Falconer

"Go home, go home," said Walton. "I got to study."

Farragut picked up his chair, and stopping by Ransome’s cell, he said, "I got this terrible toothache. It's a wisdom tooth. I'm forty-eight years old and I still got my wisdom teeth. This one on the left is just like a clock. It starts aching at around nine at night and stops at dawn. Dawn tomorrow is when I'D know whether the pain is over, whether or not the tooth has to come out. I'll know at daybreak. That's about six twenty-eight."

"Thank you, Miss America," said Ransome.

Farragut stumbled back to his cell, got into bed and slept.

He had a dream that was unlike the day. His dream was in the most vivid colors, those aniline dyes that the eye receives only after this spectrum has been extracted by a camera. Farragut is on a cruise ship, experiencing a familiar mixture of freedom, boredom and sunburn. He swims in the pool, drinks with the international crowd in the bar at noon, gets laid during the siesta, plays deck te

The schooner has come for him. He goes below, climbs down a rope ladder onto her deck and as they sail away he waves goodbye to his friends on the cruise-men, women and the members of the ship's orchestra. He does not know who owns the schooner and who greets him there. He remembers nothing except that he stands on her deck and watches the cruise ship regain speed. She is a big old-fashioned cruiser, named for a queen, white as a bride, with three canted stacks and a little gold lace, like a toy boat, at her bow. She goes crazily off course, veers to port and heads at full tilt for a nearby island that looks like one of the Atlantic Islands, only with palms. She rams the beach, heels to starboard and bursts into flame, and while he sails away he can see, over his shoulder, the pyre and the enormous column of smoke. The instant he woke, the brightness of the dream's colors were quenched by the grayness of Falconer.

Farragut woke. He swung his head from his watch to the window. It was six twenty-eight. Rain was falling into that part of the world and he guessed into The Wall. It was Tiny who had waked him. "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet," said Tiny. " Chesterfields, they satisfy. I'd walk a mile for a Camel." He had five cigarettes in his hand. Farragut took two. They were loosely rolled and were, he guessed, ca

The amnesty on which Farragut exhaled formed a cloud-a gray cloud like the clouds that could begin to be seen outside his window-and raised him nicely off his earthbound cot, raised him above all earthly things. The noise of the rain seemed to be a gentleness-something his bellicose mother, pumping gas in her opera cloak, had missed. Then he heard the squeek-geek-growl of the Stone's glass ear and some sleepy urging from Ransome.

"Jiggle it, jiggle it, jiggle it, for Christ's sake." Then he heard the voice of a woman, not, he thought in the expansiveness of ca

"Hi, people! This is Patty Smith, anchorwoman for Eliot Hendron, who, as you may not know, has been overwhelmed by the events of the last half hour. The Wall has been repossessed by state troops. The administration petition with a plea for further time was burned by the inmates' committee at six A.M. The inmates agreed to the plea for further time but to nothing else. There appear to have been preparations for the execution of the hostages. The gas attack began at six-eight, followed two minutes later by the order to fire. Firing lasted six minutes. It is too early to estimate the number of the dead, but Eliot, my partner and the last eyewitness in yard K, estimated them as at least fifty dead and fifty dying. Troopers have stripped the living of their clothes. They now lie naked in the rain and the mud, vomiting from the effects of CS-2. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, excuse me." She was crying. "I guess I'll have to join Eliot in the infirmary."

"Sing us a song» Chicken Number Two," said Ransome. "Oh, sing us a song."

There was a wait while Chicken shook off a little of the ca

If the only song I can sing is a sad song, I ain't going to sing at all.

If the only song I can sing is a sad song,

I ain't going to sing at all.

I ain't going to sing about the dead and the dying,

I ain't going to sing about the knives and the firing. I ain't going to sing about the praying and the crying- If the only song I can sing is a sad song, I ain't going to sing no more.

So they were naked again or nearly so, wailing in line to get new DC issue, choosing their places in front of signs that said EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL, having stripped themselves of their prison grays and tossed these into a bin. The new issue was a noncommittal green, scarcely, thought Farragut, a verdant green, scarcely the green of Trinity and the long summer months, but a shade up from the gray of the living dead. It was only Farragut who sang a bar of "Greensleeves" and only the Cuckold who smiled. Considering the solemnity of this change of color, skepticism and sarcasm would have seemed to them all trifling and contemptible, for it was for this light-gree

The change of dress was part of an atmosphere of amnesty that had settled over Falconer after the rebellion at The Wall had been crushed. Marshack had hung up his plants again with the wire that Farragut had stolen and no one had found the honed typewriter key. After new uniforms were issued, alterations were in order. Most of the men wanted their new issue cut and resewn along sharp lines. It was four days before there was any green thread for sale, and the supply ran out in an hour, but Bumpo and Te