“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect; and that’s what you can win us. Transilience—if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands—that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?”

“I’ve been working on Skask’s gravitational hypothesis. I have a feeling he’s wrong in using partial differential equations only.”

“But your last paper was on gravity. When are you going to get to the real thing?”

“You know that the means are the end, to us Odonians,” Shevek said lightly. “Besides, I can’t very well present a theory of time that omits gravity, can I?”

“You mean you’re giving it to us in bits and dribbles?” Atro asked, suspiciously. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d better look over that last paper. Some of it didn’t make much sense to me. My eyes get so tired these days. I think that damnable magnifier-projector-thingy I have to use for reading has something wrong with it. It doesn’t seem to project the words clearly any more.”

Shevek looked at the old man with compunction and affection, but he did not tell him any more about the state of his theory.

• • •

Invitations to receptions, dedications, openings, and so forth were delivered to Shevek daily. He went to some, because he had come to Urras on a mission and must try to fulfill it: he must urge the idea of brotherhood, he must represent, in his own person, a solidarity of the Two Worlds. He spoke, and people listened to him and said, “How true.”

He wondered why the government did not stop him from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his own purposes, the extent of the control and censorship they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.”

He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations.

But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his isolation. He wasn’t doing what he had come here to do. It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was that—as always—he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras in all these months.