"He's a man," said the green-eyed blonde. "That's the next best thing."
"Oh, Olga," said a strapping brunette. "Who'd ever thought a man could look so good?"
"I did," said Olga. She chucked Jonathan under the chin. He shivered like an unbroken colt when the bit first goes in its mouth. He felt like a mouse hemmed in by a ring of cats.
A big rawboned brute of a girl strolled into the circle. She said, "Dinner's ready." Her voice was loud, strident. It reminded him of the voices of girls in the honky tonks on Venus. She looked at him appraisingly as if he were a horse she was about to bid on. "Bring him into the ship," she said. "The man must be starved."
He was propelled jubilantly into the palatial dining salon of the wrecked liner. A long polished meturilium table occupied the center of the floor. Automatic weight distributing chairs stood around it. His feet sank into a green fiberon carpet. He had stepped back into the Thirty-fourth Century from the fabulous barbarian past.
With a sigh of relief, he started to sit down. A lithe red-head sprang forward and held his chair. They all waited politely for him to be seated before they took their places. He felt silly. He felt like a captive princess. All the confidence engendered by the familiar settings of the space ship went out of him like wind. He, Jonathan Fawkes, was a castaway on an asteroid inhabited by twenty-seven wild women.
As the meal boisterously progressed, he regained sufficient courage to glance timidly around. Directly across the table sat a striking, grey-eyed girl whose brown hair was coiled severely about her head. She looked to him like a stenographer. He watched horrified as she seized a whole roast fowl, tore it apart with her fingers, gnawed a leg. She caught him staring at her and rolled her eyes at him. He returned his gaze to his plate.
Olga said: "Hey, Sultan."
He shuddered, but looked up questioningly.