“All very well. Saio’s our current star, no doubt of that. Least of all in his own mind, eh, Saio? But what’s that to do with the price of cheese? Where’s your General Temporal Theory?”

“In my head,” said Shevek with a broad, genial smile.

There was a very little pause.

Oiie asked him if he had seen the work on relativity theory by an alien physicist, Ainsetain of Terra. Shevek had not. They were intensely interested in it, except for Atro, who had outlived intensity. Pae ran off to his room to get Shevek a copy of the translation. “It’s several hundred years old, but there’s fresh ideas in it for us,” he said.

“Maybe,” said Atro, “but none of these offworlders can follow our physics. The Hainish call it materialism, and the Terrans call it mysticism, and then they both give up. Don’t let this fad for everything alien sidetrack you, Shevek. They’ve got nothing for us. Dig your own pigweed, as my father used to say.” He gave his senile snort and levered himself up out of the chair. “Come on out for a turn in the Grove with me. No wonder you’re stuffy, cooped up in here.”

“The doctor says I am to stay in this room three days. I might be—infected? Infectious?”

“Never pay any attention to doctors, my dear fellow.”

“Perhaps in this case, though, Dr. Atro,” Pae suggested in his easy, conciliating voice.

“After all, the doctor’s from the Government, isn’t he?” said Chifoilisk, with evident malice.

“Best man they could find, I’m sure,” Atro said unsmiling, and took his leave without urging Shevek further. Chifoilisk went with him. The two younger men stayed with Shevek, talking physics, for a long time.

With immense pleasure, and with that same sense of profound recognition, of finding something the way it was meant to be, Shevek discovered for the first time in his life the conversation of his equals.

Mitis, though a splendid teacher, had never been able to follow him into the new areas of theory that he had, with her encouragement, begun to explore. Gvarab was the only person he had met whose training and ability were comparable to his own, and he and Gvarab had met too late, at the very end of her life. Since those days Shevek had worked with many people of talent, but because he had never been a full-time member of the Abbenay Institute, he had never been able to take them far enough; they remained bogged down in the old problems, the classical Sequency physics. He had had no equals. Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last.

It was a revelation, a liberation. Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.