Free Ringworld by Larry Niven Page A

unfamiliar red giant glared beneath his feet.
    "Too fast," Louis snarled. "Too tanj fast!" In any normal ship you only had to check the mass indicator every six hours or so. On the Long Shot you hardly dared blink!
    Louis let his eyes drop to the bright, fuzzy red disc and its starry background.
    "Tanj! I'm already out of known space!"
    He wheeled the ship to see the stars. A foreign sky streamed beneath him. "They're mine, all mine!" Louis chortled, rubbing his hands together. On sabbaticals Louis Wu was his own entertainment.
    The red star returned to view, and Louis let it swing another ninety degrees. He'd let his ship get too close to the star, and now he'd have to circle around it.
    He was then an hour and a half on his way.
    He was three hours on his way when he dropped out again.
    The foreign stars didn't bother him. City lights drowned the starlight over most of the Earth; and Louis Wu had been raised a flatlander. He had not seen a star until he was twenty-six. He checked to be sure he was in clear space, he closed covers on instrument panels, and then, finally, he stretched.
    "Wow. My eyes feel like boiled onions."
    Releasing himself from the crash web, he floated, flexing his left hand. For three hours he had flown with that hand closed on the hyperdrive switch. From elbow to fingertips it felt like a single cramp.
    Under the ceiling were rungs for isometric exercises. Louis used them. The kinks left his muscles, but he was still tired.
    Mmmm. Wake Teela? It would be nice to talk to her now. Lovely idea there. Next time I go on sabbatical I'll take a woman in stasis. Get the best of both worlds. But he looked and felt like something washed from a flooded graveyard. Unfit for polite company. Oh, well.
    He should not have let her board the Long Shot.
    Not for his own sake! He was glad enough that she had stayed over those two days. It had been like the story of Louis Wu and Paula Cherenkov, rewritten for a happy ending. Perhaps it had been better.
    Yet there was something shallow about Teela. It wasn't only her age. Louis's friends were of all ages, and some of the youngest were very deep indeed. Certainly they suffered most. As if hurting were part of the learning process. Which it probably was.
    No, there was a lack of empathy in Teela, a lack of the ability to feel someone else's pain ... Yet she could sense another's pleasure, and respond to pleasure, and create pleasure. She was a marvelous lover: painfully beautiful, almost new to the art, sensuous as a cat and startlingly uninhibited ...
    Now of which would qualify her as an explorer.
    Teela's life had been happy and dull. Twice she had fallen in love, and twice she had been first to tire of the affair. She had never been in a bad stress situation, never been really hurt. When the time came, when Teela found her first genuine emergency, she would probably panic.
    "But I picked her as a lover," said Louis to himself. "Damn Nessus!" If Teela had ever been found in a stress situation, Nessus would have rejected her as unlucky!
    It had been a mistake to bring her. She would be a liability. He would spend too much of his time protecting her when he should be protecting himself.
    What kinds of stress situations might they face? The puppeteers were good businessmen. They did not overpay. The Long Shot was a fee of unheard-of value. Louis had the chilly suspicion that they would earn it.
    "Sufficient unto the day," Louis said to himself.
    And he returned to his crash couch and slept for an hour under the sleep headset. Waking, he swung the ship, into line and dropped back into the Blind Spot.
    Five-and-a-half hours from Sol he dropped out again.
    The puppetwes coordinates defined a small rectangular section of the sky as seen from Sol plus a radial distance in that direction. At that distance, those coordinates defined a cube half a light year on a side. Somewhere in that volume, presumably, was a fleet of ships. Also in that volume, unless instruments had fouled him