"Turn your intercoms about to give me a view of your path. Are either of you hurt?"
"No, but we are stuck," said Louis. "We can't jump. We're too high, moving too fast. Were headed straight for the Civic Center."
"For what?"
"The cluster of lighted buildings. Remember?"
"Yes." The puppeteer seemed to consider. "A bandit signal must be overriding the signals from your instruments. Speaker, I want readings from your dashboard."
Speaker read off, while he and Louis drew ever closer to the lights of the central city. At one point Louis interrupted. "We're passing that patch of suburbia with the street lights."
"Are they indeed street lights?"
"Yes and no. All the oval doors of the houses glow bright orange. It's peculiar. I think it's honest street lighting, but the power's been dimmed and cooled by time."
"I concur," said Speaker-To-Animals.
"I hate to nag, but we're getting closer. I think we're headed for the big building in the middle."
"I see it. The double cone with lights only in the top half."
"That's the one."
"Louis, let us try to interfere with the bandit signal. Slave your 'cycle to mine."
Louis activated the slave circuit.
His 'cycle slammed hard up against him, as if he'd been booted in the butt by a giant foot. An instant later the power cut off entirely.
Crash balloons exploded before and behind him. They were shaped balloons, and they interlocked around him like a pair of clasped hands. Louis could not so much as move his hands or turn his head.
He was falling.
"I'm falling," he reported. His hand, pressed against the dashboard by the balloons, still touched the slave circuit. Louis waited another moment, still hoping the slave circuit would take hold. But the beehive houses were coming too close. Louis shifted back to manual.
Nothing happened. He was still falling.
With a calm that was sheer braggadocio, Louis said, "Speaker, don't try the slave circuit. It doesn't work." And because they could see his face, he waited with his face immobile and his eyes open. Waited for the Ringworld to slap him dead.
Deceleration came suddenly, pushing hard upward on the cycle. The 'cycle turned over, leaving Louis Wu head down under five gees of pull.
He fainted.
When he came to, he was still head down, held by the pressure of the crash balloons. His head was pounding. He saw a hazy crazy vision of the Puppet Master cursing and trying to get his strings. untangled, while, the puppet Louis Wu dangled head down over the stage.
The floating building was short and wide and ornate. Its lower half was an inverted cone. As the flycycles approached it, a horizontal slit slid open and swallowed them.
They were passing into the dark interior when Speaker's flycycle, which had been edging closer to Louiss, quietly turned over. Balloons exploded around Speaker before he could fall. Louis scowled in sour satisfaction. He had been miserable long enough to appreciate the company.
Nessus was saying, "Your inverted attitude implies that you are being supported by fields electromagnetic in nature. Such fields would support metal but not protoplasm, with the result …"
Louis wriggled against his confinement; but not too hard. He would fall if he wriggled free of the balloons. Behind him the door slid shut, just faster than Louis's eyes could adjust to the dark. He saw nothing of the interior. He couldn't guess how far down the floor might be.
He heard Nessus saying, "Can you reach it with your hand?"
And Speaker, "Yes, if I can push between the … Yowrr! You were right. The casing is hot."
"Then your motor has been burnt out. Your flycycles are inert, dead."
"Fortunate that my saddle is shielded from the heat."
"We can hardly be surprised if the Ringworlders were adept at harnessing electromagnetic forces. So many other tools were denied them: hyperdrive, thrusters, induced gravity …"
Louis had been straining to see something, anything. He could turn his head, slowly, his cheek scraping against the balloon surface; but there was no light anywhere.
Moving his arms against the pressure, he felt across the dashboard until he thought he had found the headlight switch. Why he expected it to work, he could not have said.
The beams went out tight and white, and bounced dimly back from a distant curved wall.
A dozen vehicles hung about him, all at the same level. There were packages no larger than a racing jet backpack, and others as large as flying cars. There was even a kind of flying track with a transparent hull.
Within the maze of floating junk, a flycycle held Speaker-To-Animals upside down. The kzin's bald head and hairy orange mask protruded below the shaped crash balloons; and one clawed hand had been pushed forcefully out to touch the side of the 'cycle.
"Good," said Nessus. "Light. I was about to suggest that. Do you both understand the implication? Every electrical and electromagnetic circuit in your vehicle has been burnt out, provided it was working when you were attacked. Speaker's vehicle, and presumably yours, Louis, was attacked again as you entered the building."
"Which is pretty clearly a prison," Louis forced out. His head felt like a water balloon being filled too full, and he had trouble speaking. But he couldn't let the others do all the work even if the work was only speculating on alien technology while hanging head down.
"And if it's a prison," he went on, "then why isn't there a third zap gun in here with us? In case we should happen to have working weapons. Which we do."
"There unquestionably is one," said Nessus. "Your headlamps prove that the third zap gun is not working. The zap guns are clearly automatic; otherwise someone would be guarding you. It should be safe for Speaker to use the Slaver digging tool."
"That's good news," Louis said. "Except that I've been looking around -"
He and Speaker were floating upside down in an airborne Sargasso Sea. Of three archaic flying jet packs, one was still occupied. The skeleton was small but human. Not a trace of skin remained on the white bones. The clothing must have been good, for shreds of it still survived: brightly colored rags, including a tattered yellow cloak that hung straight down from the point of the flyer's jaw.
The other packs were empty. But the bones had to be somewhere … Louis forced his head back, back …
The basement of the police building was a wide, dim, conical pit. Around the wall were concentric rings of cells. The doors were trap doors above the cells. There were radial stairways leading down to the pit at the apex. In and around the pit were the bones Louis was searching for, shining dimly back at him from far below.
He couldn't wonder that one man in a ruined flying pack had been afraid to turn himself loose. But others, trapped here in cars and backpacks, had preferred the long fall to death by thirst.
Louis said, "I don't see what Speaker is supposed to use the Slaver disintegrator on."
"I have been thinking about that very seriously."
"It he blows a hole in the wall, it doesn't help us. Likewise the ceiling, which he can't reach anyway. If he hits the generator for the field holding us here, we fall ninety feet to the floor. But if he doesn't, we'll be here until we starve, or until we give up and turn ourselves loose. Then we fall ninety feet to the floor."
"Yes."
"That's all? Just yes?"
"I need more data. Will one of you please describe what you see around you? I see only part of a curved wall."
They took turns describing the conical cell block, what they could see of it in the dim, point-source light. Speaker turned on his own lights, and that helped.
But when Louis ran out of things to say, he was still trapped, upside down, without food or water, hanging above a lethal drop.