Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  “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.

  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.

  “Evening, Cap’n.” A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and touched his cap as O’Leary passed by.

  “Evening.” O’Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he’d noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn’t much to sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate’s job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain’s job to notice when they didn’t.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a perfectly good civil-service position—better than post-office clerk, not as good as congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He was proud of it. It was right that he should be proud of it. He was civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to do a good, clean civil-service job. If he had happened to be born a fig—a clerk, he told himself; if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been proud of that too. There wasn’t anything wrong with being a clerk—or a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer for that matter. Good laborers were the salt of the earth! They weren’t smart, maybe, but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O’Leary was a broadminded man, and many times he had thought almost with a touch of envy how comfortable it must be to be a wipe—a laborer, he corrected himself. No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and loaf, work and loaf.

  Of course, he wouldn’t really want that kind of life, because he was Civil Service, and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that weren’t meant to be—

  “Evening, Cap’n.”

  He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of maintaining the prison’s car pool, just inside the gate. “Evening, Conan,” he said. Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser, and he would be there for the next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the cars going—and, O’Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.

  So why didn’t this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?

  2

  Every prison has its Green Sleeves—sometimes they are called by different names. Old Marquette called it “the canary”; Louisiana State called it “the red hats”; elsewhere it was called “the hole,” “the snake pit,” “the Klondike.” When you’re in it you don’t much care what it is called; it is a place for punishment.

  And punishment is what you get.

  Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its inhabitants wore it was called the Green Sleeves. It was a community of its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And like any other community, it had its leading citizens…two of them. Their names were Sauer and Flock.

  Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Green Sleeves. She was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor below, when she heard the yelling.

  “Owoo-o-o,” screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block; and “Yow-w-w!” shrieked Flock at the other.

  The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on the outside. The inside guard muttered, “Wipe rats! They’re getting on my nerves.”

  The outside guard shrugged.

  “Detail, halt!” The two guards turned to see what was coming in as the three new candidates for the Green Sleeves slumped to a stop at the head of the stairs. “Here they are,” Sodaro told them. “Take good care of ’em, will you? Especially the lady—she’s going to like it here, because there’s plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her company.” He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O guards.

  The outside guard said sourly, “A woman, for God’s sake. Now, O’Leary knows I hate it when there’s a woman in here. It gets the others all riled up.”

  “Let them in,” the inside guard told him. “The others are riled up already.”

  Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough, against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a rule that even in Block O you didn’t leave the tangler fields on all the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner’s restraining garment removed.

  Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat on her face. It was like walking through molasses; it was her first experience of a tanglefoot field.

  The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. “Take it easy, auntie. Come on, get in your cell.” He steered her in the right direction and pointed to a green-sleeved straitjacket on the cell cot. “Put that on. Being as you’re a lady, we won’t tie it up—but the rules say you got to wear it, and the rules—Hey! She’s crying!” He shook his head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry in the Green Sleeves.

  However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann shoulders were shaking, but not from tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she passed them by, and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge to retch.

  Sauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were laborers—“wipes,” for short—or at any rate they had been once; they had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big, grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe five-footer, with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid eyes of a calf.

  Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. “Hey, Flock,” he cried.

  “What do you want, Sauer?” called Flock from his own cell.

  “Didn’t you see, Flock?” bellowed Sauer. “We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so as not to disturb the lady!” He screeched with howling, maniacal laughter. “Anyway, if we don’t cut this out, they’ll get us in trouble, Flock!”

  “Oh, you think so?” shrieked Flock. “Jeez, I wish you hadn’t said that, Sauer. You got me scared! I’m so scared I’m gonna have to yell!”

  The howling started all over again.

  The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. “Say, you want to take a turn in here for a while?”

  “Uh-uh,” said the outside guard.

  “You’re yellow,” the inside guard said moodily. “Ah, I don’t know why I don’t quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I’ll come in and beat your head off!”

  “Ee-ee-ee!” shrieked Sauer. “I’m scared!” Then he grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. “Don’t you know you can’t hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, boss?”

&nb
sp; “Shut up!” yelled the inside guard…

  Sue-Ann Bradley’s weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting under her skin. They weren’t even—even human, she told herself miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the satisfaction of hearing her. They were animals!

  Resentment and anger she could understand—she told herself doggedly that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen’s rebellion against the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was good that Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious system—

  But did they have to scream so?

