threw back his big orange head and mewed: an almost supersonic squeal. He threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the universe. The wire blade of his variable-sword cut through a water tank without slowing noticeably; water began dripping out on all four sides of the tank. Speaker didn’t notice. His eyes didn’t see, his ears didn’t hear.
“Take his weapon,” said Nessus.
Louis moved. He approached cautiously, ready to duck if the variable-sword should move his way. The kzin was waving it gently, like a baton. Louis took the handle from the kzin’s unresisting fist. He touched the proper stud, and the red ball retracted until it touched the handle.
“Keep it,” said Nessus. He clamped his jaws on Speaker’s arm and led the kzin to a crash couch. The kzin made no resistance. He was no longer making sounds; he stared into infinity, and his great furry face showed only a vast calm.
“What happened? What did you do?”
Speaker-To-Animals, totally relaxed, stared at infinity and purred.
“Watch,” said Nessus. He moved carefully back from the kzin’s crash couch. He held his flat heads high and rigid, not so much pointed as aimed, and at no time did his eyes leave the kzin.
The kzin’s eyes focused suddenly. They flicked from Louis, to Teela, to Nessus. Speaker-To-Animals made plaintive snarling sounds, sat upright, and switched to Interworld.
“That was very, very nice. I wish—”
He stopped, started over. “Whatever you did,” he told the puppeteer, “do not do it again.”
“I judged you to be a sophisticate,” said Nessus. “My judgment was accurate. Only a sophisticate would fear a tasp.”
Teela said, “Ah.”
Louis said, “Tasp?”
The puppeteer addressed himself to Speaker-To-Animals. “You understand that I will use the tasp every time you force me to. I will use it if you make me uneasy. If you attempt violence too often, or if you startle me too often, you will soon become dependent on the tasp. Since the tasp is a surgically implanted part of me, you would have to kill me to possess it. And you would still be ignobly bound by the tasp itself.”
“Very astute,” said Speaker. “Brilliantly unorthodox tactics. I will trouble you no more.”
“Tanj! Will somebody tell me what a tasp is?”
Louis’s ignorance seemed to surprise everybody. It was Teela who answered. “It jolts the pleasure center of the brain.”
“From a distance?” Louis hadn’t known that that was even theoretically possible.
“Sure. It does for you just what a touch of current does for a wirehead; but you don’t need to drop a wire into your brain. Usually a tasp is just small enough to aim with one hand.”
“Have you ever been hit by a tasp? None of my business, of course.”
Teela grinned derision for his delicacy. “Yes. I know what it feels like. A moment of—well, there’s no describing it. But you don’t use a tasp on yourself. You use it on someone who isn’t expecting it. That’s where the fun comes in. Police are always picking up taspers in the parks.”
“Your tasps,” said Nessus, “induce less than a second of current. Mine induces ’prox ten seconds.”
The effect on Speaker-To-Animals must have been formidable. But Louis saw other implications. “Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. That’s lovely! Who but a puppeteer would go around with a weapon that does good to the enemy?”
“Who but a prideful sophisticate would fear too much pleasure? The puppeteer is quite right,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “I would not risk the tasp again. Too many jolts from the puppeteer’s tasp would leave me his willing slave. I, a kzin, slaved to an herbivore!”
“Let us board the Long Shot,” Nessus said grandly. “We have wasted enough time on trivialities.”
Louis was first aboard the Long Shot.
He was not surprised to find his feet trying to dance on Nereid’s rock surface. Louis knew how to move in low gravity. But his hindbrain stupidly expected gravity to change as he entered the Long Shot’s airlock. Braced for the change, he stumbled and almost fell when it didn’t come.
“I know they had induced gravity then,” he grumbled as he moved into the cabin. “…Oh.”
The cabin was primitive. There were hard right angles everywhere, suitable for bumping knees and elbows. Everything was bulkier than necessary. Dials were badly placed…
But, more than primitive, the cabin was small. There had been induced gravity when the Long Shot was built; but, even in a ship a mile wide, there had been no room for the machinery. There was barely room for a pilot.
Instrument board and mass indicator, a kitchen slot, a crash couch, and