He jumped up, remembering. "The governor!"
Sue-Ann Bradley said: "He's all right. I _think_ he is, anyway. He's in
the cell right next to us, with a couple guards. I guess they came up
with you." She shivered as the yells in the corridor rose. "Sauer is
angry at the medic," she explained. "He wants him to fix Flock up so
they can--'crush out,' I think he said. The medic says he can't do it.
You see, Flock got burned pretty badly with a knife he made. Something
about the tanglefoot field--"
"Eddy currents," said O'Leary dizzily.
"Anyway, the medic--"
"Never mind the medic. What's Lafon doing?"
"Lafon? The Negro?" Sue-Ann Bradley frowned. "I didn't know his name.
He started the whole thing, the way it sounds. They're waiting for
the mob down in the yard to break out and then they're going to make a
break--"
"Wait a minute," growled O'Leary. His head was beginning to clear.
"What about you? Are you in on this?"
She hung between laughter and tears. Finally: "Do I _look_ as if I am?"
O'Leary took stock. Somehow, somewhere, the girl had got a length of
metal pipe--from the plumbing, maybe. She was holding it in one hand,
supporting him with the other. There were two other guards in the cell,
both out cold--one from O'Leary's squad, the other, O'Leary guessed, a
desk guard who had been on duty when the trouble started.
"I wouldn't let them in," she said wildly. "I told them they'd have to
kill me before they could touch that guard."
O'Leary said suspiciously: "You belonged to that Double-A-C, didn't
you? You were pretty anxious to get in the Greensleeves, disobeying
Auntie Mathias's orders. Are you sure you didn't know this was going
to--"
It was too much. She dropped the pipe, buried her head in her hands. He
couldn't tell if she laughed or wept, but he could tell that it hadn't
been like that at all.
"I'm sorry," he said awkwardly, and touched her helplessly on the
shoulder.
* * * * *
He turned and looked out the little barred window, because he couldn't
think of any additional way to apologize. He heard the wavering beat
in the air and saw them--bobbing a hundred yards up, their wide
metal vanes fluttering and hissing from the jets at the tips. The GI
'copters. Waiting--as everyone seemed to be waiting.
Sue-Ann Bradley asked shakily: "Is anything the matter?"
O'Leary turned away. It was astonishing, he thought, what a different
perspective he had on those helicopter bombers from inside Block O.
Once he had cursed the warden for not ordering at least tear gas to be
dropped.
He said harshly: "Nothing. Just that the 'copters have the place
surrounded."
"Does it make any difference?"
He shrugged. Does it make a difference? The difference between trouble
and tragedy, or so it now seemed to Captain O'Leary. The riot was
trouble. They could handle it, one way or another. It was his job, any
guard's job, to handle _prison_ trouble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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