a prison,” he went on, “then why isn’t there a third zap gun in here with us? In case we should happen to have working weapons. Which we do.”
“There unquestionably is one,” said Nessus. “Your headlamps prove that the third zap gun is not working. The zap guns are clearly automatic; otherwise someone would be guarding you. It should be safe for Speaker to use the Slaver digging tool.”
“That’s good news,” Louis said. “Except that I’ve been looking around—”
He and Speaker were floating upside down in an airborne Sargasso Sea. Of three archaic flying jet packs, one was still occupied. The skeleton was small but human. Not a trace of skin remained on the white bones. The clothing must have been good, for shreds of it still survived: brightly colored rags, including a tattered yellow cloak that hung straight down from the point of the flyer’s jaw.
The other packs were empty. But the bones had to be somewhere…Louis forced his head back, back…
The basement of the police building was a wide, dim, conical pit. Around the wall were concentric rings of cells. The doors were trap doors above the cells. There were radial stairways leading down to the pit at the apex. In and around the pit were the bones Louis was searching for, shining dimly back at him from far below.
He couldn’t wonder that one man in a ruined flying pack had been afraid to turn himself loose. But others, trapped here in cars and backpacks, had preferred the long fall to death by thirst.
Louis said, “I don’t see what Speaker is supposed to use the Slaver disintegrator on.”
“I have been thinking about that very seriously.”
“It he blows a hole in the wall, it doesn’t help us. Likewise the ceiling, which he can’t reach anyway. If he hits the generator for the field holding us here, we fall ninety feet to the floor. But if he doesn’t, we’ll be here until we starve, or until we give up and turn ourselves loose. Then we fall ninety feet to the floor.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all? Just yes?”
“I need more data. Will one of you please describe what you see around you? I see only part of a curved wall.”
They took turns describing the conical cell block, what they could see of it in the dim, point-source light. Speaker turned on his own lights, and that helped.
But when Louis ran out of things to say, he was still trapped, upside down, without food or water, hanging above a lethal drop.
Louis felt a bubbling scream somewhere in him, buried deep and well under control, but rising. Soon it would be near the surface…
And he wondered if Nessus would leave them.
That was bad. It was a question with an obvious answer. There was every reason why the puppeteer should leave, and no reason why he should not.
Unless he still hoped to find civilized natives here.
“The floating vehicles and the age of the skeletons both indicate that there is nobody tending the machinery of the cell block,” Speaker speculated. “The fields that trapped us must have collected a few vehicles after the city was deserted; but then there were no more vehicles on the Ringworld. So the machines still work, because nothing has strained their powers in so long a time.”
“That may be so,” said Nessus. “But someone is monitoring our conversation.”
Louis felt his ears prick up. He saw Speaker’s fan out.
“It must have required excellent technique to tap a closed beam. One wonders if the eavesdropper has a translator.”
“What can you tell about him?”
“Only his direction. The source of the interference is your own present whereabouts. Perhaps the eavesdropper is above you.”
Reflexively Louis tried to look up. Not a prayer. He was head down, with two crash balloons and the flycycle between him and the ceiling.
“We’ve found the Ringworld civilization,” he said aloud.
“Perhaps. I think a civilized being could have repaired the third zap gun, as you called it. But the main thing…let me think.”
And the puppeteer went off into Beethoven, or the Beatles, or something classical-sounding. For all Louis could tell he was making it up as he went along.
And when he said Let me think, he meant it. The whistling went on and on. Louis was getting thirsty. And hungry. And his head was pounding.
He had given up hope, several separate times, when the puppet came on again. “I would have preferred to use the Slaver disintegrator, but it is not to be. Louis, you will have to do it; you are primate-descended, better