The Ringworld Engineers

Louis threw the wet ball back at him, and waved, and moved away.

If only he could think of a way to clear the roof entirely!

There were no guardrails at the edge of the roof. Louis walked with care. Presently he circled a clump of small trees whose trunks seemed to have been wrung like washcloths, and found himself in a place of reasonable privacy. There he used his translator.

“Hindmost?”

“Speaking. Chmeee is still under attack. He has retaliated once, by melting one of the great ship’s large swiveling projectile launchers. I ca

“He’s probably letting them see how good his defenses are. Then he’ll deal.”

“What will he deal for?”

“Even he doesn’t know that yet. I doubt they can do much for him except introduce him to a female or three. Hindmost, there’s no way I can do any research here. I can’t read the screens. I’ve got too much material anyway. It’d take me a week.”

“What might Chmeee accomplish in a week? I dare not stay to find out.”

“Yah. What I’ve got is some reading spools. They’ll tell us most of what we want to know, if we can read them. Can you do anything with them?”

“I think it unlikely. Can you furnish me with one of their reading machines? With that I could play the tapes on the screen and photograph them for Needle’s computer.”

“They’re heavy. They’ve got thick cables that—”

“Cut the cables.”

Louis sighed. “Okay. Then what?”

“Already I can see the floating city through the probe camera. I will guide the probe to you. You must remove the deuterium filter to expose the stepping disc. Have you a grippy?”

“I don’t have any tools at all. What I’ve got is a flashlight-laser. You tell me where to slice.”

“I hope this is worth losing half my fuel source. Very well. If you can secure a reading machine, and if it will pass through the opening to the stepping disc, well and good. Otherwise, bring the tapes. Perhaps there is something I can do.”

Louis stood at the rim of the Library roof and looked down past his toes, into the textured dusk of the shadow farm. At the shadows edge was noonday light. Rectangle-patterned farmland ran away from him. The Serpent River curled away to port and disappeared among low mountains. Beyond the mountains were seas, flatlands, a tiny mountain range, tinier seas, all bluing with distance … and finally the Arch rising up and up. Half hypnotized, Louis waited beneath the bright sky. There was nothing else to be done. He was barely aware of time passing.

The probe came out of the sky on a breath of blue flame. Where the nearly invisible fire touched the rooftop, the plants and soil became an orange inferno. Small Hanging People and blue-robed librarians and wet children ran screaming for the stairwell.

The probe settled into the flame and toppled on its side, slowed by attitude jets. There were tiny jets all around the upper rim, and the big jet underneath. It was twenty feet long and ten feet thick, a cylinder made lumpy by cameras and other instruments.

Louis waited until the fires had mostly gone out. Then he waded through coals to the probe. The roof was empty, as far as he could tell—empty even of bodies. No dead. Good.

The voice of his translator guided him as he cut away the thick molecular sieve in the top of the probe. Presently he had exposed a stepping disc. He asked, “Now what?”

“I’ve reversed the action of the stepping disc in the other probe and removed the filter. Can you get a reading machine?”

“I’ll try. I don’t like any of this.”

“In two years it won’t matter. I give you thirty minutes. Then come, bringing whatever you have.”

A score of blue-robed librarians had almost decided to come after him when Louis appeared in the stairwell. His hood was pulled over his face. The bits of heavy metal they fired at him bounced from his impact armor, and he came on in a jerky step-stop-step walk.

The fusillade slowed and stopped. They retreated before him.

When they had gone far enough, Louis sliced through the top of the stairway below him. The spiral staircase had been moored only at top and bottom. Now it compressed like a spring, ripping side ramps from doorsills. Librarians hung on for dear life. Louis had the top two floors to himself.

And when he turned to the nearest reading room, Harkabeeparolyn was blocking his path with an ax in her hands.

“Once again I need your help,” Louis said.

She swung. Louis caught the ax as it rebounded from the join of his neck and shoulder. She thrashed, trying to wrench it from his grip.

“Watch,” he said. He waved the laser beam through the cable that fed a reading machine. The cable spurted flame and fell apart, sparking.

Harkabeeparolyn screamed, “Lyar Building will pay dearly for this!”

“That can’t be helped. I want you to help me carry a reading machine up to the roof. I thought I was going to have to cut through a wall. This is better.”

“I won’t!”

Louis waved the light through a reading machine. It burned after falling apart. The smell was horrible. “Say when.”

“Vampire lover!”

The machine was heavy, and Louis wasn’t about to let go of the laser. He backed up the stairs; most of the weight was in Harkabeeparolyn’s arms. He told her, “If we drop it we’ll have to go back for another one.”

“Idiot! … You’ve already … ruined the cable!”

He didn’t answer.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to save the world from brushing against its sun.”

She almost dropped it then. “But—but the motors! They’re all back in place!”

“So you already knew that much! It’s too little too late. Most of your spaceships never came back. There aren’t enough motors. Keep moving.”

As they reached the roof, the probe lifted and settled beside them on attitude jets. They set the machine down. It wasn’t going to fit. Louis gritted his teeth and sliced the screen free of the rest of the machine. Now it would fit.

Harkabeeparolyn just looked at him. She was too exhausted to comment.

The screen went into the gap where the molecular filter had been, and vanished. What remained, the guts of the machine, was much heavier. Louis managed to heave one end into the gap. He lay down on his back and used his legs to push it inward until it too vanished.

“Lyar Building had nothing to do with this,” he told the librarian. “They didn’t know what I had in mind. Here.” He dropped a swatch of dull black cloth beside her. “Lyar Building can tell you how to fix water condensers and other old machines with this. You can make the whole city independent of the Machine People.”

She watched him with eyes full of horror. It was hard to tell if she heard.

He eased himself feet first into the probe.

And out head first into Needle’s cargo hold.