Ringworld

The kzin was silent.

"Take your time" said Louis. "Think it through. You can't take the Long shot anyway. You'd kill us all if you tried it."

The next day the Improbable crossed a long, straight meteoric furrow. They turned to antispinward, directly toward Fist-of-God.

Fist-of-God Mountain had grown large without coming near. Bigger than any asteroid, roughly conical, she had the look of a snow-capped mountain swollen to nightmare size. The nightmare continued, for Fist-of-God continued to swell.

"I don't understand," said Prill. She was puzzled and upset. "This formation is not known to me. Why was it built? At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more useful, for they hold back the air."

"That's what I thought," Louis Wu said. And he would say no more.

That day they saw a small glass bottle resting at the end of the meteoric gouge they had been following.

The Liar was as they had left it: on its back on a frictionless surface. Mentally Louis postponed the celebration. They were not home yet.

In the end Prill had to hover the Improbable so that Louis could cross from the landing ramp. He found controls that would open both doors of the airlock at the same time. But air murmured out around them all the time they were transferring Nessus' body. They could not reduce the cabin pressure without Nessus, and Nessus was, to all appearances, dead.

But they got him into the autodoc anyway. It was a puppeteer-shaped coffin, form-fitted to Nessus himself, and bulky Puppeteer surgeons and mechanics must have intended that it should handle any conceivable circumstance. But had they thought of decapitation?

They had. There were two heads in there, and two more with necks attached, and enough organs and body parts to make several complete puppeteers. Grown from Nessus himself, probably; the faces on the heads looked familiar.

Prill came aboard, and landed on her head. Rarely had Louis seen anyone so startled. He had never thought to tell her about induced gravity. Her face showed nothing as she stood up, but her posture — She was awed to silence.

In that ghostly silence of homecoming, Louis Wu suddenly screamed like a banshee.

"Coffeeee!" he yelled. And, "Hot water!" He charged into the stateroom he had shared with Teela Brown. A moment later he put his head out and screamed, "Prill!"

Prill went.

She hated coffee. She thought Louis must be insane to swallow the bitter stuff, and she told him so.

The shower was a long lost, badly missed luxury, once Louis explained the controls.

She went wild over the sleeping plates.

Speaker was celebrating the homecoming in his own fashion. Louis didn't know everything about the kzin's stateroom. He did know that the kzin was eating his head off.

"Meat!" Speaker exulted. "I was not happy eating long-dead meat."

"That stuff you're eating now is reconstituted."

"Yes, but it tastes freshly killed!"

That night Prill retired to a couch in the lounge. She appreciated the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. But Louis Wu slept in free fall for the first time in three months.

He slept ten hours, and woke feeling like a tiger. A half-disc of sun flamed beneath his feet.

Back aboard the Improbable, he used the flashlight laser to free the knobbed end of the shadow square. When he finished, it still had some fused electrosetting plastic attached.

He did not try to carry it to the Liar. The black thread was far too dangerous, the Ring floor far too slippery. Louis moved on all fours on the frictionless surface, and he pulled the knob behind him.

He found Speaker silently watching from the airlock.

Louis entered the airlock via Prill's stepladder, pushed past the kzin and went aft. Speaker continued to watch.

The farthest point aft in the wreck of the Liar was a cha

He moved forward. At intervals he checked the position of the wire by using it to slice a Jinxian sausage dialed from the Liar's kitchen. Then he marked the spot with bright yellow paint. When he finished, the path of the virtually invisible thread was marked in a line of yellow splotches ru

When the wire drew taut, it would certainly cut through some internal partitions of the ship. The yellow paint allowed Louis to gauge the path it would take, and to assure himself that the wire would not damage any part of the life-support system. But the paint had another purpose. It would warn them all to keep away from the wire, lest they lose fingers or worse.

Louis left the airlock, waited for Speaker to follow him out. Then he closed the outer door.

At this point Speaker asked, "Is this why we came?"

"Tell you in a minute," said Louis. He walked aft along the General Products hull, picked up the knob in both hands, and tugged gently. The wire hold.

He put his back into it. He pulled with all his strength. The wire did not budge. The airlock door held it fast.

"There's just no way to give it a stronger test. I wasn't sure the airlock door would be a close enough fit. I wasn't sure the wire wouldn't abrade a General products hull. I'm still not sure. But yes, this is why we came."

"What shall we do next?"

"We open the airlock door." He did it. "We let the thread slide freely through the Liar while we carry the handle back to the Improbable and cement it in place." And they did that

The thread that had linked the shadow squares turned invisibly away to starboard. It had been dragged for thousands of miles behind the Improbable, because there was no way to get it aboard the flying building. Perhaps it trailed all the way back to the tangle of thread in the City Beneath Heaven; a tangle like a cloud of smoke, that might have held millions of miles of the stuff.

Now it entered the Liar's double airlock, circled through the Liar's fuselage, out the wiring cha

"So far so good," said Louis. "Now I'll need Prill. No, tanj it! I forgot. Prill doesn't have a pressure suit."

"A pressure suit?"

"We're taking the Improbable up Fist-of-God Mountain. The building isn't airtight. Well need pressure suits, and Prill doesn't have one. We'll have to leave her here."

"Up Fist-of-God Mountain," Speaker repeated. "Louis: one flycycle has not the power to drag the Liar up that slope. You propose to burden the motor with the additional mass of a floating building."

"No, no, no. I don't want to drag the Liar. All I want to do is pull the shadow square wire behind us. It should slide freely through the Liar, unless I give Prill the word to close the airlock door."

Speaker thought about it. "That should work, Louis. If the puppeteer's flycycle has not the power we need, we can cut away chunks of the building to make it lighter. But why? What do you expect to find at the top?"

"I could tell you in one word; and then you'd laugh in my face. Speaker, if I'm wrong, I swear you'll never know," said Louis Wu.

And he thought: I'll have to tell Prill what to do. And plug the Liar's wiring cha

The Improbable was not a spaceship. Her lifting power was electromagnetic, thrusting against the Ring foundation itself. And the Ring floor sloped up toward Fist-of-God; for Fist-Of-God was hollow. Naturally the Improbable tended to tilt, to slide back down against the push of the puppeteer's flycycle.