“They’ll get worse,” Shevek said lightly. “How’s everything here?”

“Bad, bad.” Sabul shook his grizzled head. “This is a bad time for pure science, for the intellectual.”

“Is there ever a good one?”

Sabul produced an unnatural chuckle.

“Did anything come in for us on the summer shipments from Urras?” Shevek inquired, clearing off sitting room on the bench. He sat down and crossed his legs. His light skin had tanned and the fine down that covered his face had bleached to silver while he worked in the fields in Southrising. He looked spare, and sound, and young, compared to Sabul. Both men were aware of the contrast.

“Nothing of interest.”

“No reviews of the Principles?”

“No.” Sabul’s tone was surly, more like himself.

“No letters?”

“No.”

“That’s odd.”

“What’s odd about it? What did you expect, a lectureship at Ieu Eun University? The Seo Oen Prize?”

“I expected reviews and replies. There’s been time.” He said this as Sabul said, “Hardly been time for reviews yet.”

There was a pause.

“You’ll have to realize, Shevek, that a mere conviction of rightness isn’t self-justifying. You worked hard on the book, I know. I worked hard editing it, too, trying to make clear that it wasn’t just an irresponsible attack on Sequency theory, but had positive aspects. But if other physicists don’t see value in your work, then you’ve got to begin looking at the values you hold and seeing where the discrepancy lies. If it means nothing to other people, what’s the good of it? What’s its function?”

“I’m a physicist, not a functions analyst,” Shevek said amiably.

“Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst. You’re thirty, aren’t you? By that age a man should know not only his cellular function but his organic function—what his optimum role is the social organism is. You haven’t had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most people—”

“No. Since I was ten or twelve I’ve known what kind of work I had to do.”

“What a boy thinks he likes to do isn’t always what his society needs from him.”

“I’m thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.”

“You’ve reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment. First the Northsetting Regional Institute—”

“And a forest project, and farm projects, and practical training, and block committees, and volunteer work since the drought; the usual amount of necessary kleggich. I like doing it, in fact. But I do physics too. What are you getting at?”

As Sabul did not answer but merely glared under his heavy, oily brows, Shevek added, “You might as well say it plainly, because you’re not going to arrive at it by way of my social conscience.”

“Do you consider the work you’ve done here functional?”

“Yes. ‘The more that is organized, the more central the organism: centrality here implying the field of real function.’ Tomar’s Definitions. Since temporal physics attempts to organize everything comprehensible to the human mind, it is by definition a centrally functional activity.”