Part 5 (1/2)
Louis had thought this through, over and over, while under the wire. He tried to remember the optimism he'd felt then, but it was gone. ”We stall. We search the s.p.a.ceport ledges. When we don't find anything, we search the Ringworld itself. We're equipped for that. We don't let the Hindmost give up till we find our own answer. Whatever it might be.”
”This situation is entirely your fault.”
”I know. That's what makes it so funny.”
”Laugh, then.”
”Give me my droud and I'll laugh.”
”Your foolish speculations have left us slave to a mad root-eater. Must you always pretend to more knowledge than is yours?”
Louis sat down with his back to a yellow-glowing wall. ”It seemed so reasonable. Tanj, it was reasonable, Look: the puppeteers were studying the Ringworld years before we came on the scene. They knew its spin and its size and its ma.s.s, which is just more than the ma.s.s of Jupiter. And there's nothing else in the system. Every planet, every moon, every asteroid, gone. It seemed so obvious. The Ringworld engineers took a Jupiter-style planet and made it into building materials, and they used the rest of the planetary garbage, too, and they built it all into a Ringworld. The ma.s.s of, say, Sol system would be just about right.”
”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 trans.m.u.te 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 trans.m.u.tation. And she thought our two-headed companion was charmingly gullible. She told him a tale of Ringworld stars.h.i.+ps carrying lead to trans.m.u.te 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 trans.m.u.tation 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 ma.s.s 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 disa.s.semble a dozen Jupiters, or a superjovian planet a dozen times Jupiter's ma.s.s. 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. Trans.m.u.tation or not, there's got to be something valuable on the Ringworld. Maybe we'll find it. Maybe there's a United Nations s.h.i.+p already here. Maybe well find a thousand-year-old Ringworld s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es! 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 doc.u.mentary on the Trinoc culture that won a-”
”Current addiction involves the brain directly. It's different, Louis.”
”Yeah. Yeah, it's different.” Louis felt the depression like a wall of black jelly sagging inward, crus.h.i.+ng 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.”
”Yeah.”
”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 s.e.x. 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.p.a.cecraft.”
”What do you call a s.p.a.cecraft? 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 trans.m.u.tation 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 s.h.i.+ps, then moved on to a long, narrow building at the very lip of infinity, which proved to be the guidance center for the s.p.a.cecraft 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.”