by Larry Niven
“It was only speculation.”
“I convinced you both. Remember that. And gas giant planets,” Louis continued doggedly, “are mostly hydrogen. The Ringworld engineers would have had to convert hydrogen into Ringworld floor material—whatever that stuff is; it’s like nothing we ever built. They would have had to transmute material at a rate that would outstrip a supernova. Listen, Chmeee, I’d seen the Ringworld. I was ready to believe anything.”
“And so was Nessus.” The kzin snorted, forgetting that he too had believed. “And Nessus asked Halrloprillalar about transmutation. And she thought our two-headed companion was charmingly gullible. She told him a tale of Ringworld starships carrying lead to transmute into fuel. Lead! Why not iron? Iron would bulk more, but its structural strength would be greater.”
Louis laughed. “She didn’t think of it.”
“Did you ever tell her that transmutation was your hypothesis?”
“What do you think? She’d have laughed herself to death. And it was too late to tell Nessus. By then Nessus was in the autodoc with one head missing.”
“Uurrr.”
Louis rubbed his aching shoulders. “One of us should have known better. I told you I did some math after we got back. Do you know how much energy it takes to spin the mass of the Ringworld up to seven hundred and seventy miles per second?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It takes a lot. Thousands of times the yearly energy output of this kind of sun. Where would the Ringworld engineers get all that energy? What they had to do was disassemble a dozen Jupiters, or a superjovian planet a dozen times Jupiter’s mass. All mostly hydrogen, remember. They’d use some of the hydrogen in fusion for the energy to run that project, and reserve more of it in magnetic bottles. After they made the Ringworld from the solid residues, they’d have fuel for fusion rockets to spin it up to speed.”
“Hindsight is so wonderful.” Chmeee prowled back and forth along the corridor, on his hind legs, like a man, deep in thought. “So we are slaved to a mad alien searching for a magical machine that never was. What do you hope will happen in the year left to us?”
It was difficult to be optimistic without current. “We explore. Transmutation or not, there’s got to be something valuable on the Ringworld. Maybe we’ll find it. Maybe there’s a United Nations ship already here. Maybe well find a thousand-year-old Ringworld spaceship crew. Maybe the Hindmost will get lonely and let us join him on the flight deck.”
The kzin paced, his tail switching back and forth. “Can I trust you? The Hindmost controls the current flow to your brain.”
“I’ll kick the habit.”
The kzin snorted.
“Finagle’s festering testicles! Chmeee, I’m two and a quarter centuries old. I’ve been everything. I’ve been a master chef. I helped build and operate a wheel city above Down. I settled on Home for a while and lived like a colonist. Now I’m a wirehead. Nothing lasts. You can’t do any one thing for two hundred years. A marriage, a career, a hobby—they’re good for twenty years, and maybe you go through a phase more than once. I did some experimental medicine. I wrote a big chunk of that documentary on the Trinoc culture that won a—”
“Current addiction involves the brain directly. It’s different, Louis.”
“Yah. Yah, it’s different.” Louis felt the depression like a wall of black jelly sagging inward, crushing him down. “It’s all black or all white. The wire is sending or it isn’t. There’s no variety. I’m sick of it. I was sick of it before the Hindmost took over my current flow.”
“But you did not give up the droud.”
“I want the Hindmost to think I can’t.”
“You want me to think you can.”
“Yah.”
“What of the Hindmost? Never have I heard of a puppeteer who behaved so strangely.”
“I know. It makes me wonder if all the mad traders were Nessus’s sex. If the … call them sperm-carrying males … are the dominant ones.”
“Urrr—”
“It doesn’t have to be that way. The kind of madness that sends a puppeteer to Earth because he can’t deal with other puppeteers, that’s not the same as the madness that makes a Joseph Stalin. What do you want from me, Chmeee? I don’t know how he’ll act. If we give him some credit for brains, then he’ll use General Products trading techniques. It’s the only way he knows to deal with us.”
