The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was
Flock--astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't
been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there
was something that glinted and smoked.
"All right," croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut
with pain.
But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,
smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though
it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God
knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how--filed,
filed to sharpness over endless hours.
No wonder Flock moaned--the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly
cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv
had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.
"All right," whispered Flock, "just walk out the door and you won't get
hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell
him not to, you hear?"
He was nearly fainting with the pain.
But he hadn't let go.
He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.
IV
It was Flock on the phone to the warden--Flock with his eyes still
streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing
the two bound deck guards.
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 involved.
A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in
every limb and class. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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