Read Ringworld for Free Online Page A

luck! No, never mind, I won't argue the point. I know humans crazier than that. A couple of 'em. are still here at the party. Well, you saw for yourself that she's no xenophile."
    "Nor is she a xenophobe. She does not fear either of us."
    "She doesn't have the spark. She isn't -- isn't --"
    "She has no restlessness," said Nessus. "She is happy where she is. This is indeed a liability. There is nothing she wants. Yet how could we know this without asking?"
    "Okay, pick your own candidates." Louis stalked from his office.
    Behind him the puppeteer fluted, "Louis! Speaker! The signal! One of my agents has found another candidate!"
    "He sure has," Louis said disgustedly. Across the living room, Teela Brown was glaring at another Pierson's puppeteer.
    ***
    Louis woke slowly. He remembered donning a sleep headset and setting it for an hour of current. Presumably that had been an hour ago. After the set turned itself off the discomfort of having the thing on his head would have wakened him ...
    It wasn't on his head.
    He sat up abruptly.
    "I took it off you," said Teela Brown. "You needed the sleep."
    "Oh boy. What time is it?"
    "A little after seventeen."
    "I've been a bad host. How goes the party?"
    "Down to about twenty people. Don't worry, I told them what I was doing. They all thought it was a good idea."
    "Okay." Louis rolled off the bed. "Thanks. Shall we join what's left of the party?"
    "I'd like to talk to you first."
    He sat down again. The muzziness of sleep was slowly leaving him. He asked, "What about?"
    "You're really going on this crazy trip?"
    "I really am."
    "I don't see why."
    "I'm ten times your age," said Louis Wu. "I don't have to work for a living. I don't have the patience to be a scientist. I did some writing once, but it turned out to be hard work, which was the last thing I expected. What's left? I play a lot."
    She shook her head, and firelight shivered on the walls. "It doesn't sound like playing."
    Louis shrugged. "Boredom is my worst enemy. It's killed a lot of my friends. but it won't get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere."
    "Shouldn't you at least know what the risk is?"
    "I'm getting well paid."
    "You don't need the money."
    "The human race needs what the puppeteers have got. Look, Teela, you were told all about the second quantum hyperdrive ship. It's the only ship in known space that moves faster than three days to the light year. And it goes almost four hundred times that fast!"
    "Who needs to fly that fast?"
    Louis wasn't in the mood to deliver a lecture on the Core explosion. "Let's get back to the party."
    "No, wait!"
    "Okay."
    Her hands were large, with long, slender fingers. They glowed in reflected light as she brushed them nervously through her burning hair. "Tanj, I'm messing this up. Louis, are you in love with anyone right now?"
    That surprised him. "I don't think so."
    "Do I really look like Paula Cherenkov?"
    In the semidarkness of the bedroom she looked like the burning giraffe in the Dali painting. Her hair glowed by its own light, a stream of orange and yellow flame darkening to smoke. In that light the rest of Teela was shadow touched by the flickering light of her hair. But Louis's memory filled in the details: the long, perfect legs, the conical breasts, the delicate beauty of her small face. He had first seen her four days ago, on the arm of Tedron Doheny, a spindly crashlander who had journeyed to Earth for the party.
    "I thought you were Paula herself," he said now. "She lives on We Made It, which is where I met Ted Doheny. When I saw you together I thought Ted and Paula had come on the same ship.
    "Close up, there were differences. You've got better legs, but Paula's walk was more graceful. Paula's face was -- colder, I think. Maybe that's just memory."
    From outside the door came bursts of computer music, wild and pure, strangely incomplete without the light patterns to make it whole. Teela shifted restlessly, stirring the firelight shadows on the wall.
    "What