Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,22

a space behind the couch where a man might wedge himself with his head bent to the low ceiling.

Louis braced himself in that space and opened the kzin’s variable-sword to three feet.

Speaker-To-Animals came aboard, moving in self-conscious slow motion. He climbed past Louis without slowing, up into the overhead compartment.

The overhead compartment had been a recreation room for the ship’s single pilot. Exercise machinery and a reading screen had been ripped out, and three new crash couches installed. Speaker climbed into one of these.

Now Louis followed him up the rungs, one-handed. Keeping the variable-sword unostentatiously in sight, he closed the cover on the kzin’s crash couch and flipped a knife switch.

The crash couch became a mirror-surface egg. Inside, no time would pass until Louis turned off the stasis field. If the ship should happen to ram an antimatter asteroid, even the General Products hull would be ionized vapor; but the kzin’s crash couch would not lose its mirror finish.

Louis relaxed. It had all been like a kind of ritualistic dance; but its purpose was real enough. The kzin had good reason to steal the ship. The tasp had not altered that. Speaker must not be given an opportunity.

Louis returned to the pilot’s cabin. He used the ship-to-suit circuit. “Come on in.”

Something over a hundred hours later, Louis Wu was outside the solar system.

C H A P T E R 5

Rosette

There are singularities in the mathematics of hyperspace. One such singularity surrounds every sufficiently large mass in the Einsteinian universe. Outside of these singularities, ships can travel faster than light. Inside, they disappear if they try it.

Now the Long Shot, some eight light-hours from Sol, was beyond Sol’s local singularity.

And Louis Wu was in free fall.

There was tension in his gonads and discomfort in his diaphragm, and his stomach thought he wanted to belch. These sensations would pass. There was a paradoxical urge to fly…

He had flown many times in free fall, in the huge transparent bubble of the Outbound Hotel, which circled Earth’s Moon. Here, he would smash something vital if he so much as flapped his arms.

He had chosen to accelerate outward under two gravities. For something like five days he had worked and eaten and slept in the pilot’s crash couch. Despite the excellent facilities of the couch, he was dirty and unkempt; despite fifty hours of sleep, he was exhausted.

Louis felt his future foreshadowed. For him, the keynote of the expedition would be discomfort.

The sky of deep space looked not much different from the lunar night sky. In the solar system the planets add little to a naked-eye view. One remarkably bright star glared in the galactic south; and that star was Sol.

Louis used flywheel controls. The Long Shot rotated, and stars went by beneath his feet.

Twenty-seven, three hundred and twelve, one thousand even—Nessus had given him these coordinates just before Louis closed the crash couch on him. They were the location of the puppeteer migration. And now Louis realized that this was not in the direction of either of the Clouds of Magellan. The puppeteer had lied to him.

But, Louis thought, it was about two hundred light years away. And it was along the galactic axis. Perhaps the puppeteers had chosen to move out of the galaxy along the shortest direction, then travel above the plane of the galaxy to reach the Lesser Cloud. Thus they would avoid interstellar debris: suns, dust clouds, hydrogen concentrations…

It didn’t particularly matter. Louis’s hands, like a pianist’s about to begin a concert, hovered over the instrument panel.

Descended.

The Long Shot vanished.

Louis kept his eyes away from the transparent floor. He had already stopped wondering why there were no covers for all that window space. The sight of the Blind Spot had driven good men mad; but there were those who could take it. The Long Shot’s pilot must have been such a man.

He looked instead at the mass pointer: a transparent sphere above the instrument panel, with a number of blue lines radiating from its center. This one was oversized, despite limitations on cabin space. Louis settled back and watched the lines.

They changed visibly. Louis could fix his eye on a line and watch it sweep slowly across the curvature of the sphere. It was unusual and unnerving. At normal hyperdrive speeds the lines would remain fixed for hours.

Louis flew with his left hand on the panic switch.

The kitchen slot to his right fed him odd-tasting coffee and, later, a handmeal that came apart in his hands, into separate strata of