But when at last it crawled into the station down the line, and they got a meal—a half loaf of holum bread and a bowl of soup—their gloom gave place to elation. By the time you got to the bottom of the bowl you noticed that the soup was pretty thin, but the first taste of it, the first taste had been wonderful, worth fasting for. They all agreed on that. They got back into the train laughing and joking together. They had seen each other through.

A truck-train convoy picked up the Abbenay passengers at Equator Hill and brought them the last five hundred miles. They came into the city late on a windy night of early autumn. It was getting on for midnight; the streets were empty. Wind flowed through them like a turbulent dry river. Over dim street lamps the stars flared with a bright shaken light. The dry storm of autumn and passion carried Shevek through the streets, half running, three miles to the northern quarter, alone in the dark city. He took the three steps of the porchway in one, ran down the hall, came to the door, opened it. The room was dark. Stars burned in the dark windows. “Takver!” he said, and heard the silence. Before he turned on the lamp, there in the dark, in the silence, all at once, he learned what separation was.

Nothing was gone. There was nothing to be gone. Only Sadik and Takver were gone. The Occupations of Uninhabited Space turned softly, gleaming a little, in the draft from the open door.

There was a letter on the table. Two letters. One from Takver. It was brief: she had received an emergency posting to the Comestible Algae Experimental Development Laboratories in Northeast, for an indeterminate period. She wrote:

I could not in conscience refuse now. I went and talked to them at Divlab and also read their project sent in to Ecology at PDC, and it is true they need me because I have worked exactly on this algaeciliate-shrimp-kukuri cycle. I requested at Divlab that you be posted to Rolny but of course they won’t act on that until you also request it, and if this is not possible because of work at the Inst. then you won’t. After all if it goes on too long I will tell them get another geneticist, and come back! Sadik is very well and can say yite for light. It will not be very long. All, for life, your sister, Takver. Oh please come if you can.

The other note was scribbled on a tiny bit of paper: “Shevek: Physics off. on yr return. Sabul.”

Shevek roamed around the room. The storm, the impetus that had hurled him through the streets, was still in him. It had come up against the wall. He could go no farther, yet he must move. He looked in the closet. Nothing was in it but his winter coat and a shirt which Takver, who liked fine handwork, had embroidered for him; her few clothes were gone. The screen was folded back, showing the empty crib. The sleeping platform was not made up, but the orange blanket covered the rolled-up bedding neatly. Shevek came up against the table again, read Takver’s letter again. His eyes filled with tears of anger. A rage of disappointment shook him, a wrath, a foreboding.