Louis made his voice sarcastic. "You couldn't be afraid of where we're going."

"No." The insult slid right past him. How would a kzin recognize sarcasm? "You will all disrobe now, so that I may know that you are unarmed. When you have done so I will request the puppeteer to don his pressure suit. We two will board the Long Shot. Louis and Teela will stay behind, but I will take your clothing and your luggage and your pressure suits. I will disable this ship. Doubtless the Outsiders, curious as to why you have not returned to Earth, will come to help you long before your lifesystem fails. Do you all understand?"

Louis Wu, relaxed and ready to take advantage of any slip the kzin might make … Louis Wu glanced at Teela Brown from the corner of his eye and saw a horrible thing. Teela was bracing herself to jump the kzin.

Speaker would cut her in two.

Loins would have to move first.

"Don't be foolish, Louis. Stand up slowly and move against the wall. You shall be the first toooo …"

Speaker let the word trail off in a kind of croon.

Louis halted his leap, caught by a thing he didn't understand.

Speaker-To-Animals threw back his big orange head and mewed: an almost supersonic squeal. He threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the universe. The wire blade of his variable-sword cut through a water tank without slowing noticeably; water began dripping out on all four sides of the tank. Speaker didn't notice. His eyes didn't see, his ears didn't hear.

"Take his weapon," said Nessus.

Louis moved. He approached cautiously, ready to duck if the variable-sword should move his way. The kzin was waving it gently, like a baton. Louis took the handle from the kzin's unresisting fist. He touched the proper stud, and the red ball retracted until it touched the handle.

"Keep it," said Nessus. He clamped his jaws on Speaker's arm and led the kzin to a crash couch. The kzin made no resistance. He was no longer making sounds; he stared into infinity, and his great furry face showed only a vast calm.

"What happened? What did you do?"

Speaker-To-Animals, totally relaxed, stared at infinity and purred.

"Watch," said Nessus. He moved carefully back from the kzin's crash couch. He held his fiat heads high and rigid, not so much pointed as aimed, and at no time did his eyes leave the kzin.

The kzin's eyes focused suddenly. They flicked from Louis, to Teela, to Nessus. Speaker-To-Animals made plaintive snarling sounds, sat upright, and switched to Interworld.

"That was very, very nice. I wish -"

He stopped, started over. "Whatever you did," he told the puppeteer, "do not do it again."

"I judged you to be a sophisticate," said Nessus. "My judgment was accurate. Only a sophisticate would fear a tasp."

Teela said, "Ah."

Louis said, "Tasp?"

The puppeteer addressed himself to Speaker-To-Animals. "You understand that I will use the tasp every time you force me to. I will use it if you make me uneasy. If you attempt violence too often, or if you startle me too often, you will soon become dependent on the tasp. Since the tasp is a surgically implanted part of me, you would have to kill me to possess it. And you would still be ignobly bound by the tasp itself."

"Very astute," said Speaker. "Brilliantly unorthodox tactics. I will trouble you no more."

"Tanj! Will somebody tell me what a tasp is?"

Louis's igriorance seemed to surprise everybody. It was Teela who answered. "It jolts the pleasure center of the brain."

"From a distance?" Louis hadn't known that that was even theoretically possible.

"Sure. It does for you just what a touch of current does for a wirehead; but you don't need to drop a wire into your brain. Usually a tasp is just small enough to aim with one hand."

"Have you ever been hit by a tasp? None of my business, of course."

Teela grinned derision for his delicacy. "Yes. I know what it feels like. A moment of — well, theres no describing it. But you don't use a tasp on yourself. You use it on someone who isn't expecting it. That's where the fun comes in. Police are always picking up taspers in the parks."

"Your tasps," said Nessus, "induce less than a second of current. Mine induces approximately ten seconds."

The effect on Speaker-To-Animals must have been formidable. But Louis saw other implications. "Oh, wow. That's beautiful. That's lovely! Who but a puppeteer would go around with a weapon that does good to the eneray?"

"Who but a prideful sophisticate would fear too much pleasure? The puppeter is quite right," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I would not risk the tasp again. Too many jolts from the puppeteer's tasp would leave me his willing slave. I, a kzin, slaved to an herbivore!"

"Let us board the Long Shot," Nessus said grandly. "We have wasted enough time on trivialities."

Louis was first aboard the Long Shot.

He was not surprised to find his feet trying to dance on Nereid's rock surface. Louis knew how to move in low gravity. But his hindbrain stupidly expected gravity to change as he entered the Long Shoes airlock. Braced for the change, he stumbled and almost fell when it didn't come.

"I know they had induced gravity then," he grumbled as he moved into the cabin. "… Oh."

The cabin was primitive. There were hard right angles everywhere, suitable for bumping knees and elbows. Everything was bulkier than necessary. Dials were badly placed …

But, more than primitive, the cabin was small. There had been induced gravity when the Long Shot was built; but, even in a ship a mile wide, there had been no room for the machinery. There was barely room for a pilot.

Instrument board and mass indicator, a kitchen slot, a crash couch, and a space behind the couch where a man might wedge himself with his head bent to the low ceiling — Louis braced himself in that space and opened the kzin's variable-sword to three feet.

Speaker-To-Animals came aboard, moving in self-conscious slow motion. He climbed past Louis without slowing, up into the overhead compartment.

The overhead compartment had been a recreation room for the ship's single pilot. Exercise machinery and a reading sereen had been ripped out, and three new crash couches installed. Speaker climbed into one of these.

Now Louis followed him up the rungs, one-handed. Keeping the variable-sword unostentatiously in sight, he closed the cover on the kzin's crash couch and flipped a knife switch.

The crash couch became a mirror-surface egg. Inside, no time would pass until Louis turned off the stasis field. If the ship should happen to ram an antimatter asteroid, even the General Products hull would be ionized vapor; but the kzin's crash couch would not lose its mirror finish.

Louis relaxed. It had all been like a kind of ritualistic dance; but its purpose was real enough. The kzin had good reason to steal the ship. The tasp had not altered that Speaker must not be given an opportunity.

Louis returned to the pilot's cabin. He used the ship-to-suit circuit. "Come on in."

Something over a hundred hours later, Louis Wu was outside the solar system.