“Looking for something?”

He put his question once more.

The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but stooped and very thin, looked him over. “What you want to get there for?”

“I’m looking for a person who lives there.”

“Where you from?”

“I need to get to this street, Joking Lane. Is it far from here?”

“Where you from, mister?”

“I am from Anarres, from the Moon,” Shevek said angrily. “I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight.”

“You’re him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you doing here?”

“Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell them I’m here, or will you help me?”

“God damn,” the man said. “God damn. Look—” He hesitated, was about to say something, about to say something else, said, “You just go on,” and in the same breath though apparently with a complete change of mind, said, “All right. I’m closing. Take you there. Hold on. God damn!”

He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shutters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a sharp pace, saying, “Come on!”

They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit darkness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal. They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly shops. Shevek’s guide stopped and knocked on the shuttered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker conferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and they both entered. A girl had let them in. “Tuio’s in back, come on,” she said, looking up into Shevek’s face in the weak light from a back hallway. “Are you him?” Her voice was faint and urgent; she smiled strangely. “Are you really him?”

Tuio Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which he had been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes off Shevek.

“He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He say he the, you know, the one from Anarres.”

“You are, aren’t you?” Maedda said slowly. “Shevek. What are you doing here?” He stared at Shevek with alarmed, luminous eyes.

“Looking for help.”

“Who sent you to me?”

“The first man I asked. I don’t know who you are. I asked him where I could go, he said to come to you.”

“Does anybody else know you’re here?”

“They don’t know I’ve gone. Tomorrow they will.”

“Go get Remeivi,” Maedda said to the girl. “Sit down, Dr. Shevek. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. “I escaped,” he said. “From the University, from the jail. I don’t know where to go. Maybe it’s all jails here. I came here because they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might help each other.”