“Yes.”

“We can’t bribe him with a magic transmutation device. There isn’t any.”

“I dreaded that you would blurt out the truth.”

“No way. Once he knows we aren’t needed, we’re dead. And we don’t have any other bribes.” Louis continued, “We can’t get to the flight deck. There may be stepping discs that would take us there, somewhere aboard Needle, but where are they and how do we get the Hindmost to turn them on? We can’t attack him either. Projectiles won’t go through a GP hull. There’s flare shielding on the hull, and probably more flare shielding between our cell and the flight deck. A puppeteer wouldn’t have ignored that. So we can’t fire a laser at him because the walls would turn mirror-colored and bounce the beam back at us. What’s left? Sonics? He just turns off the microphones. Have I left anything out?”

“Antimatter. You need not remind me that we have none.”

“So we can’t threaten him, we can’t hurt him, and we can’t reach the flight deck anyway.”

The kzin clawed thoughtfully at the ruff around his neck.

“It just occurred to me,” Louis said. “Maybe Needle can’t get back to known space at all.”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“We know too much. We’re very bad publicity for the puppeteers. Odds are the Hindmost never planned to take us home. Well, why would he go himself? The place he wants to reach is the Fleet of Worlds, which is twenty or thirty light-years from here by now, in the opposite direction. Even if we could fly Needle, we probably don’t have the life support to reach known space.”

“Shall we steal a Ringworld ship, then? This one?”

Louis shook his head. “We can look it over. But even if it’s in good shape, we probably can’t fly it. Halrloprillalar’s people took crews of a thousand, and they never went that far, according to Prill … though the Ringworld engineers probably did.”

The kzin stood peculiarly still, as if afraid to release the energy bottled inside him. Louis began to realize how angry Chmeee was. “Do you counsel me to surrender, then? Is there not even vengeance for us?”

Louis had thought this through, over and over, while under the wire. He tried to remember the optimism he’d felt then, but it was gone. “We stall. We search the spaceport ledges. When we don’t find anything, we search the Ringworld itself. We’re equipped for that. We don’t let the Hindmost give up till we find our own answer. Whatever it might be.”

“This situation is entirely your fault.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so funny.”

“Laugh, then.”

“Give me my droud and I’ll laugh.”

“Your foolish speculations have left us slave to a mad root-eater. Must you always pretend to more knowledge than is yours?”

Louis sat down with his back to a yellow-glowing wall. “It seemed so reasonable. Tanj, it was reasonable, Look: the puppeteers were studying the Ringworld years before we came on the scene. They knew its spin and its size and its mass, which is just more than the mass of Jupiter. And there’s nothing else in the system. Every planet, every moon, every asteroid, gone. It seemed so obvious. The Ringworld engineers took a Jupiter-style planet and made it into building materials, and they used the rest of the planetary garbage, too, and they built it all into a Ringworld. The mass of, say, Sol system would be just about right.”

“It was only speculation.”

“I convinced you both. Remember that. And gas giant planets,” Louis continued doggedly, “are mostly hydrogen. The Ringworld engineers would have had to convert hydrogen into Ringworld floor material—whatever that stuff is; it’s like nothing we ever built. They would have had to transmute material at a rate that would outstrip a supernova. Listen, Chmeee, I’d seen the Ringworld. I was ready to believe anything.”

“And so was Nessus.” The kzin snorted, forgetting that he too had believed. “And Nessus asked Halrloprillalar about transmutation. And she thought our two-headed companion was charmingly gullible. She told him a tale of Ringworld starships carrying lead to transmute into fuel. Lead! Why not iron? Iron would bulk more, but its structural strength would be greater.”

Louis laughed. “She didn’t think of it.”

“Did you ever tell her that transmutation was your hypothesis?”

“What do you think? She’d have laughed herself to death. And it was too late to tell Nessus. By then Nessus was in the autodoc with one head missing.”

“Uurrr.”

Louis rubbed his aching shoulders. “One of us should have known better. I told you I did some math after we got back. Do you know how much energy it takes to spin the mass of the Ringworld up to seven hundred and seventy miles per second?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It takes a lot. Thousands of times the yearly energy output of this kind of sun. Where would the Ringworld engineers get all that energy? What they had to do was disassemble a dozen Jupiters, or a superjovian planet a dozen times Jupiter’s mass. All mostly hydrogen, remember. They’d use some of the hydrogen in fusion for the energy to run that project, and reserve more of it in magnetic bottles. After they made the Ringworld from the solid residues, they’d have fuel for fusion rockets to spin it up to speed.”

“Hindsight is so wonderful.” Chmeee prowled back and forth along the corridor, on his hind legs, like a man, deep in thought. “So we are slaved to a mad alien searching for a magical machine that never was. What do you hope will happen in the year left to us?”

It was difficult to be optimistic without current. “We explore. Transmutation or not, there’s got to be something valuable on the Ringworld. Maybe we’ll find it. Maybe there’s a United Nations ship already here. Maybe well find a thousand-year-old Ringworld spaceship crew. Maybe the Hindmost will get lonely and let us join him on the flight deck.”

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.