He was sketching out notes for a series of hypotheses which led to a coherent theory of Simultaneity. But that began to seem a petty goal; there was a much greater one, a unified theory of Time, to be reached, if he could just get to it. He felt that he was in a locked room in the middle of a great open country: it was all around him, if he could find the way out, the way clear. The intuition became an obsession. During that autumn and winter he got more and more out of the habit of sleeping. A couple of hours at night and a couple more sometime during the day were enough for him, and such naps were not the kind of profound sleep he had always had before, but almost a waking on another level, they were so full of dreams. He dreamed vividly, and the dreams were part of his work. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like dividing soap bubbles. He got up and scribbled down, without really waking, the mathematical formula that had been eluding him for days. He saw space shrink in upon him like the walls of a collapsing sphere driving in and in towards a central void, closing, closing, and he woke with a scream for help locked in his throat, struggling in silence to escape from the knowledge of his own eternal emptiness.
On a cold afternoon late in winter he stopped in at the physics office on his way home from the library to see if there were any letters for him in the pickup box. He had no reason to expect any, since he had never written any of his friends at Northsetting Regional; but he hadn’t been feeling very well for a couple of days, he had disproved some of his own most beautiful hypotheses and brought himself after half a year’s hard work right around to where he had started from, the phasic model was simply too vague to be useful, his throat felt sore, he wished there was a letter from somebody he knew, or maybe somebody in the physics office to say hello to, at least But nobody was there except Sabul.
“Look here, Shevek.”
He looked at the book the older man held out: a thin book, bound in green, the Circle of Life on the cover. He took it and looked at the title page: “A Critique of Atro’s Infinite Sequency Hypothesis.” It was his essay, Atro’s acknowledgment and defense, and his reply. It had all been translated or retranslated into Pravic, and printed by the PDC presses in Abbenay. There were two authors’ names: Sabul, Shevek.
Sabul craned his neck over the copy Shevek held, and gloated. His growl became throaty and chuckling. “We’ve finished Atro. Finished him, the damned profiteer! Now let them try to talk about ‘puerile imprecision’!” Sabul had nursed ten years’ resentment against the Physics Review of Ieu Eun University, which had referred to his theoretical work as “crippled by provincialism and the puerile imprecision with which Odonian dogma infects every area of thought.”
“They’ll see who’s provincial now!” he said, grinning. In nearly a year’s acquaintance Shevek could not recall having seen him smile.
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?”
“Waste of time.”
Shevek absorbed this with a slight nod. He got up, lanky and angular, and stood a moment, remote among his thoughts. The winter light lay harsh on his hair, which he now wore pulled back in a queue, and his still face. He came to the desk and took a copy off the little stack of new books. “I’d like to send one of these to Mitis,” he said.
“Take all you want. Listen. If you think you know what you’re doing better than I do, then submit that paper to the Press, You don’t need permission! This isn’t some kind of hierarchy, you know! I can’t stop you. All I can do is give you my advice.”
“You’re the Press Syndicate’s consultant on manuscripts in physics,” Shevek said. “I thought I’d save time for everyone by asking you now.”
His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.
“Save time, what do you mean?” Sabul growled, but Sabul was also an Odonian: he writhed as if physically tormented by his own hypocrisy, turned away from Shevek, turned back to him, and said spitefully, his voice thick with anger, “Go ahead! Submit the damned thing! I’ll declare myself incompetent to give counsel on it. I’ll tell them to consult Gvarab. She’s the Simultaneity expert, not I. The mystical gagaist! The universe as a giant harp-string, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Harmonies, I suppose? The fact is that I am incompetent — in other words, unwilling — to counsel PDC or the Press on intellectual excrement!”
“The work I’ve done for you,” Shevek said, “is part of the work I’ve done following Gvarab’s ideas in Simultaneity, If you want one, you’ll have to stand the other. Grain grows best in shit, as we say in Northsetting.”
He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from Sabul, said goodbye and left.
He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without apparent violence. But violence had been done.