"But it's such a small effect!"

"But it is the only effect, Louis. There is nothing to interfere with its action, or to stop it. It might go on for millenia, building to what you see now."

"Maybe. Maybe." The eye seemed less frightening now. As the puppeteer had said, it must be some kind of storm. It was all the colors of a storm, of black clouds and upper sunlit white clouds and the dark "eye" of the storm acting as the iris of the Eye.

"The problem is the air sink, of course. Why does air disappear near the center of the storm?"

"Maybe a pump is still working in there."

"I doubt that, Louis. If that were so, the air disturbances in this vicinity would be planned."

"Well?"

"Have you noticed the places where the ring foundation material pokes through the soil and the bedrock? Surely such erosion must be unplanned. Have you noticed how such places appeared more frequently as we neared this place? The Eye storm must have upset weather patterns for tens of thousands of miles around, over an area greater than your world or mine."

This time it was Louis who whistled. "Tanj for torment! But then — oh, now I see. There must be a meteor puncture in the center of the Eye storm."

"Yes. You see the importance of this. The ring floor can be penetrated."

"But not by anything we're armed with."

"True. Still, we must know if the puncture is there."

Already Louis's superstitious panic seemed a remembered dream. The puppeteer's analytical calm was contagious and steadying. Louis Wu looked fearlessly into the eye and said, "We'll have to go in and look. You think it'll be safe, flying through the iris?"

"It should be no more than clear, still air in a partial vacuum."

"Okay. I'll relay the good news. Well all fly through the eye storm."

The sky was darkening as they approached the iris. Was night falling overhead? Impossible to tell. The thickening, blackening clouds made darkness enough.

The eye was at least a hundred miles long from corner to corner, and something like forty miles tall. Its outline seemed to blur as they approached. Layers and streamers became visible. The true shape of the eye began to show: a tunnel of churning winds, reasonably uniform, whose cross-section was a picture of a human eye.

But it still looked like an eye as they hurtled toward the iris.

It was like falling into the eye of God. The visual effect was horrifying, terrifying, almost comically overdone. Louis was ready to laugh or scream. Or back out. It would only take one observer to find out whether there was a hole in the Ringworld floor. Louis could go around …

They were in.

They flew down a black corridor lit by lightning. Lightning flashed almost continuously, ahead and behind and on all sides. For a uniform distance around them the air was clear. Beyond the iris region, opaque black clouds swirled around them, moving at greater than hurricane velocities.

"The leaf-eater was right," Speaker roared. "It is nothing but a storm."

"Funny thing. He was the only one of the four of us who didn't panic when he saw that eye. I guess puppeteers aren't superstitious," screamed Louis Wu.

Teela called, "I see something ahead of us!"

It was a dip in the floor of the tunnel. Louis grinned with tension and rested his hands lightly on the controls. There might be a tanj of a downdraft over that dip.

He was less wary now, less tense, than he had been when they entered the Eye. What could happen where even a puppeteer found safety?

Clouds and lightning whirled around them as they neared the dip.

They braked and hovered over the dip, their flycycle motors fighting the downdraft. Through the muffling action of the sonic folds, the storm screamed in their ears.

It was like looking into a funnel. Obviously there was air disappearing down there; but was it being pumped away at high speed, or was it being spewed at the stars through the black bottom of the Ringworld? They couldn't actually see much …

Louis did not notice when Teela dropped her 'cycle. She was too far away, the flickering light was too strange, and he was looking down. He saw a tiny speck dwindling into the funnel, but he thought nothing of it.

Then, thinned by the howl of the storm, he heard Teela's scream.

Teela's face was clear in the intercom image. She was looking down, and she was terrified.

"What is it?" he bellowed.

He could barely hear her answer. "It's got me!"

He looked down.

The funnel was clear between its whirling conical sides. It was oddly and steadily lit, not by lightning per se, but by cathode-ray effects caused by current differences in a nearly complete vacuum. There was a speck of … something down there, something that might conceivably have been a flycycle, if anyone were stupid enough to dive a flycycle into a maelstrom merely to get a closer look at a puncture hole into outer space.

Louis felt sick. There was nothing to be done, nothing at all. He wrenched his eyes away -

Only to see Teela's eyes above the dashboard. She was looking down into something dreadful -

And blood was running from her nose.

He saw the terror drain out of her face, to leave a white corpselike calm. She was about to faint. Anoxia? The sonic fold would hold air against vacuum, but it had to be set first.

Half-conscious, she looked up at Louis Wu. Do something, she begged. Do something.

Her head fell forward against the dash.

Louis's teeth were in his lower lip. He could taste the blood. He looked down into the funnel of streaming neon-lit cloud, and it was sickeningly like the whirlpool over a bathtub drain. He found the tiny speck that must be Teela's cycle — and saw it lunge straight forward and into the sloping, whirling wall of the funnel.

Seconds later he saw the vapor trail appear ahead of him, far down the eye of the horizontal hurricane. A thread of white, sharply pointed. Somehow it never occurred to him to doubt that it was Teela's 'cycle.

"What happened?" Speaker called.

Louis shook his head, declining to answer. He felt numb. Reason was short-circuited; his thoughts traced a circle, round and round.

Teela's intercom image was face down, showing mostly hair. She was unconscious, in an uncontrolled flycycle moving far faster than twice sonic speed. Somebody really ought to do something about that …

"But she was about to die, Louis. Could Nessus have activated a control we don't know about?"

"No. I'd rather believe that than … no."

"I think that must be what happened," said Speaker.

"You saw what happened! She fainted, her head hit the control board, and her 'cycle shot out of that drain like hell wouldn't have it! She punched the right controls with her forehead!"

"Nonsense."

"Yeah." Louis wanted to sleep, to stop thinking …

"Consider the probabilities, Louis!" The kzin got it then, and he left his mouth open while he thought about it. His verdict was, "No. Impossible."

"Yeah."

"She would not have been chosen to join us. If her luck were even partially dependable, Nessus would never have found her. She would have stayed on Earth."

Lightning sparkled, illuminating the long, long tunnel of churning storm cloud. A straight, narrow line pointed dead ahead: the vapor trail from Teela's flycycle. But the 'cycle itself was beyond visibility.

"Louis, we would never have crashed on the Ringworld!"

"I'm still wondering about that."

"Perhaps you had better wonder how to save her life."

Louis nodded. With no real sense of urgency, he pushed the call button for Nessus — a thing Speaker could not do.

The puppeteer answered instantly, as if he had been waiting for the signal. Louis was surprised to see that Speaker remained on the line. Rapidly he outlined what had happened.