“I am well,” he said at last, at random.

It did not appease the man. “Please come with me. I’m a doctor.”

“I am well.”

“Please come with me, Dr. Shevek!”

“You are a doctor,” Shevek said after a pause. “I am not. I am called Shevek.”

The doctor, a short, fair, bald man, grimaced with anxiety. “You should be in your cabin, sir—danger of infection—you weren’t to be in contact with anybody but me, I’ve been through two weeks of disinfection for nothing, God damn that captain! Please come with me, sir. I’ll be held responsible—”

Shevek perceived that the little man was upset. He felt no compunction, no sympathy; but even where he was, in absolute solitude, the one law held, the one law he had ever acknowledged. “All right,” he said, and stood up.

He still felt dizzy, and his right shoulder hurt. He knew the ship must be moving, but there was no sense of motion; there was only a silence, an awful, utter silence, just outside the walls. The doctor led him through silent metal corridors to a room.

It was a very small room, with seamed, blank walls. It repelled Shevek, reminding him of a place he did not want to remember. He stopped in the doorway. But the doctor urged and pleaded, and he went on in.

He sat down on the shelf-like bed, still feeling lightheaded and lethargic, and watched the doctor incuriously. He felt he ought to be curious; this man was the first Urrasti he had ever seen. But he was too tired. He could have lain back and gone straight to sleep.

He had been up all the night before, going through his papers. Three days ago he had seen Takver and the children off to Peace-and-Plenty, and ever since then he had been busy, running out to the radio tower to exchange last-minute messages with people on Urras, discussing plans and possibilities with Bedap and the others. All through those hurried days, ever since Takver left, he had felt not that he was doing all the things he did, but that they were doing him. He had been in other people’s hands. His own will had not acted. It had had no need to act. It was his own will that had started it all, that had created this moment and these walls about him now. How long ago? Years. Five years ago, in the silence of night in Chakar in the mountains, when he had said to Takver, “I will go to Abbenay and unbuild walls.” Before then, even; long before, in the Dust, in the years of famine and despair, when he had promised himself that he would never act again but by his own free choice. And following that promise he had brought himself here: to this moment without time, this place without an earth, this little room, this prison.

The doctor had examined his bruised shoulder (the bruise puzzled Shevek; he had been too tense and hurried to realize what had been going on at the landing field, and had never felt the rock strike him). Now he turned to him holding a hypodermic needle.