The con shrank away from him. Sweat was glistening on his furrowed yellow forehead. "I—I had to do it, Cap'n! I shorted the wormcan in the tangler subgrid, but I had to! I got a signal—'Bollix the grid tonight or some day you'll be in the yard and we'll static you!' What could I do, Cap'n? I didn't want to—" O'Leary pressed: "Who did the signal come from?" The con only shook his head, perspiring still more. The warden asked faintly: "What's he saying?" O'Leary rolled his eyes to heaven. And this was the warden—couldn't even understand shoptalk from the mouths of his own inmates! He translated: "He got orders from the prison underground to short-circuit the electronic units in the tangler circuit. They threatened to kill him if he didn't." The warden drummed with his fingers on the desk. "The tangler field, eh? My, yes. That is important. You'd better get it fixed, O'Leary. Right away." "Fixed? Warden, who's going to fix it? You know as well as I do that every mechanic in the prison is a con. Even if one of the guards would do a thing like that—and 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 mechanic—and a specialist electrician from a particular subgroup of the greaser class at that—could fix something like the tangler field generators. He said absently: "Well, that's true enough. After all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' you know." O'Leary took a deep breath. He needed it. He beckoned to the guard at the door. "Take this greaser out of here!" The con shambled out, his head hanging. O'Leary turned to the warden and spread his hands. "Warden," he said, "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 O 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.
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