The canned air tasted cool and metallic. There was too much metal in these ships, Louis thought. It seemed queer that Halrloprillalar’s people hadn’t used more advanced materials. Making a Bussard ramjet was no task for primitives.
The air smelled funny, and the yellow-white glow in the walls dimmed and brightened irregularly. Best get back to their pressure suits, soon.
Chmeee said, “There is the lander. It would function as a spacecraft.”
“What do you call a spacecraft? It must have interplanetary capability. It’d need that to get around on the Ringworld. I wouldn’t think we could reach another star with it.”
“I was thinking of ramming Needle. If there is no escape, we may take vengeance.”
“That’ll be fun to watch. You ramming a General Products hull.”
The kzin loomed over him. “Do not be too amusing, Louis. What would I be on the Ringworld, with no mate, no land, no name, and a year to live?”
“We’d be buying time. Time to find a way off. In the meantime”—Louis stood up—“officially, we’re still searching for a magic transmutation machine. Let’s make at least a token search.”
Chapter 7
Decision Point
Louis woke ravenous. He dialed a cheddar cheese souffl‚ and Irish coffee and blood-oranges and ate his way through it all.
Chmeee slept curled protectively around himself. He looked different somehow. Neater—yes, neater, because the scar tissue under his fur had disappeared and the new fur was growing out.
His stamina was impressive. They had searched every one of the four Ringworlder ships, then moved on to a long, narrow building at the very lip of infinity, which proved to be the guidance center for the spacecraft accelerator system. At the last, Louis was moving in a fog of exhaustion. He knew he should have been examining Needle for details of construction, weak points, routes into the flight deck. Instead he had watched Chmeee, with hatred. The kzin never stopped to rest.
The Hindmost appeared from somewhere, from behind or within the green-painted private sector. His mane was combed and fluffy, dressed with crystals that changed their spectral color as he moved. Louis was intrigued. The puppeteer had been scruffy while he was flying Needle alone. Did he dress to impress his alien prisoners with his elegance?
He asked, “Louis, do you want the droud?”
Louis did, but—“Not yet.”
“You slept eleven hours.”
“Maybe I’m adjusting to Ringworld time. Did you get anything done?”
“I took laser spectrograms of the ships’ hulls. They are largely iron alloys. I have deep-radar scans, two views each for the four ships; I moved Needle while you slept. There are two more spaceport ledges one hundred and twenty degrees around the Ringworld. I located eleven more ships by their hull composition. I could not learn detail at this distance.”
Chmeee woke, stretched, and joined Louis at the transparent wall. “We learn only to ask more questions,” he said. “One ship was left intact, three were stripped. Why?”
“Perhaps Halrloprillalar could have told us,” the Hindmost aid. “Let us deal with the only urgent question. Where is the transmutation device?”
“We have no instruments here. Flick us to the lander, Hindmost. We will use the screens on the flight deck.”
***
Eight screens glowed around the horseshoe curve of the lander’s instrument board. Chmeee and Louis studied ghostly schematics of the Bussard ramjet ships, generated by the computer from the deep-radar scans.
“It looks to me,” Louis said, “like one team did the entire looting job. They
had three ships to work with, and they took what they wanted most first. They kept working till something stopped them: they ran out of air or something. The fourth ship came later. Mmm … but why didn’t the fourth crew loot their own ship?”
“Trivialities. We seek only the transmuter. Where is it?”
Chmeee said, “We could not identify it.”
Louis studied the deep-radar ghosts of four ships. “Let’s be methodical. What isn’t a transmutation system?” He traced lines on the image of the one intact ship, using a light-pointer. “Here, these paired toroids circling the hull have to be the ramscoop field generators. Fuel tanks here. Access tubes here, here, here …” As he pointed them out, the. Hindmost obliged by removing sections of ship from the screen. “Fusion reaction motor, this whole section. Motors for the landIng legs. Take out the legs too. Attitude jets here, here, here, all fed by tubes along here carrying plasma from the one small fusion generator, here. Battery. This thing with the snout, pointing out of the middle of the hull—what did Prill call it?”
