Meyers looked up.
"Huh?"
"I said I'm glad I was never sick," repeated Taranto deliberately, thinking, Let him figure that out if he can!
"This heat's enough to make anybody sick," complained Meyers. "Why do they have to keep us up on the top floor of the tower, anyway?"
"You expect a luxury suite in the cellar? What kind of jail were you ever in where the prisoners got the best?"
"Who says I was ever in jail?" demanded Meyers defensively.
Taranto grinned slightly, but made no reply. After a moment, the other returned to his study of the table. He breathed in loudly, his shoulders heaving as if he had been running. To avoid the sight, Taranto let his eyes wander for the thousandth time around the walls of the square cell.
The large blocks of baked clay were turning from dun to gray in the twilight seeping through the four small window openings. Overhead, they curved together to form a high arch that was the peak of the tower. Besides table and bench, the room contained a clay water jug a yard high, a wooden bucket, a battered copper cooking pot, and a pile of coarse straw upon which lay the two gray shirts the spacers had discarded in the heat. In the center of the floor was a wooden trap door which Taranto eyed speculatively.
He reminded himself that he must suppress his longing to smash the next Syssokan head that appeared in the opening.
"It's getting near time," he remarked after a few minutes.