Shevek sat down across the room, clearing a pile of papers off a bench to do so; the physics office was of course communal, but Sabul kept this back room of the two littered with materials he was using, so that there never seemed to be quite room for anyone else. Shevek looked down at the book he still held, then out the window. He felt, and looked, rather ill. He also looked tense; but with Sabul he had never been shy or awkward, as he often was with people whom he would have liked to know. “I didn’t know you were translating it,” he said.

“Translated it, edited it. Polished some of the rougher spots, filled in transitions you’d left out, and so forth. Couple of decads’ work. You should be proud of it, your ideas to a large extent form the groundwork of the finished book.”

It consisted entirely of Shevek’s and Atro’s ideas.

“Yes,” Shevek said. He looked down at his hands. Presently he said, “I’d like to publish the paper I wrote this quarter on Reversibility. It ought to go to Atro. It would interest him. He’s still hung up on causation.”

“Publish it? Where?”

“In Iotic, I meant—on Urras. Send it to Atro, like this last one, and he’ll put it in one of the journals there.”

“You can’t give them a work to publish that hasn’t been printed here.”

“But that’s what we did with this one. All this, except my rebuttal, came out in the Ieu Eun Review—before this came out here.”

“I couldn’t prevent that, but why do you think I hurried this into print? You don’t think everybody in PDC approves of our trading ideas with Urras like this, do you? Defense insists that every word that leaves here on those freighters be passed by a PDC-approved expert. And on top of that, do you think all the provincial physicists who don’t get in on this pipeline to Urras don’t begrudge our using it? Think they aren’t envious? There are people lying in wait, lying in wait for us to make a false step. If we’re ever caught doing it, we’ll lose that mail slot on the Urrasti freighters. You see the picture now?”

“How did the Institute get that mail slot in the first place?”

“Pegvur’s election to the PDC, ten years ago.” Pegvur had been a physicist of moderate distinction. “I’ve trod damned carefully to keep it, ever since. See?”

Shevek nodded.

“In any case, Atro doesn’t want to read that stuff of yours. I looked that paper over and gave it back to you decads ago. When are you going to stop wasting time on these reactionary theories Gvarab clings to? Can’t you see she’s wasted her whole life on ’em? If you keep at it, you’re going to make a fool of yourself. Which, of course, is your inalienable right. But you’re not going to make a fool of me.”

“What if I submit the paper for publication here, in Pravic, then?”