“Were you at the Institute?” Takver asked, examining him as he sat beside her.

“Just went by there. Sabul left me a note this morning at the Syndicate.” Shevek drank off his fruit juice and lowered the cup, revealing a curious set to his mouth, a nonexpression. “He said the Physics Federation has a full-time posting to fill. Autonomous, permanent.”

“For you, you mean? There? At the Institute?”

He nodded.

“Sabul told you?”

“He’s trying to enlist you,” Bedap said.

“Yes, I think so. If you can’t uproot it, domesticate it, as we used to say in Northsetting.” Shevek suddenly and spontaneously laughed. “It is funny, isn’t it?” he said.

“No,” said Takver. “It isn’t funny. It’s disgusting. How could you go talk to him, even? After all the slander he’s spread about you, and the lies about the Principles being stolen from him, and not telling you that the Urrasti gave you that prize, and then just last year, when he got those kids who organized the lecture series broken up and sent away because of your ‘crypto-authoritarian influence’ over them—you an authoritarian!—that was sickening, unforgivable. How can you be civil to a man like that?”

“Well, it isn’t all Sabul, you know. He’s just a spokesman.”

“I know, but he loves to be the spokesman. And he’s been so squalid for so long! Well, what did you say to him?”

“I temporized—as you might say,” Shevek said, and laughed again. Takver glanced at him again, knowing now that he was, for all his control, in a state of extreme tension or excitement.

“You didn’t turn him down flat, then?”

“I said that I’d resolved some years ago to accept no regular work postings, so long as I was able to do theoretical work. So he said that since it was an autonomous post I’d be completely free to go on with the research I’d been doing, and the purpose of giving me the post was to—let’s see how he put it—‘to facilitate access to experimental equipment at the Institute, and to the regular channels of publication and dissemination.’ The PDC press, in other words.”

“Why, then you’ve won,” Takver said, looking at him with a queer expression. “You’ve won. They’ll print what you write. It’s what you wanted when we came back here five years ago. The walls are down.”

“There are walls behind the walls,” Bedap said.

“I’ve won only if I accept the posting. Sabul is offering to… legalize me. To make me official. In order to dissociate me from the Syndicate of Initiative. Don’t you see that as his motive, Dap?”

“Of course,” Bedap said. His face was somber. “Divide to weaken.”

“But to take Shev back into the Institute, and print what he writes on the PDC press, is to give implied approval to the whole Syndicate, isn’t it?”

“It might mean that to most people,” Shevek said.

“No, it won’t,” Bedap said. “It’ll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists. But the good Odonians at the Institute gently showed him his errors and he has returned to the path of social-organic truth. Leaving the Syndicate of Initiative shorn of its one conceivable claim to the attention of anybody on Anarres or Urras.”