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.