"I smell trouble," said O'Leary to the warden.
"Trouble? Trouble?" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his
little round eyes looked terrified--as perhaps they should have. Warden
Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in
the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the
last decent job he would have in his life.
"Trouble? _What_ trouble?"
O'Leary shrugged. "Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This
afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard."
The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: "O'Leary, what
did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball
in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for."
"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the
outside--an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes
don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things."
O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that
it didn't _smell_ right?
"For instance--Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's
a pretty good old girl--that's why she's the block orderly. She's a
lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.
But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she
told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now
Mathias wouldn't--"
The warden raised his hand. "Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about
that kind of stuff." He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured
himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a
desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped
a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the
scalding heat.
He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.
"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have
your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is
just as important as my job," he said piously. "_Everybody's_ job is
just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to
our own jobs. We don't want to try to _pass_."
O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was
that for the warden to talk to him?
"Excuse the expression, O'Leary," the warden said anxiously. "I mean,
after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?" He was
a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. "_You_ know you
don't want to worry about _my_ end of running the prison. And _I_ don't
want to worry about _yours_. You see?" And he folded his hands and
smiled like a civil-service Buddha.
* * * * *
O'Leary choked back his temper. "Warden, I'm telling you that there's
trouble coming up. I smell the signs."
"Handle it, then!" snapped the warden, irritated at last.
"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose--"
"It isn't," the warden said positively. "Don't borrow trouble with
all your supposing, O'Leary." He sipped the remains of his coffee,
made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not
noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into
it this time.
He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.
"Well, then," he said at last. "You just remember what I've told you
tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the--'
Oh, curse the thing."
His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.
That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;
they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.
"Hello," barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. "What
the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm--What? You did _what_?
You're going to WHAT?"
He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.
Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like
clamshells in a steamer.
"O'Leary," he said faintly, "my mistake."
And he hung up--more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his
fingers.
The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.
Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it
didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.
Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the
hard-timers of the Greensleeves.
His name was Flock.
He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,
thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the
crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the
face of an agonized man.