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A World Out Of Time—Larry Niven



To Owen Lock and Judy-Lynn del Rey, who edited the manuscript of this book and
made me do some necessary rewriting: Where the hell were you when Ringworld
was published?
To anyone who owns a first edition of Ringworld: Hang on to that. It’s the only
version in which the Earth rotates in the wrong direction (Chapter 1).


CHAPTER 1 -- RAMMER
I

Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose
outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his
frozen body. He had had it bad.

He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed
for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the
risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He’d been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They’d been
dying.
Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret,
but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.
Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy—
but empty.

The State had use for an empty man.
Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He
stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-walled
coffin, and sleep and pain.
The pain was gone.
He sat up at once.
And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not
swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He
reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young
man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip; his arms were shorter than he had
expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully.
His arms. Scrawny, knobby—and not his.
The man in the jumpsuit said, „Are you all right?“
„Yeah,“ said Corbell. My God, what have they done to me? I thought I was ready for
anything, but this—He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all
right. This was certainly somebody else’s body, but it didn’t seem to have cancer,
either. „What’s the date? How long has it been?“
A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. „Twenty-one ninety, your dating.
You won’t have to worry about our dating.“
That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question: