“Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.” He smiled again, rather less ingenuously. When Pae had shut the door behind himself, Shevek suddenly stood up. “You filthy profiteering liar!” he said in Pravic, white with rage, his hands clenched to keep them from picking something up and throwing it after Pae.

Efor came in carrying a cup and saucer on a tray. He stopped short, looking apprehensive.

“It’s all right, Efor. He didn’t—he didn’t want the cup. You can take it all now.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Listen. I should like no visitors, for a while. Can you keep them out?”

“Easy, sir. Anybody special?”

“Yes, him. Anybody. Say I am working.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that, sir,” Efor said, his wrinkles melting with malice for an instant; then with respectful familiarity, “Nobody you don’t want get past me,” and finally with formal propriety, “Thank you, sir, and good morning.”

Food, and adrenalin, had dispelled Shevek’s paralysis. He walked up and down the room, irritable and restless. He wanted to act. He had spent nearly a year now doing nothing, except being a fool. It was time he did something.

Well, what had he come here to do?

To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it. The rights of an Odonian and of a human being.

His benevolent and protective hosts let him work, and maintained him while working, all right. The problem came on the third limb. But he himself had not got there yet. He had not done his job. He couldn’t share what he didn’t have.

He went back to the desk, sat down, and took a couple of scraps of heavily scribbled paper out of the least accessible and least useful pocket of his tight-fitting, stylish trousers. He spread these scraps out with his fingers and looked at them. It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul, writing very small, in abbreviations, on shreds of paper. He knew now why Sabul did it: he was possessive and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.

Again Shevek sat quite motionless, his head bowed, studying the two little bits of paper on which he had noted down certain essential points of the General Temporal Theory, so far as it went.

For the next three days he sat at the desk and looked at the two bits of paper.

At times he got up and walked around the room, or wrote something down, or employed the desk computer, or asked Efor to bring him something to eat, or lay down and fell asleep.

Then he went back to the desk and sat there.

On the evening of the third day he was sitting, for a change, on the marble seat by the hearth. He had sat down there on the first night he entered his room, this gracious prison cell, and generally sat there when he had visitors. He had no visitors at the moment, but he was thinking about Saio Pae.