shiny-flat and translucent, with distant reddish-brown ridges. One would have to go outside to see it properly.
Louis released his crash web and stood up.
His balance was precarious; for his eyes and his inner ear disagreed on the direction of down. He took it slowly. Easy. No hurry. The emergency was over.
He turned, and Teela was in the airlock. She was not wearing a pressure suit. The inner door was just closing.
He bellowed, “Teela, you silly leucoto, come out of there!”
Too late. She couldn’t possibly have heard him through the closed hermetic seal. Louis sprang to the lockers.
The air samplers on the Liar’s wing had been vaporized with the rest of the Liar’s external sensors. He would have to go out in a pressure suit and use the chest sensors to find out if the Ringworld’s air could be breathed safely.
Unless Teela collapsed and died before he could get out. Then he would know.
The outer door was opening.
Automatically the internal gravity went off in the airlock. Teela Brown dropped headfirst through the open door, clutched frantically for a door jamb, had it for just long enough to change her angle of fall. She landed on her tail instead of her skull.
Louis climbed into his pressure suit, zipped up the chest, donned the helmet and closed the clamps. Outside and overhead, Teela was on her feet, rubbing herself where she had landed. She hadn’t stopped breathing, thank Finagle for his forbearance.
Louis entered the lock. No point in checking his suit’s air. He’d only be in the suit long enough for the instruments to tell him if he could breathe outside air.
He remembered the tilt of the ship in time to grab at the jamb as the airlock opened. As the cabin gravity went off Louis swung around, hung by his hands for an instant, and dropped.
His feet shot out from under him the moment they touched ground. He landed hard on his gluteus maximus.
The flat, grayish, translucent material beneath the ship was terribly slippery. Louis tried once to stand, then gave it up. Sitting, he examined the dials on his chest.
His helmet spoke to him in Speaker’s burry voice. “Louis.”
“Yah.”
“Is the air breathable?”
“Yah. Thin, though. Say a mile above sea level, Earth standard.”
“Shall we come out?”
“Sure, but bring a line into the lock and tie it to something. Otherwise we’ll never get back up. Watch out when you get down. The surface is almost frictionless.”
Teela was having no trouble with the slippery surface. She stood awkwardly, with her arms folded, waiting for Louis to quit fooling around and take off his helmet.
He did. “I have something to tell you,” he said. And he spoke rudely to her.
He spoke of the uncertainties in spectroanalysis of an atmosphere from two light years away. He spoke of subtle poison metal compounds, and strange dusts, organic wastes and catalysts, which can poison an otherwise breathable atmosphere, and which can only be detected from on actual air sample. He spoke of criminal carelessness and culpable stupidity; he spoke of the unwisdom in volunteering one’s services as a guinea pig. He said it all before the aliens could leave the airlock.
Speaker came down hand over hand, landed on his feet and moved a few steps away, cat-careful, balanced like a dancer. Nessus came down gripping the rope with alternate sets of teeth. He landed in tripod position.
If either of them noticed that Teela was upset, they gave no sign. They stood below the tilted hull of the Liar, looking about them.
They were in an enormous, shallow gully. Its floor was translucent gray and perfectly flat and smooth, like a vast glass tabletop. Its borders, a hundred yards from the ship in either direction, were gentle slopes of black lava. The lava seemed to ripple and flow before Louis’s eyes. It must be still hot, he decided, from the impact of the Liar’s landing.
The shallow lava walls stretched away behind the ship, away and away, perfectly straight, until they dwindled to a vanishing point.
Louis tried to stand up. Of the four of them he was the only one having trouble with his balance. He reached his foot, then stood precariously balanced, unable to move.
Speaker-To-Animals unsheathed his flashlight-laser and fired at a point near his feet. They watched the point of green light…in silence. There was no crackle of solid material exploding into vapor. No steam or smoke formed where the beam struck. When Speaker released the trigger button, the light was gone instantly; the spot was not glowing, nor