The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,
and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison
operator: "Get me the governor--fast."
_Riot!_
The word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.
It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority
with his manager and their wives--and just when he was holding the
Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.
It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field
to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a
Red Alert that was real.
It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway
checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the
nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.
Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.
A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in
every limb and class. In its ten million homes, in its hundreds of
thousands of public places, the city-state's people shook under the
impact of the news from the prison.
For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely
a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers
relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the
corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes
and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.
* * * * *
Forty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The
airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of
the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched
and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained
and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled
for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids
couldn't get up yet--it was the middle of the night.
And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers
struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the briefing
area to hear.
They caught the words from a distance--not quite correctly. "Riot!"
gasped an aircraftswoman first-class, mother of three. "The wipes! I
_told_ Charlie they'd get out of hand and--Alys, we aren't safe. You
know how they are about GI women! I'm going right home and get a club
and stand right by the door and--"
"Club!" snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two children
querulously awake in her nursery at home. "What in God's name is the
use of a club? You can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head. You'd
better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun--you'll need it
before this night is over."
But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the
scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of
trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called
them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such
levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.
The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a
whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they
were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up
their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers
in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.
They were ready for the breakout.
But there wasn't any breakout.
The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The
helicopters hung on--still ready, still waiting.
The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.
They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.
The prison below them was washed with light--from the guard posts on
the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of
the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.
North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed
land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed
lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion
from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded
tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to
window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.
"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!" a helicopter bombardier
yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the
whirling blades. "Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout
from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be
right in the middle of it!"
He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it--for every
man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of
it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared. _No mixing._ That
was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in
a family fight--and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers
a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties
than blood or skin?
But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and
once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The
breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever
known.
But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to
come.
* * * * *
The Jug itself was coming to a boil.
Honor Block A, relaxed and easy at the end of another day, found itself
shaken alert by strange goings-on. First there was the whir and roar of
the Air Force overhead. _Trouble._ Then there was the sudden arrival
of extra guards, doubling the normal complement--day-shift guards,
summoned away from their comfortable civil-service homes at some urgent
call. _Trouble for sure._
Honor Block A wasn't used to trouble. A Block was as far from the
Greensleeves of O Block as you could get and still be in the Jug. Honor
Block A belonged to the prison's halfbreeds--the honor prisoners, the
trusties who did guards' work because there weren't enough guards to go
around. They weren't Apaches or Piutes; they were camp-following Injuns
who had sold out for the white man's firewater. The price of their
service was privilege--many privileges.
Item: TV sets in every cell. Item: Hobby tools, to make gadgets for
the visitor trade--the only way an inmate could earn an honest dollar.
Item: In consequence, an exact knowledge of everything the outside
world knew and put on its TV screens (including the grim, alarming
reports of "trouble at Estates-General"), and the capacity to convert
their "hobby tools" to--other uses.
An honor prisoner named Wilmer Lafon was watching the TV screen with an
expression of rage and despair.
Lafon was a credit to the Jug--he was a showpiece for visitors.
Prison rules provided for prisoner training--it was a matter of
"rehabilitation." Prisoner rehabilitation is a joke and a centuries-old
one at that; but it had its serious uses, and one of them was to keep
the prisoners busy. It didn't much matter at what.
Lafon, for instance, was being "rehabilitated" by studying
architecture. The guards made a point of bringing inspection
delegations to his cell to show him off. There were his walls, covered
with pin-ups--but not of women. The pictures were sketches Lafon had
drawn himself; they were of buildings, highways, dams and bridges; they
were splendidly conceived and immaculately executed.
"Looka that!" the guards would rumble to their guests. "There isn't an
architect on the outside as good as this boy! What do you say, Wilmer?
Tell the gentlemen--how long you been taking these correspondence
courses in architecture? Six years! Ever since he came to the Jug."
And Lafon would grin and bob his head, and the delegation would go,
with the guards saying something like: "Believe me, that Wilmer could
design a whole skyscraper--and it wouldn't fall down, either!"
And they were perfectly, provably right. Not only could Inmate Lafon
design a skyscraper, but he had already done so. More than a dozen of
them. And none had fallen down.
Of course, that was more than six years back, before he was convicted
and sent to the Jug. He would never design another. Or if he did, it
would never be built. For the plain fact of the matter was that the
Jug's rehabilitation courses were like rehabilitation in every prison
since crime and punishment began. They kept the inmates busy. They
made a show of purpose for an institution that had never had a purpose
beyond punishment.
And that was all.
For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentence. How
does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills
paid by the state? Lafon's punishment was that he, as an architect, was
_through_.
Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal.
Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the
personality. Chop-chop, and a man's reputation comes off; chop-chop
again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop, and he has
lost the respect and trust of his fellows.
The jail itself isn't the punishment. The jail is only the shaman's
hatchet that performs the amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail
worked--if it were _meant_ to work--it would be the end of jails.
Rehabilitation? Rehabilitation for what?
* * * * *
Wilmer Lafon switched off the television set and silently pounded his
fist into the wall.
Never again to return to the Professional class! For, naturally, the
conviction had cost him his membership in the Architectural Society and
_that_ had cost him his Professional standing.
But still--just to be out of the Jug, that would be something! And his
whole hope of ever getting out lay not here in Honor Block A, but in
the turmoil of the Greensleeves, a hundred meters and more than fifty
armed guards away.
He was a furious man. He looked into the cell next door, where a
con named Garcia was trying to concentrate on a game of Solitaire
Splitfee. Once Garcia had been a Professional, too; he was the closest
thing to a friend Wilmer Lafon had. Maybe he could now help to get
Lafon where he wanted--_needed!_--to be.
Lafon swore silently and shook his head. Garcia was a spineless
milksop, as bad as any clerk--Lafon was nearly sure there was a touch
of the inkwell somewhere in his family. Shrewd and slippery enough,
like all figgers. But you couldn't rely on him in a pinch.
Lafon would have to do it all himself.
He thought for a second, ignoring the rustle and mumble of the other
honor prisoners of Block A. There was no help for it; he would have to
dirty his hands with physical activity.
Outside on the deck, the guards were grumbling to each other. Lafon
wiped the scowl off his black face, put on a smile, rehearsed what he
was going to say, and politely rattled the door of his cell.
"Shut up down there!" one of the screws bawled. Lafon recognized the
voice; it was the guard named Sodaro. That was all to the good. He knew
Sodaro and he had some plans for him.
He rattled the cell door again and called: "Chief, can you come here a
minute, please?"
Sodaro yelled: "Didn't you hear me? Shut up!" But he came wandering by
and looked into Lafon's tidy little cell.
"What the devil do you want?" he growled.