Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

“Yah, I thought of that. Tanj, I wish we had more time.”

They bounced toward the stepping disc, swaddled in gear.

Harkabeeparolyn was shapeless in layers of cloth. Her face within the helmet was tense with concentration. Pressure suit, flying belt, laser — she’d be lucky to remember how to work what she was wearing, let alone fight. From a distance it might be Louis Wu under all that cloth. Teela might hesitate. Anything might count.

She was gone. Louis followed, switching on his flying belt.

Chmeee, Harkabeeparolyn, Louis Wu: they floated like balls of black tissue paper above the rust-colored slope of Mons Olympus. The probe wasn’t floating. It must have hovered until it ran out of fuel, then dropped and rolled. It was badly battered. The stepping disc had survived.

The dials below Louis’s chin told him that the air was very thin, very dry, rich in carbon dioxide. A good imitation of Mars, but this was nearly Earth’s gravity. How had the martians survived? They must have adapted, buoyed by the sea of dust they lived in. Stronger than their extinct cousins… Stick to business!

The crater rim was forty miles upslope. It took them fifteen minutes. Harkabeeparolyn trailed. Her flying was jerky; she must have been constantly fiddling with the controls.

The hatch at the bottom of the crater was rock-and-rust-colored and rough-surfaced. It had exploded inward, downward.

They dropped into darkness.

Their flying belts held them. That shouldn’t have worked. The repulser units were repelling flat scrith plates overhead and underneath. But the scrith ceiling was not load-bearing. It was much thinner than the Ringworld floor below them.

Louis switched to infrared (hoping Harkabeeparolyn would remember; otherwise she’d be blind). Heat radiated from below — a small, bright circle. Their surroundings were vast, indistinct. Columns of discs, and slender ladders alongside, along three walls. And rising up the middle of the great room, a tilted tower of toroids. They fell past it, ring by ring. A linear accelerator, aimed up through Mons Olympus? Then those discs could be one-protector fighting platforms waiting to be launched into the sky.

A hole had been punched downward through the floor. They dropped through. Harkabeeparolyn was still with them. The warm spot was still below, growing large.

Twelve floors, close together, each with a hole punched through. Needle had cut quite a swath. Even the last of the ruptures was a big one… and infrared light glared through it. The chamber below was just short of red-hot. Chmeee dropped into it well ahead of Louis. A moment later he floated back up, then settled on the floor above.

They were maintaining radio silence. Louis imitated Chmeee: he dropped through the last hole and found himself in a blaze of infrared. Enormous heat had been released here. And the tunnel leading away glowed more brightly still.

Louis rose to join Chmeee. He waved at Harkabeeparolyn, and she settled beside him with a thump.

Yah . Needle had been towed away through that tunnel, with enough heat played on the ship to trigger the stasis field. Easy to follow… except that they’d broil. Now what?

Now follow Chmeee, who was floating away at speed. What did he have in mind? If only they could talk!

They were moving through residential space. It was confining for people trying to fly at speed. Cubicles with no doors, or else doors like the doors on a safe; never a curtain for mere privacy. How did Pak protectors live? Glimpses into cubicles showed spartan simplicity. On the floor of a cubicle, a skeleton with swollen joints and a crested skull. One great room was full of what must have been exercise equipment, including a jungle gym that looked a mile high.

They flew for hours. Sometimes there were miles of straight corridor. They could take these at high speed. At other times they had to pick their way.

Doors blocked them. Chmeee dealt with that: the doors sprayed away from the disintegrator beam in a cloud of monatomic dust.

Dust puffed from one big door, and then the dust stopped coming and the door was still there. A blank rectangle. It must be scrith, Louis thought.

Chmeee took them left, around whatever that door guarded. Louis dropped behind Harkabeeparolyn and flew backward, watching for Teela Brown to emerge. The big door remained closed. If it hid Teela Brown, she couldn’t detect them through scrith. Even protectors had limits.

They could have been following the tunnel to Needle , moving above it, but they weren’t. With Needle ’s position to establish their orientation, Chmeee was leading them about twelve degrees to antispinward of starboard… toward a great hemispherical cavity with a moving neutrino source halfway up one wall. Good enough.

They veered right when they could. They passed another scrith door, but it wasn’t blocking their path. Whatever they had circled, it was big. An emergency control room? They might want to find it again.

Fourteen hours had passed, and almost a thousand miles, before they stopped to rest. They slept in a land of waist-high metal doughnut centered in a vast expanse of floor. Purpose unknown — but nothing could sneak up on them. Louis was getting hungry for something besides nutrient syrup. He wondered: had Teela eaten and gone about her business and had time to grow hungry again?

They flew on. They were out of the residential section now, though there were still cubicles here and there, with empty food storage bins and plumbing and nice flat floors for catnaps. But these were tucked away in huge chambers that might hold anything or nothing.

They flew around the perimeter of what must have been a tremendous pump, judging from the racket that pounded their eardrums until they had left it behind. Chmeee led them left, and blasted through a wall, and took them into a map room so large that Louis shrank within himself. When Chmeee blasted the far wall the huge hologram blazed and died, and they moved on.

Close now. They slept on top of a fusion generator that wasn’t running. Four hours; then they moved on.

A corridor, and light beyond, and wind blowing them onward.

They emerged into the light.

The sun was just past zenith in a nearly cloudless sky. An endless sunlit landscape stretched before them: ponds, groves of trees, fields of grain, and rows of dark green vegetables. Louis felt like a target. A coil of black wire was taped to his shoulder. Now he pulled it free and flung it away. One end was still attached to his suit. It would radiate heat if she fired now.

Where was Teela Brown?

Not here, it seemed.

Chmeee led them across a range of small hills. He arced down beside a stagnant pond. Louis followed, with Harkabeeparolyn behind him. The kzin was opening his spacesuit. As Louis touched down, Chmeee held both palms outward, then mimed holding his suit tightly shut.

Don’t open your suit . He meant it for Harkabeeparolyn. She’d been warned, but Louis watched her till he was sure she wouldn’t.

Now what?

The land was too flat. Hiding places looked scarce — groves of trees, a handful of soft-edged hills behind them: too obvious. Hide underwater? Maybe. Louis began reeling in the superconductor wire he’d thrown away. They probably had hours to prepare, but when Teela came, she’d come like lightning.

Chmeee had stripped himself naked. Now he put the suit of superconductor cloth back on. He went to Harkabeeparolyn and helped her remove his own impact armor, and donned it. Leaving her that much more helpless. Louis did not interfere.

Hide behind the sun? The small, fusion-powered, neutrino-emitting sun — at least it was no obvious hiding place. Could it be done? With superconductor wire trailing into a pond, he’d only be at the boiling point of water. Tanj, that was clever! It would even have worked, nearer the martian surface, where water would boil at some reasonable temperature. But they were too near the Ringworld floor; air pressure was nearly at sea level.