"Hey, Cap'n, wait!" Sodaro was looking alarmed. "This isn't a first
offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in
the mess hall." He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. "The
block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,
and she claimed the same business--said she didn't understand when the
other one asked her to move along." He added virtuously: "The guard
warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure."
Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: "I
don't care. I don't care!"
O'Leary stopped her. "That's enough! Three days in Block O!"
It was the only thing to do--for her own sake as much as for his. He
had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted
to say "sir" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up
forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was
clearly the next step for her.
All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet
to Sodaro and said absently: "Too bad a kid like her has to be here.
What's she in for?"
"You didn't know, Cap'n?" Sodaro leered. "She's in for conspiracy to
violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,
Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!"
Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked
"Civil Service." But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the
smell from his nose.
What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty
business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the
yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage--decent Civil
Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If
anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and
look what she had made of it.
The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no
exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that
creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment
that clans formed, specialization began--the hunters using the weapons
made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the
ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.
Civilization merely increased the extent of specialization. From
the born mechanic and the man with the gift of gab, society evolved
to the point of smaller contact and less communication between the
specializations, until now they could understand each other on only the
most basic physical necessities--and not even always then.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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