demanded. "You know as well as I do that every me-
chanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards
would do a thing like thatand 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 mechanicand a spe-
cialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser
class at thatcould 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 breathhe needed it.
He beckoned to the guard at the door. "Take this
greaser out of herel" 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 0
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 be-
tween the cells, and the guards couldn't shut them up; they
were listening to concealed radios, and the guards didn't
dare make a shake-down 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 onshoot his way into the Green Sleeves if
he had toand clean up the infection.
