Ringworld

He had given them a strange moment just before takeoff. Music had played suddenly through the cabin, complex and lovely, rich in minor tones, like the sad call of a sex-maddened computer. Nessus whistled. With his twin mouths, rich in nerves and muscles appropriate to mouths which were also hands, the puppeteer was a walking orchestra.

He had insisted that Louis fly the craft, and his confidence in Louis's ability was such that he had not strapped down. Louis suspected special, secret gadgets to protect the passengers of the puppeteer-built ship.

Speaker had come aboard with a twenty-pound luggage case which, when opened, had held little more than a collapsed microwave oven for heating meat. That, and a haunch of raw something-or-other, of kzinti rather than terrestrial origin. For some reason Louis had expected the kzin's pressure suit to look like bulky medieval armor. It didn't. It was a multiple balloon, transparent, with a monstrously heavy backpack and a fishbowl helmet packed with esoteric-looking tongue controls. Though it held no identifiable weapons, the backpack had a look of battle gear, and Nessus had insisted that he store it.

The kzin had spent most of the voyage napping.

And now they all stood looking over Louis's shoulder.

"I'll drop us next to the Outsider ship," said Louis.

"No. Take us east. We have been using an isolated area to park the Long Shot."

"What for? Would the Outsiders spy on you?"

"No. The Long Shot uses fusion drives instead of thrusters. The heat of takeoffs and landings would disturb the Outsiders."

"Why Long Shot?"

"It was so named by Beowulf Shaeffer, the only sentient being ever to fly that ship. He took the only extant holographs of the Core explosion. Is not Long Shot a gambler's term?"

"Maybe he didn't expect to come back. I'd better tell you: I've never flown anything with a fusion drive. My ship rides on reactionless thrusters, just like this one."

"You must learn," said Nessus.

"Wait," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I myself have had experience with fusion-driven spacecraft. Therefore I will pilot the Long Shot."

"Impossible. The pilot's crash couch is designed to fit a human frame. The control panels follow human custom."

The kzin made angry noises deep in his throat.

"There, Louis. Ahead of us."

The Long Shot was a transparent bubble over a thousand feet in diameter. As Louis guided their craft to circle the behemoth, he could find no cubic inch of her that was not packed with the green-and-bronze machinery of hyperspace shunt motors. Her hull was a General Products #4 hull, easily recognized by one familiar with spacecraft, so big that it was commonly used only to ship entire prefab colonies. But she didn't look like a spacecraft. She was the tremendous counterpart of some primitive orbital satellite, built by a race whose limited resources and limited technology required that every smallest bit of space be used.

"And where do we sit?" Louis inquired. "On top?"

"The cabin is underneath. Land beneath the curve of the hull."

Louis brought his ship down on dark ice, then slid her carefully forward, under the bulging belly of the Long Shot.

There were lights in the lifesystem; they gleamed through the Long Shot's hull. Louis saw two tiny rooms, the lower just big enough to hold a crash couch and a mass indicator and a horseshoe-shaped bank of instruments, the upper room no larger. He felt the kzin move up behind him.

"Interesting," said the kzin. "I presume that Louis is intended to ride in the lower compartment, and we three in the upper."

"Yes. The fitting of three crash couches into so small a space gave us considerable difficulty. Each is equipped with a stasis field for maximum safety. Since we will ride in stasis, it matters little that there is no room to move about."

The kzin snorted, and Louis felt him leave his shoulder. He let the ship settle a last few inches, then snapped off a succession of switches.

"I have a point to make," he said. "Teela and I are collecting the same fee between us that Speaker-To-Animals is collecting alone."

"Do you wish additional pay? I will consider your suggestions."

"I want something you don't need any more," Louis told the puppeteer. "Something your race left behind them." He'd picked a good moment for bargaining. He didn't expect it to work, but it was certainly worth a try. "I want the location of the puppeteer planet."

Nessus's heads swung out from his shoulders, then turned back to face each other. For a moment Nessus held his own stare before asking, "Why?"

"Once upon a time the location of the puppeteer world was the most valuable secret in known space. Your own kind would have paid a fortune in blackmail to keep that secret," said Louis. "That was what made it valuable. Fortune hunters searched every G and K star in sight looking for the puppeteer world. Even now, Teela and I could sell the information to any news network for good money."

"But if that world is outside known space?"

"Ah-h-h," said Louis. "My history teacher used to wonder about that. The information would still be worth money."

"Before we depart for our ultimate destination," the puppeteer said carefully, "you will know the coordinates of the puppeteer world. I think you will find the information more surprising than useful." Again, for a heartbeat, the puppeteer peered into his own eyes.

He broke the pose. "I direct your attention to four conical projections -"

"Yeah." Louis had already noticed the open-mouthed cones, pointing outward and downward around the double cabin. "Are those the fusion motors?"

"Yes. You will find that the ship behaves very like a ship driven by reactionless thrusters, except that there is no internal gravity. Our designers had little room to spare. Concerning the operation of the quantum Il hyperdrive, there is a thing I must warn you about -"

"I have a variable-sword," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I urge calm."

It took a moment for the words to register. Then Louis turned, slowly, making no sudden gestures.

The kzin stood against a curved wall. In one clawed fist he held something like an oversized jumprope handle. Ten feet from the handle, held expertly at the level of the kzin's eyes, was a small, glowing red ball. The wire which joined ball to handle was too thin to be visible, but Louis didn't doubt it was there. Protected and made rigid by a Slaver stasis field, the wire would cut through most metals, including — if Louis should choose to hide behind it — the back of Louis's crash couch. And the kzin had chosen a position such that he could strike anywhere in the cabin.

At the kzin's feet Louis saw the unidentified haunch of alien meat. It had been ripped open, and, of course, it had been hollow.

"I would have preferred a more merciful weapon," said Speaker-To-Animals. "A stu

Louis did. He had thought of playing with the cabin gravity; but the kzin would have cut him in two if he'd tried it.

"Now, if you will all remain calm, I will tell you what will happen next."

"Tell us why," Louis suggested. He was estimating chances. The red bulb was an indicator to tell Speaker where his invisibly thin wire blade ended. But if Louis could grab that end of the blade, and keep from losing his fingers in the process — No. The bulb was too small.

"My motive should be obvious," said Speaker. The black markings around his eyes had taken on the look of a bandit's mask in a cartoon. The kzin was neither tense nor relaxed. And he stood where he was almost impossible to attack.

"I intend to give my world control of the Long Shot. With the Long Shot as a model we will build more such ships. Such ships would give us a killing superiority in the next Man-Kzin war, provided that men do not also have designs for Long Shot. Satisfactory?"