The kzin had sense enough to remain silent. He had nearly finished donning the multiple balloon and heavy backpack which served him as a pressure suit. Obviously he intended to go out for a look.

He went out on one of the flycycles: a dumbbell-shaped thruster-powered vehicle with an armchair seat in the constriction.

They watched him maneuver alongside the writhing thread of black. It had cooled considerably; for the fringe of brightness around the goggle-induced black had dimmed from violet-white through white-white to orange-white. They watched Speaker's dark bulk leave the flycycle and move about near the heated, writhing wire.

They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a fall half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility.

Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention.

"It was no thicker than thread," said the kzin. "You will notice that I hold half a grippy."

He held up the ruined tool for them to see. The grippy had been cut cleanly along a plane surface, and the cut surface polished to mirror brightness.

"When I was close enough to see how thin the thread was, I swung the grippy at it. The thread cut cleanly through the steel. I felt only the slightest of togs."

Louis said, "A variable-sword would do that."

"But a variable-sword blade is a metal wire enclosed in a Slaver stasis field. It cannot bend. This- thread was in constant motion, as you saw."

"Something new, then." Something that cut like a variable-sword. Light, thin, strong, beyond human skill. Something that stayed solid at temperatures where a natural substance would become a plasma. "Something really new. But what was it doing in our way?"

"Consider. We were passing between shadow squares when we hit something unidentified. Subsequently we found a seemingly infinite length of thread, at a temperature comparable to the interior of a hot star. Obviously we hit the thread. It retained the heat of impact. I surmise that it was strung between the shadow squares."

"Probably was. But why?"

"We can only speculate. Consoder," said Speaker-To-Animals. "The Ringworld engineers used the shadow squares to provide intervals of night. To fulfill their purpose, the rectangles must occlude. sunlight They would fail if they drifted edge-on to the sun.

"The Ringworld engineers used their strange thread to join the rectangles together in a chain. They spun the chain at faster than orbital speed in order to put tension on the threads. The threads are taut, the rectangles are held flat to the ring."

It made an odd picture. Twenty shadow squares in a Maypole dance, their edges joined by threads cut to lengths of five million miles … "We need that thread," said Louis. "There's no limit to what we could do with it."

"I had no way to bring it aboard. Or to cut a length of it, for that matter."

The Puppeteer interposed. "Our course may have been changed by the collision. Is there any way to determine if we will miss the Ringworld?"

Nobody could think of one.

"We may miss the ring, yet the collision may have taken too much of our momentum. We may fall forever in an elliptical orbit," lamented the puppeteer. "Teela, your luck has played us false."

She shrugged. "I never told you I was a good luck charm."

"It was the Hindmost who so misinformed me. Were he here now, I would have rude words for my arrogant fianc®"

Dinner that night became a ritual. The crew of the Liar took a last supper in the lounge. Teela Brown was hurtingly beautiful across the table, in a flowing, floating black-and-tangerine garment that couldn't have weighed as much as an ounce.

Behind her shoulder, the Ringworld was slowly swelling. Occasionally Teela turned to watch it. They all did. But where Louis had to guess at the feelings of the aliens, in Teela he saw only eagerness. She felt it, as he did: they would not miss the Ringworld.

In his lovemaking that night there was a ferocity that startled, then delighted her. "So that's what fear does to you! I'll have to remember."

He could not smile back. "I keep thinking that this could be the last time." With anyone, he added, to himself.

"Oh, Louis. Were in a General Products hull!"

"Suppose the stasis field doesn't go on? The hull might survive the impact, but we'd be jelly."

"For Finagle's sake, stop worrying!" She ran her fingernails across his back, reaching around from both sides. He pulled her close, so that she couldn't see his face …

When she was deeply asleep, floating like a lovely dream between the sleeping plates, he left her. Exhausted, satiated, he lolled in a hot bathtub with a bulb of cold bourbon balanced on the rim.

There had been pleasures to sample one more time.

Baby blue with white streaks, navy blue with no details, the Ringworld spread across the sky. At first only the cloud cover showed detail: storms, parallel streamers, woolly fleece, all diminutive. Growing. Then outlines of seas … the Ringworld was approximately half water …

Nessus was in his couch, strapped down, curled protectively around himself. Speaker and Teela and Louis Wu, strapped down and watching.

"Better watch this," Louis advised the puppeteer. "Topography could be important later."

Nessus obliged: one flat python head emerged to watch the impending landscape.

Oceans, bent lightning-forks of river, a string of mountains.

No sign of life below. You'd have to be less than a thousand miles up to see signs of civilization. The Ringworld went past, snatching detail away almost before it could be recognized. Detail wasn't going to matter, it was being pulled from beneath them. They would strike unknown, unseen territory.

Estimated intrinsic velocity of ship: two hundred miles per second. Easily enough to carry them safely out of the system, had not the Ringworld intervened.

The land rose up and sidewise, 770 miles per second sidewise. Slantwise, a salamander-shaped sea came at them, growing, underneath, gone. Suddenly the landscape blazed violet!

Discontinuity.

CHAPTER 10 — The Ring Floor

An instant of light, violet-white, flashbulb-bright. A hundred miles of atmosphere, compressed in an instant to a star-hot cone of plasma, slapped the Liar hard across the nose. Louis blinked.

L4Duis blinked, and they were down.

He heard Teela's frustrated complaint: "Tanj! We missed it all!"

And the puppeteer's answer: "To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal. Be grateful for the Slaver stasis field, if not for your undependable luck."

Louis heard these things and ignored them. He was horribly dizzy as eyes tried to find a level …

The sudden transition, from terrible fall to stable ground, would have been dizzying enough without the Liar's attitude to make it worse. The Liar was forty-five degrees short of being exactly upside down. With her cabin gravity still working perfectly, she wore the landscape like a tilted hat.

The sky was a high-noon sky from Earth's temperate zone. The landscape was puzzling: shiny-flat and translucent, with distant reddish-brown ridges. One would have to go outside to see it properly.

Louis released his crash web and stood up.

His balance was precarious; for his eyes and his inner ear disagreed on the direction of down. He took it slowly. Easy. No hurry. The emergency was over.