The room felt familiar.  He'd never seen one exactly like it, but it looked like the flight deck on any small interplanetary spacecraft.  You always needed cabin gravity, a ship's computer, thrust controls, attitude jets, a mass detector.  The three control chairs were recliners equipped with crash webs, controls in the arms, urinal tubes, and slots for food and drink.  One chair was much larger than the others, that was all.  Louis felt he could fly the lander blindfolded.

There was a broad strip of wraparound window above a semicircle of screens and dials.  Through the window Louis watched a section of Needle's hull swing out and up.  The hanger was open to space.

Chmeee glanced over the larger knobs and switches set before his own chair.  "We have weapons," he said softly.

A screen blinked and showed a foreshortened puppeteer head, which said, "Descend the steps to reach your vacuum equipment."

The lander's stairs were broad and shallow, made for a kzin's tread.  Below was a much larger area, living space, with a water bed and sleeping plates and a kitchen the duplicate of the one in their cell.  There was an autodoc big enough for a kzin, with an elaborate control console.  Louis had been an experimental surgeon once.  Perhaps the Hindmost knew it.

Chmeee had found the vacuum equipment behind one of an array of locker doors.  He encased himself in what looked like an assortment of transparent balloons.  He was edgy with impatience.  "Louis!  Gear yourself!"

Louis pulled on a flexible one-piece suit, skintight, and attached the fishbowl helmet and backpack.  It was standard equipment; the suit would pass sweat, letting the body be its own cooling system.  Louis added a loose oversuit lined in silver.  It would be cold out there.

The airlock was built for three.  Good: Louis could picture times when he wouldn't want to wait outside while an airlock cycled for someone else.  If the Hindmost wasn't expecting emergencies, he had prepared for them anyway.  As air was replaced by vacuum, Louis's chest expanded.  He pulled shut the "girdle," the wide elastic band around his middle that would help him exhale.

Chmeee strode out of the lander, out of Needle, into the night.  Louis picked up a tool kit and followed at an easy jog.

The sense of freedom was heady, dangerous.  Louis reminded himself that his suit's communication link included the Hindmost.  Things had to be said, and soon, but not in the puppeteer's hearing.

Proportions were wrong here.  The half-disassembled ships were too big.  The horizon was too close and too sharp.  An infinite black wall cut the brilliant, half-familiar starscape in half.  Seen through vacuum, the shapes of distant objects remained sharp and clear up to hundreds of thousands of miles away.

The nearest Ringworld ship, the intact one, looked to be half a mile distant.  It was more like a mile.  On the last voyage he had constantly misjudged the scale of things, and twenty-three years hadn't cured him.

He arrived puffing beneath the huge ship, to find an escalator built into one landing leg.  The ancient machinery wasn't working, of course.  He trudged up.

Chmeee was trying to work the controls of a big airlock.  He fished a grippy out of the kit Louis carried.  "Best not to burn through doors yet," he said.  "There is power."  He pried a cover off and worked at the innards.