office."
"Yes, sir!"
Bennington started to walk away, but before he reached the door, the
clerk, a man Bennington remembered as being on day duty on his first
visit, began to sputter, "Sir, the quickest way to your office--"
The general glanced over his shoulder, then continued on his way.
Before he could get to the door he had chosen, he heard behind him the
electrotyper chattering away like an automatic weapon with a weak sear
spring.
* * * * *
Bennington could have left by a door leading into Dr. Thornberry's
office and gone on through another door into his own big office. But
he wanted to check on the availability of the rest of the staff.
The door he opened led into a long hallway. On the left was the long
room where Thornberry's psych-med staff had their personal desks and
permanent records. On the right, a door leading to Thornberry's
office, but none into his own. His room was reached only through the
office of a clerk-receptionist or Thornberry's.
Down the hall, past the wide main entrance with its glimpse of the
flagpole outside and inside the stairs leading to the second floor,
where a large part of the permanent staff were given rent-free
quarters.
The armory, on his left just beyond the entrance, a room as long as
the med-staff's, but unlike the other--and who had the brains to do
this--locked.
Across from the armory, a big room for the rest of the administrative
staff, but no one on duty.
The supply room, corresponding in size and location to the Message
Center on the other end, unlocked and no one in it; with everything
the prison received on open shelves, available to any reaching hand.
Bennington went back the hall, through his secretary's room into his
own office.
One sleepy clerk and himself on duty--he looked at his watch--0815.
_... There were going to be some changes made...._
He spun his chair around and looked out the big window directly behind
his desk. He noted the fact that about twenty feet away the land
dropped into a very deep slant to the western arm of the moat, but the
fact recorded itself only because he always made subconscious notes of
the military aspects of terrain.
Consciously, he was wondering why the vast expanse of good, rich
earth, north, west and south of the prison, acres of fine land that
had been and still were a part of this former military post, had never
been put to productive use.
How easily Duncannon could become more self-supporting--and even
though Giles and Culpepper wanted to make a racket of the idea, there
was much to be said for a trusty system.
_Hold it_, he told himself, _those ideas and where we'll set up a
laundry--it's utterly ridiculous that we have to send everything into
Harrisburg!--can come later. Right now let's think about an
appointment list ... and the first name is my good assistant warden's,
Dr. Thornberry._
Still looking out the window, he leaned back in his chair and felt
again the slow boil of anger.
* * * * *
A gentle rap on his office door, the one opening from his secretary's
office.