where they could use the undamaged faster-than-light hyperdrive to return home. They set out to find a way to get the Lying Bastard off the Ringworld. Using their flycycles (similar to antigravity motorcycles), they try to reach the rim of the ring, where they hope to find some technology that will help them. It will take them months to cross the vast distance. When Teela develops "Plateau trance" (a kind of highway hypnosis), they are forced to land. On the ground, they encounter apparently primitive human natives who live in the crumbling ruins of a once-advanced city and think that the crew are the engineers who created the ring, and whom they revere as gods. The crew is attacked when they commit what the natives consider blasphemy (the misuse of certain technologies). They continue their journey, during which Nessus reveals some Puppeteer secrets: they have conducted experiments on both humans (breeding for luck via Birthright Lotteries: all of Teela's ancestors for six generations were born from winning the lottery) and Kzinti (breeding for reduced aggression via the Man-Kzin wars, which the Kzinti always lost). Speaker's outrage forces Nessus to flee and follow them from a safe distance. In a floating building over the ruins of a city, they find a map of the Ringworld and videos of its past civilization. While flying through a giant storm caused by air escaping through a hole in the Ring floor due to a meteoroid impact, Teela becomes separated from the others. While Louis and Speaker search for her, their flycycles are caught by an automated police trap designed to catch traffic offenders. They are trapped in the basement of a floating police station. Nessus enters the station to try to help them. In the station, they meet Halrloprillalar Hotrufan ("Prill"), a former crew member of a trading spaceship that collected plants and animals that couldn't adapt to the Ringworld. When her ship returned to the Ringworld the last time, they found that civilization had collapsed. The crew managed to enter the Ringworld, but some of them were killed and others suffered brain damage when the device that let them pass through the Ringworld floor failed. From her account, they learn that a mold was brought back from one of the original planets of the engineers by a spaceship like Prill's; it broke down the superconductors vital to the Ringworld civilization, dooming it. Teela