Ringworld by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online

restaurant? Hey, easy, easy!"
    Tle puppeteer had tucked his heads and necks between his forelegs and rolled into a ball.
    "Come on," said Louis. "Come on out." He ran his hands gently along the backs of the puppeteer's necks -- the parts that showed. The puppeteer shuddered. His skin was soft, like chamois skin, and pleasant to the touch.
    "Come on out of there. Nothing's going to hurt you here. I protect my guests."
    The puppeteer's wail came muffled from under his belly. "I was mad. Mad! Did I really insult four kzinti?"
    "Come on out. You're safe here. That's better." A flat head peeped out of the warm shadow. "Now, you see? Nothing to be afraid of."
    "Four kzinti? Not three?"
    "My mistake. I miscounted. It was three."
    "Forgive me, Louis." The puppeteer exposed his other head as far as the eye. "My manic phase has ended. I am in the depressive leg of my cycle."
    "Can you do anything about it?" Louis thought of the consequences, if Nessus should hit the wrong leg of his cycle at a crucial time.
    "I can wait for it to end. I can protect myself, to the extent possible. I can try not to let it affect my judgment."
    "Poor Nessus. You're sure you haven't learned anything new?"
    "Do I not know enough already to terrify any sane mind?" The puppeteer stood up somewhat shakily. "Why did I meet Teela Brown? I had thought she would have departed."
    "I asked her to stay with me until we find your fourth crewmate."
    "Why?"
    Louis had wondered about that himself. It had little to do with Paula Cherenkov. Louis had changed too much since her time; and he was not a man to force one woman into the mold of another.
    Sleeping plates were designed for two occupants, not one. But there had been other girls at the party ... not as pretty as Teela. Could wise old Louis Wu still be snared by beauty alone?
    But something more than beauty looked out of those flat silver eyes. Something highly complex.
    "For purposes of fornication," said Louis Wu. He had remembered that he was talking to an alien, who would not understand such complexities. He realized that the puppeteer was still shivering, and added, "Let's go to my office. It's under the hill. No meteors."
    ***
    After the puppeteer left, Louis went looking for Teela. He found her in the library, in front of a reading screen, clicking frames past at a speed high even for a speedreader.
    "Hi," she said. She froze a frame and turned. "How's our two-headed friend?"
    "Scared witless. And I'm exhausted. I've been playing psychiatrist to a Pierson's puppeteer."
    Teela brightened. "Tell me about a puppeteer's sex life."
    "All I know is, he isn't allowed to breed. He broods on it. One may assume that he could breed if there weren't a law against it. Aside from that, he stayed off the subject completely. Sorry."
    "Well, what did you talk about?"
    Louis waved a hand. "Three hundred years of traumas. That's how long Nessus has been in human space. He hardly remembers the puppeteer planet. I get the feeling he's been scared for three hundred years." Louis dropped into a masseur chair. The strain of empathizing with an alien had exhausted his mind, used up his imagination.
    "How about you? What are you reading?"
    "The Core explosion." Teela waved at the reading screen.
    There were stars in clusters and bunches and masses. You couldn't see black, there were so many stars. It might have been a dense star cluster, but it wasn't; it couldn't be. Telescopes wouldn't reach that far, nor would any normal spacecraft.
    It was the galactic core, five thousand light years across, a tight sphere of stars at the axis of the galactic whirlpool. One man had reached that far, two hundred years ago, in an experimental puppeteer-built ship. The frame showed red and blue and green stars, all superimposed, the red stars biggest and brightest. In the center of the picture was a patch of blazing white the shape of a bloated comma. Within it were lines and blobs of shadow; but the shadow within the white patch was brighter than any