“But, Governor—”
“But my foot! Can you get me in there or can’t you?”
O’Leary gauged their chances. It wasn’t more than fifty feet to the main entrance to the Old Building—not at the moment guarded, since all the guards were in hiding or on the walls, and not as yet being invaded by the inmates at large.
He said: “You’re the boss. Hold on a minute—” The searchlights were on the bare yard cobblestones in front of them; in a moment, the searchlights danced away.
“Come on!” cried O’Leary, and jumped for the entrance. The governor was with him and a pair of the guards came stumbling after.
They made it to the Old Building.
Inside the entrance, they could hear the noise from outside and the yelling of the inmates who were still in their cells. But around them was nothing but gray steel walls and the stairs going all the way up to Block O.
“Up!” panted O’Leary, and they clattered up the steel steps.
They would have made it—if it hadn’t been for the honor inmate, Wilmer Lafon, who knew what he was after and had headed for the Greensleeves through the back way. In fact, they did make it—but not the way they planned. “Get out of the way!” yelled O’Leary at Lafon and the half-dozen inmates with him; and “Go to hell!” screamed Lafon, charging; and it was a rough-and-tumble fight, and O’Leary’s party lost it, fair and square.
So when they got to Block O, it was with the governor marching before a convict-held gun, and with O’Leary cold unconscious, a lump from a gun-butt on the side of his head.
As they came up the stairs, Sauer was howling at the medic: “You got to fix up my boy! He’s dying and all you do is sit there!”
The medic said patiently: “My son, I’ve dressed his wound. He is under sedation and I must rest. There will be other casualties.”
Sauer raged, but that was as far as it went. Even Sauer wouldn’t attack a medic. He would as soon strike an Attorney, or even a Director of Funerals. It wasn’t merely that they were Professionals. Even among the Professional class, they were special; not superior, exactly, but apart. They certainly were not for the likes of Sauer to fool with and Sauer knew it.
“Somebody’s coming!” bawled one of the other freed inmates.
Sauer jumped to the head of the steps, saw that Lafon was leading the group, stepped back, saw whom Lafon’s helpers were carrying and leaped forward again.
“Cap’n O’Leary!” he roared. “Gimme!”
“Shut up,” said Wilmer Lafon, and pushed the big redhead out of the way. Sauer’s jaw dropped and the snake eyes opened wide.
“Wilmer,” he protested feebly. But that was all the protest he made, because the snake’s eyes had seen that Lafon held a gun. He stood back, the big hands half outstretched toward the unconscious guard captain, O’Leary, and the cold eyes became thoughtful.
And then he saw who else was with the party. “Wilmer! You got the governor there!”
Lafon nodded. “Throw them in a cell,” he ordered, and sat down on a guard’s stool, breathing hard. It had been a fine fight on the steps, before he and his boys had subdued the governor and the guards, but Wilmer Lafon wasn’t used to fighting. Even six years in the Jug hadn’t turned an architect into a laborer; physical exertion simply was not his métier.
Sauer said coaxingly: “Wilmer, won’t you leave me have O’Leary for a while? If it wasn’t for me and Flock, you’d still be in A Block and—”
“Shut up,” Lafon said again, gently enough, but he waved the gun muzzle. He drew a deep breath, glanced around him and grinned. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock,” he mimicked. “If it wasn’t for you and Flock! Sauer, you wipe clown, do you think it took brains to file down a shiv and start things rolling? If it wasn’t for me, you and Flock would have beaten up a few guards, and had your kicks for half an hour, and then the whole prison would fall in on you! It was me, Wilmer Lafon, who set things up and you know it!”
He was yelling and suddenly he realized he was yelling. And what was the use, he demanded of himself contemptuously, of trying to argue with a bunch of lousy wipes and greasers? They’d never understand the long, soul-killing hours of planning and sweat. They wouldn’t realize the importance of the careful timing—of arranging that the laundry cons would start a disturbance in the yard right after the Greensleeves hard-timers kicked off the riot, of getting the little greaser Hiroko to short-circuit the yard field so the laundry cons could start their disturbances.
It took a Professional to organize and plan—yes, and to make sure that he himself was out of it until everything was ripe, so that if anything went wrong, he was all right. It took somebody like Wilmer Lafon—a Professional, who had spent six years too long in the Jug—
And who would shortly be getting out.
VII
Any prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in process of going off.
From the Greensleeves, where the trouble had started, clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells—the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers who didn’t dare risk their early discharge. But for every man in his cell, a dozen were out and yelling.
A torch, licking as high as the hanging helicopters, blazing up from the yard—that was the laundry shed. Why burn the laundry? The cons couldn’t have said. It was burnable and it was there—burn it!
The yard lay open to the wrath of the helicopters, but the helicopters made no move. The cobblestones were solidly covered with milling men.
