As soon as Shevek explained where he wanted to go, the clerk got a worried look, and went off for an atlas, which she opened on the counter between them. “Now look,” she said. She was an ugly little woman with buck teeth; her hands on the colored pages of the atlas were deft and soft. “That’s Rolny, see, the peninsula sticking down into the North Temaenian. It’s just a huge sandspit. There’s nothing on it at all but the marine laboratories away out there at the end, see? Then the coast’s all swamp and salt marsh till you get clear round here to Harmony—a thousand kilometers. And west of it is the Coast Barrens. The nearest you could get to Rolny would be some town in the mountains. But they’re not asking for emergency postings there; they’re pretty self-sufficing. Of course, you could go there anyhow,” she added in a slightly different tone.

“It’s too far from Rolny,” he said, looking at the map, noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated town where Takver had grown up, Round Valley. “Don’t they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Somebody to feed the fish?”

“I’ll check.”

The human/computer network of files in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of information concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each of the general economy of the worldwide society. “They just filled an emergency draft—that’s the partner, isn’t it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians and an experienced seiner. Staff complete.”

Shevek leaned his elbows on the counter and bowed his head, scratching it, a gesture of confusion and defeat masked by self-consciousness. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Look, brother, how long is the partner’s posting?”

“Indefinite.”

“But it’s a famine-prevention job, isn’t it? It’s not going to go on like this forever. It can’t! It’ll rain, this winter.”

He looked up into his sister’s earnest, sympathetic, harried face. He smiled a little, for he could not leave her effort to give hope without response.

“You’ll get back together. Meanwhile—”

“Yes. Meanwhile,” he said.

She awaited his decision.

It was his to make; and the options were endless. He could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place in the research station. He could live anywhere and do nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest commons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.

The identity of the words “work” and “play” in Pravic had, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word “work” in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both implied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. “The saint is never busy,” she had said, perhaps wistfully.