At least he would not get bored with eating. Not soon, anyway.
But if they could not find plants and water to shovel into the intake hopper, the food slot would eventually stop delivering bricks.
He dialed a seventh brick and ate it.
Unnerving, to think how far they were from help. Earth was two hundred light years away, the puppeteer fleet two light years distant, was receding at nearly lightspeed; and even the half-vaporized Liar had been invisible from the beginning of the flight. Now the meteoric gouge had faded from sight. How easy would it be to lose the ship entirely?
Tanj near impossible, Louis decided. To antispinward was the largest mountain men had ever seen. There couldn't be many such supervolcanos on the Ringworld. To find the Liar one would aim for the mountain, then troll spinward for a linear gouge several thousand miles Iong.
… But the arch of the Ringworld blazed overhead: three million times the surface area of the Earth. There was room to get quite thoroughly lost on the Ringworld.
Nessus was beginning to stir. First one head, then the other emerged from beneath the puppeteer's torso. The puppeteer tongued switches, then spoke.
"Louis, may we have privacy?"
The transparent images of Speaker and Teela appeared to be dozing. Louis switched them out of the intercom circuit. "Go ahead."
"What has been happening?"
"Couldn't you hear?"
"My ears are in my heads. My hearing was blocked."
"How are you feeling now?"
"Perhaps I will return to catatonia. I feel very lost, Louis."
"Me too. Well, we've come twenty-two hundred miles in the last three hours. We'd have done better with transfer booths, or even stepping discs."
"Our engineers were unable to arrange stepping discs." The puppeteer's heads glanced at each other, eye to eye. A moment only they held the position; but Louis had seen that gesture before.
Now, tentatively, he tagged it as puppeteer's laughter. Would a mad puppeteer develop a sense of humor?
He continued speaking. "We're moving to port. Speaker decided that the portside rim wall was closer. I think we could have flipped a coin for it and got better accuracy. But Speaker's the boss. He took over when you went catatonic."
"That is unfortunate. Speaker's flycycle is beyond range of my tasp. I must -"
"Hold it a second. Why not leave him in command?"
"But, but, but -"
"Think about it," Louis urged. "You can always veto him with the tasp. If you don't put him in charge, he'll take over anyway, every time you relax. We need an undisputed leader."
"I suppose it cannot hurt," the puppeteer fluted. "My leadership will not materially improve our chances."
"That's the spirit. Call Speaker and tell him he's the Hindmost."
Louis hooked himself into Speaker's intercom to hear the exchange. If he was expecting fireworks he was disappointed. The kzin and the puppeteer spoke a few hissing, spitting phrases in the Hero's Tongue. Then the kzin cut himself out of the circuit.
"I must apologize," said Nessus. "My stupidity has brought disaster on us."
"Don't worry about it," Louis consoled him. "You're just in the depressive leg of your cycle."
"I am a sentient being, and I can face facts. I was terribly wrong about Teela Brown."
"True enough, but that wasn't your fault."
"It was indeed my fault, Louis Wu. I should have realized why I was having trouble finding candidates other than Teela Brown."
"Huh?"
"They were too lucky."
Louis whistled tunelessly through his teeth. The puppeteer had evolved a brand new theory.
"Specifically," said Nessus, "They were too lucky to become involved in such a dangerous project as ours. The Birthright Lotteries have indeed produced psychic, hereditary luck. Yet that luck was not available to me. When I tried to contact the Lottery Families, I found only Teela Brown."
"Listen -"
"I was unable to contact others because they were too lucky. I was able to contact Teela Brown, to involve her in this ill-fated expedition, because she did not inherit the gene. Louis, I apologize."
"Oh, go to sleep."
"I must apologize to Teela too."
"No. That's my fault. I could have stopped her."
"Could you?"
"I don't know. I honestly don't. Go to sleep."
"I cannot."
"Then you fly. I'll go to sleep."
And so it was. But before Louis dropped off he was surprised to realize how smoothly the flycycle was riding. The puppeteer was an excellent pilot.
Louis woke at first light.
He was not used to sleeping under gravity. Never in his life had he spent a night in sitting position. When he yawned and tried to stretch, muscles seemed to crack and crumble under the strain. Groaning, he rubbed sticky eyes and looked about him.
The shadows were funny; the light was funny. Louis looked up and found a white sliver of noonday sun. Stupid, he told himself as he waited for the tears to stop. His reflexes were faster than his brain.
To his left all was darkness, deepening with distance. The missing horizon was a blackness born of night and chaos, beneath a navy sky in which outlines of the Ringworld arch glowed faintly.
To the right, to spinward, was full day.
Dawn was different on the Ringworld.
The desert was coming to an end. Its weaving border, clear and sharp, curved away to right and left. Behind the 'cycles was desert, yellow-white and bright and barren. The big mountain still blocked an impressive chunk of sky. Ahead, rivers and lakes showed in diminishing perspective, separated by patches of green-brown.
The 'cycles had maintained their positions, widely separated in a diamond pattern. At this distance they seemed silver bugs, all alike. Louis was in the lead. His memory told him that Speaker had the spinward position; Nessus was to antispinward, and Teela brought up the rear.
To spinward of the mountain was a hanging thread of dust, like the trail left by a ground-effect jeep crossing a desert, but larger. It had to be larger, though it was only a thread at this distance …
"Are you awake, Louis?"
"Morning, Nessus. Have you been flying all this time?"
"Some hours ago I turned that chore over to Speaker. You will notice that we have already traveled seven thousand-odd miles."
"Yeah." But it was only a figure, a tiny fraction of the distance they would have to travel. A lifetime of using the transfer booth network had ruined Louis's sense of distance.
"Look behind us," he said. "See that dust trail? Any idea what it might be?"
"Of course. It must be the vaporized rock from our meteoric landing, recondensed in the atmosphere. It has not had time to settle out of so large a volume."
"I was thinking of dust storms … Tanj forever, look how far we slid!" For the dust trail was at least a couple of thousand miles long, if it was as far away as the ship.
Sky and earth were two flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together; and men were microbes crawling between the plates …
"Our air pressure has increased."
Louis pulled his eyes away from the vanishing point. "What did you say?"
"Look at your pressure gauge. We must have been at least two miles above our present level when we landed."
Louis dialed a ration brick for breakfast. "Is the air pressure important?"
"We must observe all things in an unfamiliar environment. One never knows what detail might be crucial. For instance, the mountain which we chose as a landmark bulks large behind us. It must be even larger than we thought. Again, what of that silver-shining point ahead of us?"
"There?"
"Almost at the hypothetical horizon line, Louis. Directly ahead."
It was like searching out a single detail in a map seen edge-on. Louis found it anyway: a bright mirror-gleam, just large enough to be more than a point.