"Do you mind telling us what you intend to do with us?" Anana said in a bored voice.

"You're going to starve," he said. "You won't die of thirst since you'll be given enough water to keep you going. At the end of a certain time-which I won't tell you-whether you're still alive or not, the beamers will blow you apart.

"Even if, inconceivably, you could get out of the cage and dodge the beamers, you can't get out of here. There's only one exit, the door you came through. You can't open that unless you know the codeword."

Anana opened her mouth, her expression making it obvious that she was going to appeal. It closed; her expression faded. No matter how desperate the situation, she was not going to humiliate herself if it would be for nothing. But she'd had a moment of weakness.

Kickaha said, "At least you could satisfy our curiosity. Who was the man who let you in? What happened to him?"

Ore grimaced. "He got away from me. I got hold of a beamer and was going to make him my prisoner. But he dived through a trapdoor I hadn't known existed. I suppose by now he's gated to another world. At least, the sensors don't indicate his presence."

Kickaha grinned, and said, "Thank you. But who was he?"

"He claimed to be an Earthman. He spoke English, but it was a quaint sort. It sounded to me like eighteenth-century English. He never told me his name. He began to ramble on and on, told me he'd been trapped here for some time when he gated from Vala's world to get away from her. It had taken him some time to find out how to activate a gate to another universe without being killed. He was just about to do so when he saw me galloping up. He decided to let me in because I didn't look like a native of this world.

"I think he was half-crazy."

"He must have been completely insane to trust you, a Lord," Anana said. "Did he say anything about having seen Kickaha, McKay, and myself. He passed over us when we were on the moon."

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.

Food crammed their dreams if not their bellies. Kickaha was drowsing fitfully, dreaming of eating roast pork, mashed potatoes and gravy, and rhubarb pie when a clicking sound awoke him. He lay on his back for a while, wondering why he would dream of such a sound. He was about to fall back into the orgy of eating again when a thought made him sit up as if someone had passed a hot pastrami by his nose.

Had Ore inserted a new element in the torture? It didn't seem possible, but ...

He got onto his hands and knees and crawled to the little door. He pushed on it, and it swung outward.

The clicking had been the release of its lock.

WHILE THEY CLAMBERED down out of the cage, the beamers on the wall tracked them. Kickaha started across toward the door. All four weapons spat at once, vivid scarlet rays passing before and behind him. Ordinarily, the rays were invisible, but Ore had colored them so his captors could see how close they were. Beauty, and terror, were in the eye of the beholder.

Anana moaned. "Oh, no! He just let us loose to tantalize us!"

Kickaha unfroze.

"Yeah. But those beamers should be hitting us."

He took another step forward. Again the rays almost touched him.

"To hell with it! They're set now so they'll just miss us! Another one of his refinements!"

He walked steadily to the door while she followed. Two of the beamers swung to her, but their rays shot by millimeters away from her. Nevertheless, it was unnerving to see the scarlet rods shoot just before his eyes. As the two got closer to the door, the rays angled past their cheeks on one side and just behind the head.