The guard gave him a shove toward the seat. “Observation period, seven days. Nobody gets silverware till their observation period’s over. Siddown.”
He sat down. No one at his table had silverware. All the others were eating, several of them noisily and messily. He kept his eyes on his own plate, unappetizing as that was. He toyed with his spoon and managed to eat a few pieces of potato out of the stew and one or two of the chunks of meat that were mostly lean.
The coffee was in a tin cup and he wondered why until he realized how breakable an ordinary cup would be and how lethal could be one of the heavy mugs cheap restaurants use.
The coffee was weak and cool; he couldn’t drink it. He sat back and closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was an empty plate and an empty cup in front of him and the man at his left was eating very rapidly. It was the man who’d been playing the non-existent piano.
He thought, if I’m here long enough, I’ll get hungry enough to eat that stuff. He didn’t like the thought of being there that long.
After a while a bell rang and they got up, one table at a time on signals he didn’t catch, and filed out. His group had come in last; it went out first.
Ray Bassington was behind him on the stairs. He said, “You’ll get used to it. What’d you say your name is?”
“George Vine.”
Bassington laughed. The door shut on them from the outside.
He saw it was dark outside. He went over to one of the windows and stared out through the bars. There was a single bright star that showed just above the top of the elm tree in the yard. His star? Well, he’d followed it here. A cloud drifted across it.