It arrived before the meal, materializing against one of the seven
walls of the roofless chamber. It was a large cabinet on slender
straight legs that resembled dark polished wood. Tennant went to it,
opened a hingeless door and pushed a knob on the inner surface. At once
the air was hideous with the acerate harmony of a singing commercial....
... so go soak your head,
be it gold, brown or red,
in Any-tone Shampoo!
A disc jockey's buoyant tones cut in quickly as the final _ooooo_
faded. "This is Grady Martin, your old night-owl, coming to you with
your requests over Station WZZX, Manhattan. Here's a wire from Theresa
McManus and the girls in the family entrance of Conaghan's Bar and
Grill on West...."
Tennant watched the girls as a sweet-voiced crooner began to ply
an unfamiliar love lyric to a melody whose similarity to a thousand
predecessors doomed it to instant success.
Olga sat up straight, her pale blue eyes round with utter disbelief.
She looked at the radio, at Tennant, at the other two women, then back
at the machine. She murmured something in Polish that was inaudible,
but her expression showed that it must have been wistful.
Eudalia grinned at Tennant and, rising, did a sort of tap dance to the
music, then whirled back into her chair, green dress ashimmer, and sank
into it just to listen.
Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers
clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. She might have been listening
to Brahms or Debussy. Her eyes glowed with the salty brilliance of
emotion and she was almost beautiful.
"_Rog!_" she cried softly when the music stopped. "A radio and WZZX! Is
it--are they--real?"
"As real as you or I," he told her. "It took quite a bit of doing,
getting them to put a set together. And I wasn't sure that radio would
get through. TV doesn't seem to. Somehow it brings things closer...."
Olga got up quite suddenly, went to the machine and, after frowning at
it for a moment, tuned in another station from which a Polish-speaking
announcer was followed by polka music. She leaned against the wall,
resting one smooth forearm on the top of the machine. Her eyes closed
and she swayed a little in time to the polka beat.
* * * * *
Tennant caught Dana looking at him and there was near approval in her
expression--approval that faded quickly as soon as she caught his gaze
upon her. The food arrived then and they sat down at the round table to
eat it.
Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the
aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their
foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison--or their
cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,
living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.
Dana said suddenly, "I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost
as much as I hate you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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