“Needn’t take half the day about it. Well, I won’t wait. Don’t want to take up what’s left of your morning. By the way, did you see the latest Bulletin of the Space Research Foundation? They print Reumere’s plans for the ansible.”
“What is the ansible?”
“It’s what he’s calling an instantaneous communication device. He says if the temporaliste — that’s you, of course • — wifl just work out the time-inertia equations, the engineers — that’s him — will be able to build the damned thing, test it, and thus incidentally prove the validity of the theory, within months or weeks.”
“Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.” He smiled again, rather less ingenuously. When Fae had shut the door behind himself, Shevek suddenly stood up. “You filthy profiteering liarl he said in Pravic, white with rage, his hands clenched to keep them from picking something up and throwing It after Pae.
Efor came in carrying a cup and saucer on a tray. He stopped short, looking apprehensive.
“It’s all right, Efor. He didn’t — He didn’t want the cup. You can take it all now.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Listen. I should like no visitors, for a while. Can you keep them out?”
“Easy sir. Anybody special?”
“Yes, him. Anybody. Say I am working.”
“He’ll be glad to hear that, air,” Efor said, his wrinkles melting with malice for an instant; then with respectful familiarity, “Nobody you don’t want get past me,” and finally with formal propriety, “Thank you, sir, and good morning.”
Food, and adrenalin, had dispelled Shevek’s paralysis. He walked up and down the room, irritable and restless. He wanted to act He had spent nearly a year now doing nothing, except being a fool. It was time he did something.
Well, what had he come here to do?
To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained •while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it The rights of an Odonian and of a human being.
His benevolent and protective hosts let him work, and maintained him while working, all right The problem came on the third limb. But he himself had not got there yet. He had not done his job. He couldn’t share what he didn’t have.
He went back to the desk, sat down, and took a couple of scraps of heavily scribbled paper out of the least accessible and least useful pocket of his tight-fitting, stylish trousers. He spread these scraps out with his fingers and looked at them. It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul, writing very small, in abbreviations, on shreds of paper. He knew now why Sabul did it: he was possessive and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.
Again Shevek sat quite motionless, his head bowed, studying the two little bits of paper on which he had noted down certain essential points of the General Temporal Theory, so far as it went.
For the next three days he sat at the desk and looked at the two bits of paper.
At times he got up and walked around the room, or Wrote something down, or employed the desk computer, or asked Efor to bring him something to eat, or lay down and fell asleep. Then he went back to the desk and sat there.
On the evening of the third day he was sitting, for a change, on the marble seat by the hearth. He had sat down there on the first night he entered this room, this gracious prison cell, and generally sat there when he had visitors. He had no visitors at the moment, but he was thinking about Saio Fae.
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument Yet its potentiality had been real, and though deformed had not been lost. Pae was a very clever physicist. Or, more exactly, he was very clever about physics. He had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most promising field. He had the flak for where to set to work, just as Shevek did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a singularly important attribute in a scientist. It was Pae who had given Shevek the book translated from the Terran, the symposium on the theories of Relativity, the ideas of which had come to occupy his mind more and more of late. Was it possible that after all he had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae, his enemy? That he had come seeking him, knowing that he might receive from his enemy what he could not receive from his brothers and friends, what no Anarresti could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien: news.…
He forgot Pae. He thought about the book. He could not state clearly to himself what, exactly, he had found so stimulating about it. Most of the physics in it was, after all, outdated; the methods were cumbersome, and the alien attitude sometimes quite disagreeable. The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, “Number the Indisputable,” as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.
Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct — in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to prove it — the Saeba variables and the theories of uifinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.
But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the urt-provable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.
In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence — the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days, and indeed these last ten years — really matter?
He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Sae-ban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.