The medic fixed him with his eyes. He was a tall man and he wore his beard proudly. “Guard, do you think you can prevent me from healing a sufferer?” He folded his hands over his abdomen and turned to leave.
The intern stepped aside and bowed his head.
O’Leary surrendered. “All right, you can go. But I’m coming with you—with a squad!”
Inmate Sue-Ann Bradley cowered in her cell. The Greensleeves was jumping. She had never—no, never, she told herself wretchedly—thought that it would be anything like this. She listened unbelievingly to the noise the released prisoners were making, smashing the chairs and commodes in their cells, screaming threats at the bound guards.
She faced the thought with fear, and with the sorrow of a murdered belief that was worse than fear. It was bad that she was in danger of dying right here and now, but what was even worse was that the principles that had brought her to the Jug were dying, too.
Wipes were not the same as Civil-Service people!
A bull’s roar from the corridor and a shocking crash of glass—that was Flock, and apparently he had smashed the TV interphone.
“What in the world are they doing?” Inmate Bradley sobbed to herself. It was beyond comprehension. They were yelling words that made no sense to her, threatening punishments on the guards that she could barely imagine. Sauer and Flock were laborers; some of the other rioting cons were clerks, mechanics—even Civil-Service or Professionals, for all she could tell. But she could hardly understand any of them. Why was the quiet little Chinese clerk in Cell Six setting fire to his bed?
There did seem to be a pattern, of sorts. The laborers were rocketing about, breaking things at random. The mechanics were pleasurably sabotaging the electronic and plumbing installations. The white-collar categories were finding their dubious joys in less direct ways—liking setting fire to a bed. But what a mad pattern!
The more Sue-Ann saw of them, the less she understood.
It wasn’t just that they talked differently. She had spent endless hours studying the various patois of shoptalk and it had defeated her; but it wasn’t just that.
It was bad enough when she couldn’t understand the words—as when that trusty Mathias had ordered her in wipe shoptalk to mop out her cell. But what was even worse was not understanding the thought behind the words.
Sue-Ann Bradley had consecrated her young life to the belief that all men were created free and equal—and alike. Or alike in all the things that mattered, anyhow. Alike in hopes, alike in motives, alike in virtues. She had turned her back on a decent Civil-Service family and a promising Civil-Service career to join the banned and despised Association for the Advancement of the Categoried Classes—
Screams from the corridor outside.
Sue-Ann leaped to the door of her cell to see Sauer clutching at one of the guards. The guard’s hands were tied, but his feet were free; he broke loose from the clumsy clown with the serpent’s eyes, almost fell, ran toward Sue-Ann.
There was nowhere else to run. The guard, moaning and gasping, tripped, slid, caught himself and stumbled into her cell. “Please!” he begged. “That crazy Sauer—he’s going to cut my ear off! For heaven’s sake, ma’am—stop him!”
Sue-Ann stared at him, between terror and tears. Stop Sauer! If only she could. The big redhead was lurching stiffly toward them—raging, but not so angry that the water-moccasin eyes showed heat.
“Come here, you figger scum!” he roared.
The epithet wasn’t even close—the guard was Civil Service through and through—but it was like a reviving whip-sting to Sue-Ann Bradley.
“Watch your language, Mr. Sauer!” she snapped incongruously.
Sauer stopped dead and blinked.
“Don’t you dare hurt him!” she warned. “Don’t you see, Mr. Sauer, you’re playing into their hands? They’re trying to divide us. They pit mechanic against clerk, laborer against armed forces. And you’re helping them! Brother Sauer, I beg—”
The redhead spat deliberately on the floor.
He licked his lips, and grinned an amiable clown’s grin, and said in his cheerful, buffoon bray: “Auntie, go verb your adjective adjective noun.”
Sue-Ann Bradley gasped and turned white. She had known such words existed—but only theoretically. She had never expected to hear them. And certainly she would never have believed she would hear them, applied to her, from the lips of a—a laborer.
At her knees, the guard shrieked and fell to the floor.
“Sauer! Sauer!” A panicky bellow from the corridor; the red-haired giant hesitated. “Sauer, come on out here! There’s a million guards coming up the stairs. Looks like trouble!”
Sauer said hoarsely to the unconscious guard: “I’ll take care of you.” And he looked blankly at the girl, and shook his head, and hurried back outside to the corridor.
Guards were coming, all right—not a million of them, but half a dozen or more. And leading them all was the medic, calm, bearded face looking straight ahead, hands clasped before him, ready to heal the sick, comfort the aged or bring new life into the world.
“Hold it!” shrieked little Flock, crouched over the agonizing blister on his abdomen, gun in hand, peering insanely down the steps. “Hold it or—”
“Shut up.” Sauer called softly to the approaching group: “Let only the doc come up. Nobody else!”
The intern faltered; the guards stopped dead; the medic said calmly: “I must have my intern with me.” He glanced at the barred gate wonderingly.
Sauer hesitated. “Well—all right. But no guards!”
A few yards away, Sue-Ann Bradley was stuffing the syncoped form of the guard into her small washroom.
It was time to take a stand. No more cowering, she told herself desperately. No more waiting. She closed the door on the guard, still unconscious, and stood grimly before it. Him, at least, she would save if she could. They could get him, but only over her dead body.
Or anyway, she thought with a sudden
