the tool would dig with both beams on. But then there would be a current flow, he thought, borrowing Speaker’s euphemism. At the moment he wasn’t looking for that much excitement.
Teela and Speaker had dismounted. Speaker was now hairless over most of his body. A large orange patch still covered him where he sat and a broad orange band crossed his eyes. Elsewhere his nude skin was veined red-violet, showing clusters of deep red cracks. Teela was spraying him with something that foamed white where it touched.
The stench of burnt hair and meat stayed Louis from coming too close. “It’s done,” he said.
The kzin looked up. “I can see again, Louis.”
“Good!” He’d been worried.
“The puppeteer brought military medical supplies, vastly superior to kzinti civilian medicines. He should not have had access to military supplies.” The kzin sounded angry. Perhaps he suspected bribery; and perhaps he was right.
“I’m going to call Nessus,” Louis said. And he circled the pair. White foam now covered the kzin from head to foot. There was no smell at all.
“I know where you are,” he told the puppeteer.
“Marvelous. Where am I, Louis?”
“You’re behind us. You circled round behind us as soon as you were out of sight. Teela and Speaker don’t know. They can’t think like puppeteers.”
“Do they expect a puppeteer to break trail for them?
“Perhaps it is best they continue to think so. What chance is there that they will permit me to rejoin them?”
“Not now. Maybe later. Let me tell you why I called…” And he told the puppeteer about the sunflower field. He was detailing the extent of Speaker’s injuries when Nessus’s flat face dropped below the level of the intercom camera.
Louis waited a few moments for the puppeteer to re-appear. Then he switched off. He was sure that Nessus would not remain long in catatonic withdrawal. The puppeteer was too sanely careful of his life.
Ten hours of daylight remained. The team waited it out in the disintegrator-dug trench.
Speaker slept through it. They walked him into the trench, then used a spray from the kzinti medkit to put him to sleep. The white stuff had congealed on him to the consistency of a foam rubber pillow.
“The world’s only bouncy kzin,” said Teela.
Louis tried to sleep. He dozed for a time. Once he half woke to bright daylight and to the sharp black shadow of the slope failing across him. He stirred and went back to sleep…
And woke later in a cold sweat. Shadows! If he had sat up to look, he’d have been burnt crisp!
But the clouds were back, safely blocking the vengeance of the sunflowers.
Finally one horizon dimmed. As the sky darkened, Louis set about waking the others.
They flew beneath the clouds. It was vital that they be able to see the sunflowers. If dawn approached while the fleet was still over sunflowers, they would have to hide out during the next day.
Occasionally Louis dipped his ’cycle for a closer look.
For an hour they flew…and then the sunflowers grew sparse. There was a region where sunflowers were scarce, half-grown seedlings growing among the blackened stumps of a recently burned forest. Grass actually seemed to compete with the sunflowers in this area.
Then there were no sunflowers at all.
And Louis could sleep at last.
Louis slept as if drugged. It was still night when he woke. He looked about him and found a glimmer of light ahead and to spinward.
Groggy as he was, he thought it would turn out to be a firefly caught in the some fold, or something equally silly. But it was still there after he rubbed his eyes.
He pushed the Call button for Speaker.
The light grew nearer and clearer. Against the darkness of the Ringworld night landscape it showed bright as a point of reflected sunlight.
Not a sunflower. Not at night.
It might be a house, Louis thought; but where would a native got his lighting? Then again, a house would have gone by like that. At flycycle cruising speed, you could cross the North American continent in two-and-half hours.
The light was drifting past them on the right, and still Speaker hadn’t answered.
Louis cut his ’cycle out of formation. He was grinning in the dark. Behind him the fleet, now under Speaker’s guidance (at Speaker’s insistence), was only two ’cycles strong. Louis picked Speaker’s from memory. He flew toward it.
Shock waves and sonic fold showed faintly outlined by cloud-dimmed Archlight, a network of straight lines converging to a point. Speaker’s flycycle, and Speaker’s ghost-gray silhouette, seemed caught in a Euclidian spiderweb.
Louis was