Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

The kzin paced, his tail switching back and forth. “Can I trust you? The Hindmost controls the current flow to your brain.”

“I’ll kick the habit.”

The kzin snorted.

“Finagle’s festering testicles! Chmeee, I’m two and a quarter centuries old. I’ve been everything . I’ve been a master chef. I helped build and operate a wheel city above Down. I settled on Home for a while and lived like a colonist. Now I’m a wirehead. Nothing lasts. You can’t do any one thing for two hundred years. A marriage, a career, a hobby — they’re good for twenty years, and maybe you go through a phase more than once. I did some experimental medicine. I wrote a big chunk of that documentary on the Trinoc culture that won a—”

“Current addiction involves the brain directly. It’s different, Louis.”

“Yah. Yah, it’s different.” Louis felt the depression like a wall of black jelly sagging inward, crushing him down. “It’s all black or all white. The wire is sending or it isn’t. There’s no variety. I’m sick of it. I was sick of it before the Hindmost took over my current flow.”

“But you did not give up the droud.”

“I want the Hindmost to think I can’t.”

“You want me to think you can.”

“Yah.”

“What of the Hindmost? Never have I heard of a puppeteer who behaved so strangely.”

“I know. It makes me wonder if all the mad traders were Nessus’s sex. If the… call them sperm-carrying males… are the dominant ones.”

“Urrr—”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. The kind of madness that sends a puppeteer to Earth because he can’t deal with other puppeteers, that’s not the same as the madness that makes a Joseph Stalin. What do you want from me, Chmeee? I don’t know how he’ll act. If we give him some credit for brains, then he’ll use General Products trading techniques. It’s the only way he knows to deal with us .”

The canned air tasted cool and metallic. There was too much metal in these ships, Louis thought. It seemed queer that Halrloprillalar’s people hadn’t used more advanced materials. Making a Bussard ramjet was no task for primitives.

The air smelled funny, and the yellow-white glow in the walls dimmed and brightened irregularly. Best get back to their pressure suits, soon.

Chmeee said, “There is the lander. It would function as a spacecraft.”

“What do you call a spacecraft? It must have interplanetary capability. It’d need that to get around on the Ringworld. I wouldn’t think we could reach another star with it.”

“I was thinking of ramming Needle . If there is no escape, we may take vengeance.”

“That’ll be fun to watch. You ramming a General Products hull.”

The kzin loomed over him. “Do not be too amusing, Louis. What would I be on the Ringworld, with no mate, no land, no name, and a year to live?”

“We’d be buying time. Time to find a way off. In the meantime” — Louis stood up — “officially, we’re still searching for a magic transmutation machine. Let’s make at least a token search.”

Louis woke ravenous. He dialed a cheddar cheese soufflé’ and Irish coffee and blood-oranges and ate his way through it all.

Chmeee slept curled protectively around himself. He looked different somehow. Neater — yes, neater, because the scar tissue under his fur had disappeared and the new fur was growing out.

His stamina was impressive. They had searched every one of the four Ringworlder ships, then moved on to a long, narrow building at the very lip of infinity, which proved to be the guidance center for the spacecraft accelerator system. At the last, Louis was moving in a fog of exhaustion. He knew he should have been examining Needle for details of construction, weak points, routes into the flight deck. Instead he had watched Chmeee, with hatred. The kzin never stopped to rest.

The Hindmost appeared from somewhere, from behind or within the green-painted private sector. His mane was combed and fluffy, dressed with crystals that changed their spectral color as he moved. Louis was intrigued. The puppeteer had been scruffy while he was flying Needle alone. Did he dress to impress his alien prisoners with his elegance?

He asked, “Louis, do you want the droud?”

Louis did, but — “Not yet.”

“You slept eleven hours.”

“Maybe I’m adjusting to Ringworld time. Did you get anything done?”

“I took laser spectrograms of the ships’ hulls. They are largely iron alloys. I have deep-radar scans, two views each for the four ships; I moved Needle while you slept. There are two more spaceport ledges one hundred and twenty degrees around the Ringworld. I located eleven more ships by their hull composition. I could not learn detail at this distance.”

Chmeee woke, stretched, and joined Louis at the transparent wall. “We learn only to ask more questions,” he said. “One ship was left intact, three were stripped. Why?”

“Perhaps Halrloprillalar could have told us,” the Hindmost aid. “Let us deal with the only urgent question. Where is the transmutation device?”

“We have no instruments here. Flick us to the lander, Hindmost. We will use the screens on the flight deck.”

Eight screens glowed around the horseshoe curve of the lander’s instrument board. Chmeee and Louis studied ghostly schematics of the Bussard ramjet ships, generated by the computer from the deep-radar scans.

“It looks to me,” Louis said, “like one team did the entire looting job. They had three ships to work with, and they took what they wanted most first. They kept working till something stopped them: they ran out of air or something. The fourth ship came later. Mmm… but why didn’t the fourth crew loot their own ship?”

“Trivialities. We seek only the transmuter. Where is it?”

Chmeee said, “We could not identify it.”

Louis studied the deep-radar ghosts of four ships. “Let’s be methodical. What isn’t a transmutation system?” He traced lines on the image of the one intact ship, using a light-pointer. “Here, these paired toroids circling the hull have to be the ramscoop field generators. Fuel tanks here. Access tubes here, here, here… ” As he pointed them out, the. Hindmost obliged by removing sections of ship from the screen. “Fusion reaction motor, this whole section. Motors for the landing legs. Take out the legs too. Attitude jets here, here, here, all fed by tubes along here carrying plasma from the one small fusion generator, here. Battery. This thing with the snout, pointing out of the middle of the hull — what did Prill call it?”

“ Cziltang brone, ” Chmeee sneezed. “It softens the Ringworld floor material temporarily, for penetration. They used it instead of airlocks.”

“Right.” Louis continued, with enthusiasm and hidden glee. “Now, they probably wouldn’t keep the magic transmuter in the living quarters, but… sleeping rooms here, control rooms here, here, here, the kitchen—”

“Could that be — ?”

“No, we thought of that. It’s just an automated chemistry lab.”

“Proceed.”

“Garden area here. Sewage treatment feeds in. Airlocks… ”

When Louis had finished, the ship was gone from the screen. The Hindmost patiently restored it. “What did we overlook? Even if the transmuter was dismounted, removed, there would be space for it.”

This was getting to be fun. “Hey, if they really kept their fuel outside — lead, molded around the hull — then this isn’t really an inboard hydrogen tank, Is it? Maybe they kept the magic transmuter in them. It needed heavy padding or heavy insulation… or cooling by liquid hydrogen.”