Maedda was silent for a minute. “An undemonstrable proof,” he said.

“Why?”

“If people know he’s here, the police will know it too.”

“Let them come and try to take him,” the girl said, and smiled.

“The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent,” Maedda said with sudden violence. “Even the SWU have accepted that!”

“I haven’t accepted it, Tuio. I’m not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, I’ll hurt back.”

“Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!”

“And power isn’t achieved by passivity.”

“We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?” Maedda appealed to Shevek. “The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”

Shevek looked at him, at the girl, and at the pawnbroker who stood listening tensely near the door. He said in a tired, quiet voice, “If I would be of use, use me. Maybe I could publish a statement on this in one of your papers. I did not come to Urras to hide. If all the people know I am here, maybe the government would be afraid to arrest me in public? I don’t know.”

“That’s it,” Maedda said. “Of course.” His dark eyes blazed with excitement. “Where the devil is Remeivi? Go call his sister, Siro, tell her to hunt him out and get him over here.—Write why you came here, write about Anarres, write why you won’t sell yourself to the government, write what you like—we’ll get it printed. Siro! Call Meisthe too.—We’ll hide you, but by God we’ll let every man in A-Io know you’re here, you’re with us!” The words poured out of him, his hands jerked as he spoke, and he walked quickly back and forth across the room. “And then, after the demonstration, after the strike, we’ll see. Maybe things will be different then! Maybe you won’t have to hide!”

“Maybe all the prison doors will fly open,” Shevek said. “Well, give me some paper, I’ll write.”

The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long time.

• • •

He spent one day in the attic of a tenement in Joking Lane, and two nights and a day in a basement under a used-furniture store, a strange dim place full of empty mirror frames and broken bedsteads. He wrote. They brought him what he had written, printed, within a few hours: at first in the newspaper Modern Age, and later, after the Modern Age presses had been closed down and the editors arrested, as handbills run on a clandestine press, along with plans and incitations for the demonstration and general strike. He did not read over what he had written. He did not listen closely to Maedda and the others, who described the enthusiasm with which the papers were read, the spreading acceptance of the plan for the strike, the effect his presence at the demonstration would make in the eyes of the world. When they left him alone, sometimes he took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and looked at the coded notes and equations of the General Temporal Theory. He looked at them and could not read them. He did not understand them. He put the notebook away again and sat with his head between his hands.