Ringworld by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

star outside it.
    "That's why you need the puppeteer ship," said Teela. "Isn't it?"
    "Right."
    "How did it happen?"
    "The stars are too close together," said Louis. "An average of half a light year apart, all through the core of any galaxy. Near the center, they're packed even tighter. In a galactic core, stars are so close to each other that they can heat each other up. Being hotter, they burn faster. They age faster.
    "All the stars of the core must have been just that much closer to going nova, ten thousand years ago.
    "Then one star went nova. It let loose a lot of heat and a blast of ganuna rays. The few stars around it got that much hotter. I gather the gamma rays also make for increased stellar activity. So a couple of neighboring stars blew up.
    "That made three. The combined heat set off a few more. It was a chain reaction. Pretty soon there was no stopping it. That white patch is all supernovae. If you like, you can get the math of it a little further along in the tape."
    "No thanks," she said -- predictably. "I gather it's an over by now?"
    "Yeah. That's old light you're looking at, though it hasn't reached this part of the galaxy yet. The chain reaction must have ended ten thousand years ago."
    "Then what is everyone excited about?"
    "Radiation. Fast particles, all kinds." The masseur chair was beginning to relax him; he settled deeper into its formless bulk and let the standing wave patterns knead his muscles. "Look at it this way. Known space is a little bubble of stars thirty-three thousand light years out from the galactic axis. The novae began exploding more than ten thousand years ago. That means that the wave front from the combined explosion will get here in about twenty thousand years. Right?"
    "Sure."
    "And the subnuclear radiation from a million novae is traveling right behind the wave front."
    "... Oh."
    "In twenty thousand years we'll have to evacuate every world you ever heard of, and probably a lot more."
    "That's a long time. If we started now, we could do it with the ships we've got. Easily."
    "You're not thinking. At three days to the light year, it would take one of our ships about six hundred years to reach the Clouds of Magellan."
    "They could stop off to get more food and air ... every year or so."
    Louis laughed. "Try talking anyone into that. You know what I think? When the light of the Core explosion starts shining through the dust clouds between here and the galactic axis, that's when everyone in human space is suddenly going to get terrified. Then they'll have a century to get out.
    "The puppeteers had the right idea. They sent a man to the Core as a publicity stunt because they wanted financing for research. He sent back pictures like that one. Before he'd even landed, the puppeteers were gone; there wasn't a puppeteer on any human world. We won't do it that way. Well wait and we'll wait, and when we finally decide to move we'll have to ship trillions of sentient beings completely out of the galaxy. We'll need the biggest, fastest ships we can build, and we'll need as many as we can get. We need the puppeteer drive now, so that we can start improving it now. The --"
    "Okay. I'm going with you."
    Louis, interrupted in midlecture, said, "Huh?"
    "I'm going with you," said Teela Brown.
    "You're out of your mind."
    "Well, you're going, aren't you?"
    Louis clamped his teeth on the explosion. When he did speak, he spoke more calmly than the situation deserved. "Yes, I'm going. But I've got reasons you don't, and I'm better at staying alive than you are, because I've been at it longer."
    "But I'm luckier."
    Louis snorted.
    "And my reasons for going may not be as good as yours, but they're good enough!" Her voice was high and thin with anger.
    "The tanj they are."
    Teela tapped the face of the reading screen. A bloated comma of nova light flared beneath her fingernail. "That's not a good reason?"
    "We'll get the puppeteer drive whether you come or not. You heard Nessus. There are thousands like