"That stuff you're eating now is reconstituted."
"Yes, but it tastes freshly killed!"
That night Prill retired to a couch in the lounge. She appreciated the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. But Louis Wu slept in free fall for the first time in three months.
He slept ten hours, and woke feeling like a tiger. A half-disc of sun flamed beneath his feet.
Back aboard the Improbable, he used the flashlight laser to free the knobbed end of the shadow square. When he finished, it still had some fused electrosetting plastic attached.
He did not try to carry it to the Liar. The black thread was far too dangerous, the Ring floor far too slippery. Louis moved on all fours on the frictionless surface, and he pulled the knob behind him.
He found Speaker silently watching from the airlock.
Louis entered the airlock via Prill's stepladder, pushed past the kzin and went aft. Speaker continued to watch.
The farthest point aft in the wreck of the Liar was a channel the size of a man's thigh. It had passed wiring to machinery in the Liar's wing, when the Liar had had a wing. Now it was sealed by a metal hatch. Louis opened the hatch, tossed the knobbed end of the win through and outside.
He moved forward. At intervals he checked the position of the wire by using it to slice a Jinxian sausage dialed from the Liar's kitchen. Then he marked the spot with bright yellow paint. When he finished, the path of the virtually invisible thread was marked in a line of yellow splotches running through the Lkw.
When the wire drew taut, it would certainly cut through some internal partitions of the ship. The yellow paint allowed Louis to gauge the path it would take, and to assure himself that the wire would not damage any part of the life-support system. But the paint had another purpose. It would warn them all to keep away from the wire, lest they lose fingers or worse.
Louis left the airlock, waited for Speaker to follow him out. Then he closed the outer door.
At this point Speaker asked, "Is this why we came?"
"Tell you in a minute," said Louis. He walked aft along the General Products hull, picked up the knob in both hands, and tugged gently. The wire hold.
He put his back into it. He pulled with all his strength. The wire did not budge. The airlock door held it fast.
"There's just no way to give it a stronger test. I wasn't sure the airlock door would be a close enough fit. I wasn't sure the wire wouldn't abrade a General products hull. I'm still not sure. But yes, this is why we came."
"What shall we do next?"
"We open the airlock door." He did it. "We let the thread slide freely through the Liar while we carry the handle back to the Improbable and cement it in place." And they did that
The thread that had linked the shadow squares turned invisibly away to starboard. It had been dragged for thousands of miles behind the Improbable, because there was no way to get it aboard the flying building. Perhaps it trailed all the way back to the tangle of thread in the City Beneath Heaven; a tangle like a cloud of smoke, that might have held millions of miles of the stuff.
Now it entered the Liar's double airlock, circled through the Liar's fuselage, out the wiring channel, and back to a blob of electrosetting plastic on the underside of the flying building.
"So far so good," said Louis. "Now I'll need Prill. No, tanj it! I forgot. Prill doesn't have a pressure suit."
"A pressure suit?"
"We're taking the Improbable up Fist-of-God Mountain. The building isn't airtight. Well need pressure suits, and Prill doesn't have one. We'll have to leave her here."
"Up Fist-of-God Mountain," Speaker repeated. "Louis: one flycycle has not the power to drag the Liar up that slope. You propose to burden the motor with the additional mass of a floating building."
"No, no, no. I don't want to drag the Liar. All I want to do is pull the shadow square wire behind us. It should slide freely through the Liar, unless I give Prill the word to close the airlock door."
Speaker thought about it. "That should work, Louis. If the puppeteer's flycycle has not the power we need, we can cut away chunks of the building to make it lighter. But why? What do you expect to find at the top?"
"I could tell you in one word; and then you'd laugh in my face. Speaker, if I'm wrong, I swear you'll never know," said Louis Wu.
And he thought: I'll have to tell Prill what to do. And plug the Liar's wiring channel with plastic. It won't stop the thread from sliding, but it should make the Liar nearly airtight.
The Improbable was not a spaceship. Her lifting power was electromagnetic, thrusting against the Ring foundation itself. And the Ring floor sloped up toward Fist-of-God; for Fist-Of-God was hollow. Naturally the Improbable tended to tilt, to slide back down against the push of the puppeteer's flycycle.
To that problem, Speaker had already found the answer.
They were living in pressure suits, before the journey had properly began. Louis sucked pap through a tube, and thought yearningly of steak broiled with a flashlight-laser. Speaker sucked reconstituted blood, and thought his own thoughts.
They certainly didn't need the kitchen. They cut that part of the building loose, and improved the tilt of the building to boot.
They cut away air conditioning and police equipment. The generators that had ruined their flycycles went only after they had been positively identified as separate from the lifting motors. Walls went. Some walls were needed for their shade; for heating became a problem in the direct sunlight.
Day by day they neared the crater at the top of Fist-of-God, a crater that would have swallowed most asteroids. The lip of the crater looked like no impact crater Louis had ever seen. Shards like obsidian spearheads formed a jagged ring. Spearheads the size of mountains themselves. There was a gap between two such peaks … they could enter there …
"I take it," said Speaker, "that you wish to enter the crater itself."
"That's right."
"Then it is good that you noticed the pass. The slope above is too steep for our drive. We should reach the pass very soon."
Speaker was steering the Improbable by modifying the flycycle thrust. That had been necessary since they cut away the stabilizing mechanism in a final attempt to reduce the building's weight. Louis had grown used to the bizarre appearance of the kzin: the five transparent concentric balloons of his pressure suit, the fishbowl helmet with its maze of tongue controls half hiding the kzin's face, the tremendous backpack.
"Calling Prill," Louis said into the intercom. "Calling Halrloprillalar. Are you there, Prill?"
"I am."
"Stay there. We'll be through in twenty minutes."
"Good. You've been long enough at it."
The Arch seemed to blaze above them. A thousand miles above the Ringworld, they could see how the Arch merged into the rim walls and the flat landscape. Like the first man in space, a thousand years ago, looking down on an Earth that, by Jahweh and his mighty hammer, really was round.
"We couldn't have known," said Louis Wu, not loudly. But Speaker looked up from his work.
Louis didn't notice the kzin's odd look. "It would have saved us so much trouble. We could have turned back after we found the shadow square wire. Tanj, we could have dragged the Liar straight up Fist-of-God Mountain behind our flycycles! But then Teela wouldn't have met Seeker."
"The luck of Teela Brown again?"
"Sure." Louis shook himself. "Have I been talking to myself?"
"I have been listening."
"We should have known," said Louis. The gap between the sharp peaks was very near. He felt the urge to babble. "The Engineers would never have built a mountain this high here. They've got over a billion miles of thousand-mile-high mountains, if you count both rim walls."
"But Fist-of-God is real, Louis."