Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. “Hey, warden!” he said—and the voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and hating. “Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt himself real bad and he needs a doctor.” He gestured playfully at the guards with the shiv. “I tell you, warden. I got this knife, and I got your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick—you hear?”

  And he snapped the connection.

  O’Leary said, “Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!”

  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 actually involved.

  A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in every limb and class. It was like a quarrel of fleas on the hide of a rhino!

  But a flea-bite can kill a rhino with the slow agony of communicated disease; and the city-state around the prison leaped in fear. 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 barroom 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.

  Thirty 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 air-craftswoman 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 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 out!”

  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. So 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 break-out 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 break-out 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 comfortable 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 Green Sleeves of O Block as you could get and still stay 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 services 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 guard 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 of a felony 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 that was ever built since time and punishment began. They kept the inmates busy. They made a show of purpose for an institution that had never had a purpose that made sense. 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 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 was 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 Green Sleeves, a hundred meters and 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. Clever enough, like all figgers. But you couldn’t rely on him in a pinch.

  He 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 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 in a moment he came wandering by and looked into Lafon’s tidy little cell.

  “What the devil do you want?” he grumbled.

  Lafon said ingratiatingly, “Hey, chief, what’s going on?”

  “Shut your mouth,” Sodaro said absently and yawned. He hefted his shoulder holster comfortably. That O’Leary, what a production he had made of getting the guards back! And here he was, stuck in Block A on the night he had set aside for getting better acquainted with that little blue-eyed statistician from the Census office.

  “Aw, chief. The television says there’s something going on in the Green Sleeves. What’s the score?”

  Sodaro had no reason not to answer him; but it was his unvarying practice to make a con wait before doing anything the con wanted. He gave Lafon a ten-second stare before he relented.

  “That’s right. Sauer and Flock took over Block O. What about it?”

  Much, much about it! But Lafon looked away to hide the eagerness in his eyes. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late…He suggested humbly: “You look a little sleepy. Do you want some coffee?”

  “Coffee?” Sodaro scratched. “You got a cup for me?”

  “Certainly! I’ve got one put aside—swiped it from the messhall, you know, not the one I use myself.”

  “Um.” Sodaro leaned on the cell door. “You know I could toss you in the Green Sleeves for stealing from the messhall.”

  “Aw, chief!” Lafon grinned.

  “You been looking for trouble. O’Leary says you were messing around with the bucks from the laundry detail,” Sodaro said half-heartedly. But he didn’t really like picking on Lafon, who was, after all, an agreeable inmate to have on occasion. “All right. Where’s the coffee?”

  They didn’t bother with tanglefoot fields in Honor Block A. Sodaro just unlocked the door and walked in, hardly bothering to look at Lafon. He took three steps toward the neat little desk at the back of the cell, where Lafon had rigged up a drawing board and a table, where Lafon kept his little store of luxury goods. Three steps. And then, suddenly aware that Lafon was very close to him, he turned, astonished—A little too late. He saw that Lafon had snatched up a metal chair; he saw Lafon swinging it, his black face maniacal; he saw the chair coming down. He reached for his shoulder holster; but it was very much too late for that.

  5

  Captain O’Leary dragged the scared little wretch into the warden’s office. He shook the con angrily. “Listen to this, warden! The boys just brought this one in from the Shops Building. Do you know what he’s been up to?”

  The warden wheezed sadly and looked away. He had stopped even answering O’Leary by now, he had stopped talking to Sauer on the interphone when the big convict called, every few minutes, to rave and threaten and demand a doctor. He had almost stopped doing everything except worry and weep. But—still and all, he was the warden. He was the one who gave the orders.

  O’Leary barked, “Warden, pay attention! This little greaser has bollixed up the whole tangler circuit for the prison. If the cons get out into the Yard now you won’t be able to tangle them. You know what that means? They’ll have the freedom of the Yard, and who knows what comes next?”

  The warden frowned sympathetically. “Tsk, tsk.”

  O’Leary shook the con again. “Come on, Hiroko! Tell the warden what you told the guards.”

  The con shrank away from him. Beads of sweat were glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead. “I—I had to do it, Cap’n!” he babbled. “I shorted the wormcan in the tangler subgrid, but I had to! I got a signal, ‘Bollix the grid tonight or wheep, someday you’ll be in the Yard and they’ll static you!’ What could I do, Cap’n? I didn’t want to—”

  O’Leary pressed: “Who did the signal come from?” But the con only shook his head, perspiring the more.

  The warden asked faintly, “What’s he saying?”

  O’Leary rolled his eyes to heaven. And this was the warden—couldn’t even understand shoptalk from the mouths of his own inmates!

  He translated: “He got orders from the prison underground to short-circuit the electronic units in the tangler circuit. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t.”

  The warden drummed with his fingers on the desk.

  “The tangler field, eh? My, yes. That is important. You’d better get it fixed, O’Leary. Right away.”

  “Fixed? Warden, look—who’s going to fix it?” O’Leary demanded. “You know as well as I do that every mechanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards would do a thing like that—and I’d bust him myself if he did!—he wouldn’t know where to start. That’s mechanic work.”

  The warden swallowed. He had to
admit that O’Leary was right. Naturally nobody but a mechanic—and a specialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser class at that—could fix something like the tangler field generators. That was a fact of life. These days, he thought pathetically, the world was so complex that it took a specialist to do anything at all.

  He said absently, “Well, that’s true enough. After all, ‘Specialization is the goal of civilization,’ you know.”

  O’Leary took a deep breath—he needed it.

  He beckoned to the guard at the door. “Take this greaser out of here!” The con shambled out, his head hanging.

  O’Leary turned to the warden and spread his hands.

  “Warden,” he said reasonably, “don’t you see how this thing is building up? Let’s not just wait for the place to explode in our faces! Let me take a squad into Block O before it’s too late.”

  The warden pursed his lips thoughtfully and cocked his head, as though he were trying to find some trace of merit in an unreasonable request.

  He said at last, “No.”

  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 all 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 Green Sleeves if he had to—and clean up the infection.