Much that he had seen recently was awesome to him because it was so old, centuries old, even millennia. The Foundation, on the contrary, was new: built within the last ten years, in the lavish, elegant style of the times. The architecture was dramatic. Great masses of color were used. Heights and distances were exaggerated. The laboratories were spacious and airy, the attached factories and machine shops were housed behind splendid Neo-Saetan porticos of arches and columns. The hangars were huge multicolored domes, translucent and fantastic. The men who worked there were, in contrast, very quiet and solid. They took Shevek away from his usual escorts and showed him through the whole Foundation, including every stage of the experimental interstellar propulsion system they were working on, from the computers and the drawing boards to a half-finished ship, enormous and surreal in the orange, violet, and yellow light within the vast geodesic hangar.

“You have so much,” Shevek said to the engineer who had taken charge of him, a man named Oegeo. “You have so much to work with, and you work with it so well. This is magnificent—the coordination, the cooperation, the greatness of the enterprise.”

“Couldn’t swing anything on this scale where you come from, eh?” the engineer said, grinning.

“Spaceships? Our space fleet is the ships the Settlers came in from Urras—built here on Urras—nearly two centuries ago. To build just a ship to carry grain across the sea, a barge, it takes a year’s planning, a big effort of our economy.”

Oegeo nodded. “Well, we’ve got the goods, all right. But you know, you’re the man who can tell us when to scrap this whole job—throw it all away.”

“Throw it away? What do you mean?”

“Faster than light travel,” Oegeo said. “Transilience. The old physics says it isn’t possible. The Terrans say it isn’t possible. But the Hainish, who after all invented the drive we use now, say that it is possible, only they don’t know how to do it, because they’re just learning temporal physics from us. Evidently if it’s in anybody’s pocket, anybody in the known worlds, Dr. Shevek, it’s in yours.”

Shevek looked at him with a distancing stare, his light eyes hard and clear. “I am a theoretician, Oegeo. Not a designer.”

“If you provide the theory, the unification of Sequency and Simultaneity in a general field theory of time, then we’ll design the ships. And arrive on Terra, or Hain, or the next galaxy, in the instant we leave Urras! This tub,” and he looked down the hangar at the looming framework of the half-built ship swimming in shafts of violet and orange light, “will be as outdated as an oxcart.”

“You dream as you build, superbly,” Shevek said, still withdrawn and stern. There was much more that Oegeo and the others wanted to show him and discuss with him, but before long he said, with a simplicity that precluded any ironic intention, “I think you had better take me back to the keepers.”