Ore’s eyebrows rose. “You were on the moon? And you survived its fall? No, he said nothing about you. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t interested or wouldn’t have gotten around eventually to telling me about you.”
He paused, smiled, and said, “Oh, I almost forgot! If you get hungry enough, one of you can eat the other.”
Kickaha and Anana could not hide their shock. Ore broke into laughter then. When he stopped bellowing, he removed a knife from the sheath at his belt. It was about six inches long and looked as if it were made of gold. He shoved it through the wires, where it lay at Anana’s feet.
“You’ll need a cutting utensil, of course, to carve steaks and chops and so forth. That’ll do the job, but don’t think for one moment you can use it to short out the wires. It’s nonconductive.”
Kickaha said, fiercely, “If it wasn’t for Anana I’d think all you Lords were totally unreformable, fit only to be killed on sight. But there’s one thing I’m sure about. You haven’t a spark of decency in you. You’re absolutely unhuman.”
“If you mean I in no way have the nature of a leblabbiy you’re right.”
Anana picked up the knife and fingered the side, which felt grainy, though its surface was steel-smooth.
“We don’t have to starve to death,” she said. “We can always kill ourselves first.”
Ore shrugged. “That’s up to you.”
He said something to the humanoid robots, and they followed him through the doorway into the elevator. He turned and waved farewell as the door slid out from the wall recesses.
“Maybe that Englishman is still here,” Kickaha said. “He might get us free. Meanwhile, give me the knife.”
Anana had anticipated him, however. She was sawing away at a wire where it disappeared into the floor. After working away for ten minutes, she put the blade down.
“Not a scratch. The wire metal is much harder than the knife’s.”
“Naturally. But we had to try. Well, there’s no use putting it off until we’re too weak even to slice flesh. Which one of us shall it be?”
Shocked, she turned to look at him. He was grinning.
“Oh, you! Must you joke about even this?”
She saw a section of the cage floor beyond him move upward. He turned at her exclamation. A cube was protruding several inches. The top was rising on one side, though no hinges or bolts were in evidence. Within it was a pool of water.
They drank quickly, since they didn’t know how long the cube would remain. Two minutes later, the top closed, and the box sank back flush with the floor.
It reappeared, filled with water, about every three hours. No cup was provided, so they had to get down on their hands and knees and suck it up with their mouths, like animals. Every four hours, the box came up empty. Evidently, they were to excrete in it then. When the box appeared the next time, it was evident that it had not been completely cleaned out.
“Ore must enjoy this little feature,” Kickaha said.
There was no way to measure the passage of time since the light did not dim. Anana’s sense of time told her, however, that they must have been caged for at least fifty-eight hours. Their bellies caved in, growled, and thundered. Their ribs grew gaunter before their eyes. Their cheeks hollowed; their legs and arms slimmed. And they felt steadily weaker. Anana’s full breasts sagged.
“We can’t live off our fat because we don’t have any,” he said. “We were honed down pretty slim from all the ordeals we’ve gone through.”
There were long moments of silence, though both spoke whenever they could think of something worthwhile to say. Silence was too much like the quiet of the dead, which they soon would be.
They had tried to wedge the knife between the crack in the side of the waterbox. They did not know what good this would do, but they might think of something. However, the knife would not penetrate into the crack.
Anana now estimated that they’d been in the cage about seventy hours. Neither had said anything about Ore’s suggestion that one of them feast on the other. They had an unspoken agreement that they would not consent to this horror. They also wondered if Ore was watching and listening through video.