“Cziltang brone,” Chmeee sneezed. “It softens the Ringworld floor material temporarily, for penetration. They used it instead of airlocks.”
“Right.” Louis continued, with enthusiasm and hidden glee. “Now, they probably wouldn’t keep the magic transmuter in the living quarters, but … sleeping rooms here, control rooms here, here, here, the kitchen—”
“Could that be—”
“No, we thought of that. It’s just an automated chemistry lab.”
“Proceed.”
“Garden area here. Sewage treatment feeds in. Airlocks …”
When Louis had finished, the ship was gone from the screen. The Hindmost patiently restored it. “What did we overlook? Even if the transmuter was dismounted, removed, there would be space for it.”
This was getting to be fun. “Hey, if they really kept their fuel outside—lead, molded around the hull—then this isn’t really an inboard hydrogen tank, Is it? Maybe they kept the magic transmuter in them. It needed heavy padding or heavy insulation … or cooling by liquid hydrogen.”
Chmeee asked, before the Hindmost could, “How would they remove it?”
“Maybe with the cziltang brone from another ship. Were all the fuel tanks empty?” He looked at the ghosts of the other ships. “Yah. Okay, we’ll find the transmuters on the Ringworld … and they won’t be working. The plague will have got to them.”
“Halrloprillalar’s tale of the bacterium that eats superconductor is in our records,” the Hindmost said.
“Well, she really couldn’t tell us an that much,” said Louis. “Her ship left on a long tour. When it came back, there was no more Ringworld civilization. Everything that used superconductors had stopped.” He had wondered how much to believe of Prill’s tale of the Fall of the Cities. But something had destroyed the Ringworld’s ruling civilization. “Superconductor is almost too wonderful. You end up using it in everything.”
“Then we can repair the transmuters,” said the Hindmost.
“Oh?”
“You will find superconducting wire and fabric stored aboard the lander. It is not the same superconductor the Ringworld used. The bacterium will not touch it. I thought we might need trade goods.”
Louis kept his poker face intact, but the Hindmost had made a startling statement. How did puppeteers come to know so much about a mutant plague that killed Ringworld machines? Suddenly Louis didn’t doubt the bacterium at all.
Chmeee hadn’t caught it. “We want to know what the thieves used for transportation. If the rim-wall transport system failed, then our transmuters may be just the other side of the rim wall, abandoned there because they stopped working.”
Louis nodded. “Failing that, we’ve got a lot of territory to search. I think we should be looking for a Repair Center.”
“Louis?”
“There has to be a control and maintenance center somewhere. The Ringworld can’t run itself forever. There’s meteor defense, meteor repair, the attitude jets … the ecology could go haywire—it all has to be watched. Of course the Repair Center could be anywhere. But it’s got to be big. We shouldn’t have that much trouble finding it. And we’ll probably find that it’s been abandoned, because if anyone had been minding the store, he wouldn’t have let the Ringworld slide off center.”
The Hindmost said, “You have been putting your mind to this.”
“We didn’t do too well the first time we came here. We came to explore, remember? Some kind of laser weapon shot us down, and we spent the rest of our time trying to get off alive. We covered maybe a fifth of the width, and learned just about nothing. It’s the Repair Center we should have been looking for. That’s where the miracles are.”
“I had not expected such ambition from a current addict.”
“We’ll start cautiously.” Cautiously for humans, Louis told himself; not for puppeteers. “Chmeee’s right: the machines could have been dumped as soon as they were through the rim wall, when the bacterium got to them.”
Chmeee said, “We should not try to take the lander through the rim wall. I have no faith in an alien machine a thousand years old. We must go over.”
The Hindmost asked, “How would you avoid the meteor defense?”
“We must try to outguess it. Louis, do you still believe that what fired on us was merely an automated defense against meteors?”
