Early in the summer PDC put up posters suggesting that people shorten their working day by an hour or so, since the protein issue at commons was now insufficient for full normal expense of energy. The exuberant activity of the city streets had already been slowing down. People off work early loitered in the squares, played bowls in the dry parks, sat in workshop doorways and struck up conversation with passersby. The population of the city was visibly thinned, as several thousands had volunteered or been posted to emergency farm work. But mutual trust allayed depression or anxiety. “We’ll see each other through,” they said, serenely. And great impulses of vitality ran just under the surface. When the wells in the northern suburbs failed, temporary mains from other districts were laid by volunteers working in their free time, skilled and unskilled, adults and adolescents, and the job was done in thirty hours.

Late in summer Shevek was posted to an emergency farm draft to Red Springs community in Southrising. On the promise of some rain that had fallen in the equatorial storm season, they were trying to get a crop of grain holum planted and reaped before the drought returned.

He had been expecting an emergency posting, since his construction job was finished and he had listed himself as available in the general labor pool. All summer he had done nothing but teach his courses, read on, go out on whatever volunteer calls came up in their block and in the city, and come home to Takver and the baby. Takver had gone back to her laboratory, mornings only, after five decads. As a nursing mother she was entitled to both protein and carbohydrate supplements at meals, and she always availed herself of both; their friends could not share extra food with her any more, there was no extra food. She was thin but flourishing, and the baby was small but solid.

Shevek got a great deal of pleasure from the baby. Having sole charge of her in the mornings (they left her in the nursery only while he taught or did volunteer work), he felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood. An alert, responsive baby, she gave Shevek the perfect audience for his suppressed verbal fantasies, what Takver called his crazy streak. He would sit the baby on his knees and address wild cosmological lectures to her, explaining how time was actually space turned inside out, the chronon being thus the everted viscera of the quantum, and distance one of the accidental properties of light. He gave extravagant and ever-changing nicknames to the baby, and recited ridiculous mnemonics at her: Time is a manacle, Time is tyrannical, Supermechanical, Superorganical—pop!—and at the pop, the baby arose a short distance into the air, squeaking and waving her fat fists. Both received great satisfaction from these exercises. When he received his posting it was a wrench. He had hoped for something close to Abbenay, not clear around in Southrising. But along with the unpleasant necessity of leaving Takver and the baby for sixty days came the steady assurance of coming back to them. So long as he had that, he had no complaints.