"I guess I just got lost. I'm going home, soon as they can get me there."
"Is that so? Well, I'll be sad to see you go. You look like a smart kid. You like chocolate cake, I bet."
"Sometimes," I said.
"Like when?"
"When my mama makes it, with a glass of milk, after school," I said.
He laughed, a strangled har-har-har. "You guys kill me. Your mama, huh? Well, they make some fine chocolate cake here, though it may not be as good as the stuff from home." He thumbed the table. "Sweetie, send up the biggest piece of chocolate cake you got down there, and a glass a milk, willya?"
The table acknowledged his request with a soft green light.
"Thank you, sir," I said.
"That's quite enough, I think," Pondicherry said. "I didn't come here to watch you rot young James's teeth. Can we get to business?"
Pondicherry started talking, in rapid, clipped sentences, punctuated by vicious bites of his food. I tried to follow what it was about — trading buffalo steaks for rare metals, I got that much, but not much more. The calves' livers were worse than I imagined, and I hid as much of them as I could under the potatoes, then pushed the plate away and dug into the cake.