“I thought so at the time. It all happened so tanj fast!” Falling sunward, all a little edgy, daunted by the reality of the Ringworld. All but Teela, of course. A momentary flash of violet-white; then Liarwas embedded in tenuous violet-glowing gas. Teela had looked out through the hull. “The wing’s gone,” she’d said.
“It didn’t fire on us till we were on a course to intersect the Ringworld surface. It’s got to be automated. I told you why I think there’s nobody in the Repair Center.”
“Nobody to fire on us deliberately. Very well, Louis. Automatics would not be set to fire on the rim transport system, would they?”
“Chmeee, we don’t know who built the rim transport system. Maybe it wasn’t the Ringworld engineers; maybe it was added later, by Prill’s people—”
“It was,” said the Hindmost.
His crew turned to look at the puppeteer’s image on the screen.
“Did I tell you that I spent some time at the telescope? I have learned that the rim transport system is only partly finished. It runs along 40 percent of this rim wall, and does not include the section we occupy now. On the portward rim wall the system is only 15 percent complete. The Ringworld engineers would not have left so minor a subsystem half built, would they? Their own mode of transport may have been the same spacecraft used to supervise construction.”
“Prill’s people came later,” Louis said. “Maybe a lot later. Maybe the rim transport system got too expensive. Maybe they never actually completed their conquest of the Ringworld … but then why were they building starships? Oh, futz, we may never know. Where does this leave us?”
“It leaves us trying to out-think the meteor defense,” Chmeee said.
“Yah. And you were right. If the meteor defense made a habit of firing on the rim wall, nobody would have built anything there.” Louis chewed it a moment longer. There would be holes in his assumptions … but the alternative was to go through the wall via an ancient cziltang brone of unknown dependability. “Okay. We fly over the rim wall.”
The puppeteer said, “You suggest a fearful risk. I prepared as best I could, but I was forced to use human technology. Suppose the lander should fail? I hesitate to risk any of my resources. You would be stranded. The Ringworld is doomed.”
“I hadn’t forgotten,” Louis said.
“First we must search all of the spaceport ledges. There are eleven more ships on this rim wall, and an unknown number on the portward rim—”
And it would be weeks before the Hindmost satisfied himself that no transmutation system was to be found on those ships. Oh, well—
“We sh
ould go now,” Chmeee said. “The secret may be nearly within our grip!”
“We have fuel and supplies. We can afford to wait.”
Chmeee reached out and tapped controls. He must have planned this sequence in detail; he must have studied the lander minutely while Louis was dopey with fatigue. The small conical craft lifted a foot from the floor, spun ninety degrees, and the blast of a fusion motor filled the docking chamber with white fire.
“You are being foolish,” the Hindmost’s liquid contralto reproved them. “I can turn off your drive.”
The lander slid clear of the curved docking hatch and lifted at a brutal four gees. When the Hindmost finished speaking, a fall would already have killed them. Louis cursed himself for not foreseeing this. Chmeee’s blood was bubbling with youth. Half the kzinti never grew up—they died in fights …
And Louis Wu, too engrossed in himself and his current-withdrawal depression, had let his options slip by him.
***
He asked coolly, “Have you decided to do your own exploring, Hindmost?”
The puppeteer’s heads quivered indecisively above his control board.
“No? Then well do it our way, thank you very much.” Louis turned to Chmeee and said, “Try landing on the rim wall” before he noticed the kzin’s peculiarly rigid attitude, blank eyes, and exposed claws. Rage? Would the kzin actually try to ram Hot Needle of Inquiry?
The kzin howled in the Hero’s Tongue.
The puppeteer answered in the voice of a kzin; changed his mind and repeated in Interworld. “Two fusion rockets, one mounted aft and one beneath. No thrusters. You need never fire the fusion motors on the ground except for defense. You may lift with repulsers, which repel the Ringworld floor material. You may fly as if using a negative gravity generator, but the repulsers are simpler in design, easier to repair and maintain. Do not use them now. They would repel the rim wall and thrust you into space.”