"If you had come sooner," there was no anger in Halloran's voice, "couldn't you have selected some of our people, those that I ... all of us know are ready for rehabilitation—even on another planet?"
"Perhaps. But no one remembered there was a prison nearby."
The warden looked at the rabbi. Goldsmid raised his heavy shoulders in an ancient Hebraic gesture.
"That was always the trouble, wasn't it, Pete?" Halloran murmured. "People never remembered the prisons!"
The telephone beside him shrilled loudly, urgently.
The inmate mopping the floor of Condemned Row's single corridor slowed in front of Bert Doyle's cell. Doyle was slated for a ride down the elevator that night to the death cell behind the gas chamber. At the moment, he was stretched out on his bunk, listening to the soft voice of Father Nelson.
"Sorry to interrupt," the inmate said, "but I thought you'd like to know that all hell's busting loose down in the yard."
Father Nelson looked up.
Doyle, too, looked interested. "A riot?" he asked.