“How did the Institute get that mail slot in the first place?”

“Pegvur’s election to the PDC, ten years ago.” Pegvur had been a physicist of moderate distinction. “I’ve trod damned carefully to keep it, ever since. See?”

Shevek nodded.

“In any case, Atro doesn’t want to read that stuff of yours. I looked that paper over and gave it back to you decads ago. When are you going to stop wasting time on these reactionary theories Gvarab clings to? Can’t you see she’s wasted her whole life on ’em? If you keep at it, you’re going to make a fool of yourself. Which, of course, is your inalienable right. But you’re not going to make a fool of me.”

“What if I submit the paper for publication here, in Pravic, then?”

“Waste of time.”

Shevek absorbed this with a slight nod. He got up, lanky and angular, and stood a moment, remote among his thoughts. The winter light lay harsh on his hair, which he now wore pulled back in a queue, and his still face. He came to the desk and took a copy off the little stack of new books. “I’d like to send one of these to Mitis,” he said.

“Take all you want. Listen. If you think you know what you’re doing better than I do, then submit that paper to the Press, You don’t need permission! This isn’t some kind of hierarchy, you know! I can’t stop you. All I can do is give you my advice.”

“You’re the Press Syndicate’s consultant on manuscripts in physics,” Shevek said. “I thought I’d save time for everyone by asking you now.”

His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.

“Save time, what do you mean?” Sabul growled, but Sabul was also an Odonian: he writhed as if physically tormented by his own hypocrisy, turned away from Shevek, turned back to him, and said spitefully, his voice thick with anger, “Go ahead! Submit the damned thing! I’ll declare myself incompetent to give counsel on it. I’ll tell them to consult Gvarab. She’s the Simultaneity expert, not I. The mystical gagaist! The universe as a giant harp-string, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I suppose? The fact is that I am incompetent — in other words, unwilling — to counsel PDC or the Press on intellectual excrement!”

“The work I’ve done for you,” Shevek said, “is part of the work I’ve done following Gvarab’s ideas in Simultaneity, If you want one, you’ll have to stand the other. Grain grows best in shit, as we say in Northsetting.”

He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from Sabul, said goodbye and left.

He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without apparent violence. But violence had been done.

As Mitis had predicted, he was “Sabul’s man.” Sabul had ceased to be a functioning physicist years ago; his high reputation was built on expropriations from other minds, Shevek was to do the thinking, and Sabul would take the credit.

Obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which Shevek would denounce and relinquish. Only he would not. He needed Sabul. He wanted to publish what he wrote and to send it to the men who could understand it, the Urrasti physicists; he needed their ideas, their criticism, their collaboration.

So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I’ll give you that. Refuse me and I’ll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?

But all I want to do is get the job done, Shevek pleaded in his mind, as he walked across the mall towards the domicile quadrangle in the grey, windy afternoon. It’s my duty, it’s my joy, it’s the purpose of my whole life. The man I have to work with is competitive, a dominance-seeker, a profiteer, but I can’t change that; if I want to work, have to work with him.

He thought about Mitis and her warning. He thought about the Northsetting Institute and the party the night before he left. It seemed very long ago now, and so childishly peaceful and secure that he could have wept in nostalgia. As he passed under the porch of the Life Sciences Building a girl passing looked sidelong at him, and he thought that she looked like that girl — what was her name? — the one with short hair, who had eaten so many fried cakes the night of the party. He stopped and turned, but the girl was gone around the corner. Anyhow she had had long hair. Gone, gone, everything gone. He came out from the shelter of the porch into the wind. There was a fine rain on the wind, sparse. Rain was sparse when it fell at all. This was a dry world. Dry, pale, inimical. “Inimical!” Shevek said out loud in Iotic. He had never heard the language spoken; it sounded very strange. The rain stung his face like thrown gravel. It was an inimical rain. His sore throat had been joined by a terrific headache, of which he had only just become aware. He got to Room 46 and lay down on the bed platform, which seemed to be much farther down than usual. He shook, and could not stop shaking. He pulled the orange blanket up around him and huddled up, trying to sleep, but he could not stop shaking, because he was under constant atomic bombardment from all sides, increasing as the temperature increased.

He had never been ill, and never known any physical discomfort worse than tiredness. Having no idea what a high fever was like, he thought, during the lucid intervals of that long night, that he was going insane. Fear of madness drove him to seek help when day came. He was too frightened of himself to ask help from his neighbors on the corridor: he had heard himself raving in the night. He dragged himself to the local clinic, eight blocks away, the cold streets bright with sunrise spinning solemnly about him. At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light pneumonia and told him to go to bed in Ward Two. He protested. The aide accused him of egoizing and explained that if he went home a physician would have to go to the trouble of calling on him there and arranging private care for him. He went to bed in Ward Two. All the other people in the ward were old. An aide came and offered him a glass of water and a pill. “What is it?” Shevek asked suspiciously. His teeth were chattering again.

“Antipyretic.”

“What’s that?”

“Bring down the fever.”

“I don’t need it.”

The aide shrugged. “All right,” she said, and went on.

Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ill: a result of their society’s very successful prophylaxy, and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use of the words “healthy” and “sick.” They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was immoral. They fought shy of pills and shots. As middle age and old age came on, most of them changed their view. The pain got worse than the shame. The aide gave the old men in Ward Two their medicine, and they joked with her. Shevek watched with dull incomprehension.

Later on there was a doctor with an injection needle.

“I don’t want it,” Shevek said. “Stop egoizing,” the doctor said. “Roll over.” Shevek obeyed.

Later on there was a woman who held a cup of water for him, but he shook so much that the water was spilt, wetting the blanket. “Let me alone,” he said. “Who are you?” She told him, but he did not understand. He told her to go away, he felt very well. Then he explained to her why the cyclic hypothesis, though unproductive in itself, was essential to his approach to a possible theory of Simultaneity, a cornerstone. He spoke partly in his own language and partly in Iotic, and wrote the formulas and equations on a slate with a piece of chalk so that she and the rest of the group would understand, as he was afraid they would misunderstand about the cornerstone. She touched his face and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She was not there, she had gone.