It was the only thing to do--for her own sake as much as for his. He
had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted
to say "sir" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up
forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was
clearly the next step for her.
All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet
to Sodaro and said absently: "Too bad a kid like her has to be here.
What's she in for?"
"You didn't know, Cap'n?" Sodaro leered. "She's in for conspiracy to
violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,
Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!"
Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked
"Civil Service." But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the
smell from his nose.
What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty
business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the
yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage--decent Civil
Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If
anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and
look what she had made of it.
The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no
exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that
creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment
that clans formed, specialization began--the hunters using the weapons
made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the
ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.
Civilization merely increased the extent of specialization. From
the born mechanic and the man with the gift of gab, society evolved
to the point of smaller contact and less communication between the
specializations, until now they could understand each other on only the
most basic physical necessities--and not even always then.
But this was desirable, for the more specialists, the higher the degree
of civilization. The ultimate should be the complete segregation
of each specialization--social and genetic measures to make them
breed true, because the unspecialized man is an uncivilized man,
or at any rate he does not advance civilization. And letting the
specializations mix would produce genetic undesirables: clerk-laborer
or Professional-GI misfits, for example, being only half specialized,
would be good at no specialization.
And the basis of this specialization society was: "The aptitude groups
are the true races of mankind." Putting it into law was only the legal
enforcement of a demonstrable fact.
"Evening, Cap'n." A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and
touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.
"Evening."
* * * * *
O'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those
things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd
noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to
sweep--the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the
cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's
job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they
didn't.
There wasn't anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a
perfectly good civil-service position--better than post-office clerk,
not as good as Congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He
_was_ proud of it. It was _right_ that he should be proud of it. He was
civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to
do a good, clean civil-service job.
If he had happened to be born a fig--a _clerk_, he corrected
himself--if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been
proud of that, too. There wasn't anything wrong with being a clerk--or
a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer, for that matter.
Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,
but they had a--well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary
was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a
touch of envy how _comfortable_ it must be to be a wipe--a _laborer_.
No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and
loaf, work and loaf.
Of course, he wouldn't _really_ want that kind of life, because he was
Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that
weren't _meant_ to be--
"Evening, Cap'n."
He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of
maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.
"Evening, Conan," he said.
Conan, now--he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the
next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on
the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the
cars going--and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up
in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status
restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he
certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as
Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.
So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?