  The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to weeping, and she didn’t even care who heard her any more. Senseless!

  It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless, because noise hides noise. But then, she hadn’t been a prisoner very long.

  3

  “I smell trouble,” said O’Leary to the warden.

  “Trouble, trouble?” Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the last decent job he would have in his life. “Trouble? What trouble?”

  O’Leary shrugged. “Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This afternoon he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.”

  The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded:

  “O’Leary, what did you want to worry me for? There’s nothing wrong with playing ball in the yard. That’s what recreation periods are for!”

  “No. You don’t see what I mean, warden. Lafon was a professional on the outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes don’t mix, it isn’t natural. And there are other things.” O’Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that it didn’t smell right? “For Instance—Well, there’s Aunt Mathias in the women’s block. She’s a pretty good old girl—that’s why she’s the block orderly, she’s a lifer, she’s got no place to go, she gets along with the other women. But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn’t understand. Now, Mathias wouldn’t—”

  The warden raised his hand. “Please, O’Leary,” he begged. “Don’t bother me about that kind of stuff.” He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O’Leary, then dropped a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring its temperature.

  He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and more assured.

  “O’Leary,” he said, “you’re a guard captain, right? And I’m your warden. You have your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now, your job is just as important as my job,” he said piously, staring gravely at O’Leary. “Everybody’s job is just as important as everybody else’s, right? But we have to stick to our own jobs. We don’t want to try to pass.”

  O’Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was that for the warden to talk to him.

  “Excuse the expression, O’Leary,” the warden said anxiously. “I mean, after all, ‘Specialization is the goal of civilization,’ right?” He was a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. “You know, you don’t want to worry about my end of running the prison. And I don’t want to worry about yours. You see?” And he folded his hands and smiled like a civil-service Buddha.

  O’Leary choked back his temper. “Warden, I’m telling you that there’s trouble coming up. I smell the signs.”

  “Handle it, then!” snapped the warden, irritated at last.

  “But suppose it’s too big to handle? Suppose—”

  “It isn’t,” the warden said positively. “Don’t borrow trouble with all your supposing, O’Leary.” He sipped the remains of his coffee, made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not noticing what he himself was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into it this time.

  He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.

  “Well, then,” he said at last. “You just remember what I’ve told you tonight, O’Leary, and we’ll get along fine. ‘Specialization is the—’ Oh, curse the thing.”

  His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably—that was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O’Leary; they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge. “Hello,” barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. “What the devil do you want? Don’t you know I’m—What? You did what? You’re going to WHAT?”

  He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.

  Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like clamshells in a steamer.

  “O’Leary,” he said faintly, “my mistake.”

  And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his fingers.

  The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.

  Five minutes before he hadn’t been anywhere near the phone, and it didn’t look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good. Because five minutes before he was in his cell, with the rest of the hard-timers of the Green Sleeves.

  His name was Flock.

  He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him, thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the face of an agonized man.

  The outside guard bellowed: “Okay, okay. Take ten!”

  Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the Green Sleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment. “Rest period” it was called—in the rule book; the inmates had a less lovely term for it.

  At the guard’s yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.

  Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped, but didn’t cry out. Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly. The eddy currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.

  The guard peered genially into her cell. “You’re okay, auntie.” She proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds. At least he didn’t have to untie her, and practically stand over her while she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was grateful. At least, she didn’t have to live quite like a fig—like an underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.

  Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” He opened the door of the cell with an asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.

  Flock was in that cell, and he was doubled over.

  The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe. Couldn’t it? But he could see Flock’s face, and the agony in it was real enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: “Cramps. I—I—”

  “Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.” The guard lumbered around Flock to the drawstrings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people didn’t believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual
smell. Something burning. Scorching—almost like meat scorching.

  It wasn’t pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to get all the way around Block O, and the inmates complained like crazy if he didn’t make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was pretty good at snow-shoeing through the tangler field. He was a little vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability to make the rounds in two minutes, every time…

  Every time but this.

  For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.

  The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was Flock—astonishing, 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 bedspring, ripped loose from its frame God knows how, hidden inside the green-sleeved jacket God knows how—filed, filed to sharpness over endless hours. No wonder Flock moaned! For the eddy-currents in the shiv were slowly cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen where the shiv had rested 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.

  4

  And 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.