should be no more than clear, still air in a partial vacuum.”
“Okay. I’ll relay the good news. We’ll all fly through the eye storm.”
The sky was darkening as they approached the iris. Was night falling overhead? Impossible to tell. The thickening, blackening clouds made darkness enough.
The eye was at least a hundred miles long from corner to corner, and something like forty miles tall. Its outline seemed to blur as they approached. Layers and streamers became visible. The true shape of the eye began to show: a tunnel of churning winds, reasonably uniform, whose cross-section was a picture of a human eye.
But it still looked like an eye as they hurtled toward the iris.
It was like falling into the eye of God. The visual effect was horrifying, terrifying, almost comically overdone. Louis was ready to laugh or scream. Or back out. It would only take one observer to find out whether there was a hole in the Ringworld floor. Louis could go around…
They were in.
They flew down a black corridor lit by lightning. Lightning flashed almost continuously, ahead and behind and on all sides. For a uniform distance around them the air was clear. Beyond the iris region, opaque black clouds swirled around them, moving at greater than hurricane velocities.
“The leaf-eater was right,” Speaker roared. “It is nothing but a storm.”
“Funny thing. He was the only one of the four of us who didn’t panic when he saw that eye. I guess puppeteers aren’t superstitious,” screamed Louis Wu.
Teela called, “I see something ahead of us!”
It was a dip in the floor of the tunnel. Louis grinned with tension and rested his hands lightly on the controls. There might be a tanj of a downdraft over that dip.
He was less wary now, less tense, than he had been when they entered the Eye. What could happen where even a puppeteer found safety?
Clouds and lightning whirled around them as they neared the dip.
They braked and hovered over the dip, their flycycle motors fighting the downdraft. Through the muffling action of the sonic folds, the storm screamed in their ears.
It was like looking into a funnel. Obviously there was air disappearing down there; but was it being pumped away at high speed, or was it being spewed at the stars through the black bottom of the Ringworld? They couldn’t actually see much…
Louis did not notice when Teela dropped her ’cycle. She was too far away, the flickering light was too strange, and he was looking down. He saw a tiny speck dwindling into the funnel, but he thought nothing of it.
Then, thinned by the howl of the storm, he heard Teela’s scream.
Teela’s face was clear in the intercom image. She was looking down, and she was terrified.
“What is it?” he bellowed.
He could barely hear her answer. “…It’s got me!”
He looked down.
The funnel was clear between its whirling conical sides. It was oddly and steadily lit, not by lightning per se, but by cathode-ray effects caused by current differences in a nearly complete vacuum. There was a speck of…something down there, something that might conceivably have been a flycycle, if anyone were stupid enough to dive a flycycle into a maelstrom merely to get a closer look at a puncture hole into outer space.
Louis felt sick. There was nothing to be done, nothing at all. He wrenched his eyes away—
Only to see Teela’s eyes above the dashboard. She was looking down into something dreadful—
And blood was running from her nose.
He saw the terror drain out of her face, to leave a white corpselike calm. She was about to faint. Anoxia? The sonic fold would hold air against vacuum, but it had to be set first.
Half-conscious, she looked up at Louis Wu. Do something, she begged. Do something.
Her head fell forward against the dash.
Louis’s teeth were in his lower lip. He could taste the blood. He looked down into the funnel of streaming neon-lit cloud, and it was sickeningly like the whirlpool over a bathtub drain. He found the tiny speck that must be Teela’s ’cycle—
—and saw it lunge straight forward and into the sloping, whirling wall of the funnel.
Seconds later he saw the vapor trail appear ahead of him, far down the eye of the horizontal hurricane. A thread of white, sharply pointed. Somehow it never occurred to him to doubt that it was Teela’s ’cycle.
“What happened?” Speaker called.
Louis shook his head, declining to answer. He felt numb. Reason was short-circuited; his thoughts traced a circle, round and round.
Teela’s intercom image was face down,