fell.”
“And so did we,” said Louis Wu.
“Yes. We were lucky to run across Halrloprillalar. She has saved us a needless journey. There is no longer any need to continue toward the rim wall.”
Louis’s head throbbed once, hard. He was going to have a headache.
“Lucky,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “Indeed. If this is luck, why am I not joyful? We have lost our goal, our last meager hope of escape. Our vehicles are ruined. One of our party is missing in this maze of city.”
“Dead,” said Louis. When they looked at him without comprehension, he pointed into the dusk. Teela’s flycycle was obvious enough, marked by one of four sets of headlamps.
He said, “We’ll have to make our own luck from now on.”
“Yes. You will remember, Louis, that Teela’s luck is sporadic. It had to be. Else she would not have been aboard the Liar. Else we would not have crashed.” The puppeteer paused, then added, “My sympathies, Louis.”
“She will be missed,” Speaker rumbled.
Louis nodded. It seemed he should be feeling more. But the incident in the Eye storm had somehow altered his feelings for Teela. She had seemed, for that time, less human than Speaker or Nessus. She was myth. The aliens were real.
“We must find a new goal,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “We need a way to take the Liar back to space. I confess I have no ideas at all.”
“I do,” Louis said.
Speaker seemed startled. “Already?”
“I want to think about it some more. I’m not sure it’s even sane, let alone workable. In any case, we’re going to need a vehicle. Let’s think about that.”
“A sled, perhaps. We can use the remaining flycycle to tow it. A big sled, perhaps the wall of a building.”
“We can better that. I am convinced that I can persuade Halrloprillalar to guide me through the machinery that lifts this building. We may find that the building itself can become our vehicle.”
“Try that,” said Louis.
“And you?”
“Give me time.”
The core of the building was all machinery. Some was lifting machinery; some ran the air conditioning and the water condensers and the water taps; and one insulated section was part of the electromagnetic trap generators. Nessus worked. Louis and Prill stood by, awkwardly ignoring one another.
Speaker was still in prison. Prill had refused to let him up.
“She is afraid of you,” Nessus had said. “We could press the point, no doubt. We could put you aboard one of the flycycles. If I refused to board until you were on the platform, she would have to lift you.”
“She might lift me halfway to the ceiling, then drop me. No.”
But she had taken Louis.
He studied her while pretending to ignore her. Her mouth was narrow, virtually lipless. Her nose was small and straight and narrow. She had no eyebrows.
Small wonder if she seemed to have no expression. Her face seemed little more than markings on a wigmaker’s dummy.
After two hours of work, Nessus pulled his heads out of an access panel. “I cannot give us motive power. The lift fields will do no more than lift us. But I have freed a correcting mechanism designed to keep us over one spot. The building is now at the mercy of the winds.”
Louis grinned. “Or a tow. Tie a line to your flycycle and pull the building behind you.”
“There is no need. The flycycle uses a reactionless thruster. We can keep it within the building.”
“You thought of it first, hmm? But that thruster’s awfully powerful. If the ’cycle tore itself loose in here—”
“Yesss—” The puppeteer turned to Prill and spoke slowly and at length in the language of the Ringworld gods. Presently he said to Louis, “There is a supply of electrosetting plastic. We can embed the flycycle in plastic, leaving only the controls exposed.”
“Isn’t that a little drastic?”
“Louis, if the flycycle tore itself loose, I could be hurt.”
“Well…maybe. Can you land the building when you need to?”
“Yes, I have altitude control.”
“Then we don’t need a scout vehicle. Okay, we’ll do it.”
Louis was resting, not sleeping. He lay on his back on the big oval bed. His eyes were open, staring through the bubble window in the ceiling.
A glow of solar corona showed over the edge of the shadow square. Dawn was not far off; but still the Arch was blue and bright in a black sky.
“I must be out of my mind,” said Louis Wu.
And, “What else can we do?”
The bedroom had probably been part of the governor’s suite. Now it was a control room. He and Nessus had mounted the flycycle