“By climbing up on a pile of dead children?” Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man’s feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro” did not hear him.
“No,” Atro went on, “you’ll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country’s threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it’s grand to see how the people close ranks when the flag’s in danger. You’re unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, you know, my dear fellow, is that it’s womanish. It simply doesn’t include the virile side of life. ‘Blood and steel, battle’s brightness’ as the old poet says. It doesn’t understand courage — love of the flag.”
Shevek was silent for a minute; then he said, gently, “That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags.”
When Atro had gone, Efor came in to take out the dinner tray. Shevek stopped him. He came up close to him, saying, “Excuse me, Efor,” and put a slip of paper down on the tray. On it he had written, “Is there a microphone in this room?”
The servant bent his head and read it, slowly, and then looked up at Shevek, a long look at short range. Then his eyes Danced for a second at the chimney of the fireplace.
“Bedroom?” Shevek inquired by the same means.
Efor shook his head, put the tray down, and followed Shevek into the bedroom. He shut the door behind him with the noiselessness of a good servant.
“Spotted that one first day, dusting,” he said with a grin that deepened the lines on his face into harsh ridges.
“Not in here?”
Efor shrugged. “Never spotted it. Could run the water in there, sir, like they do in the spy stories.”
They proceeded on into the magnificent gold and ivory temple of the shitstool. Efor turned on the taps and then looked around the walls. “No,” he said. “Don’t think so. And spy eye I could spot. Get onto them when I work for a man in Nio once. Can’t miss ’em once you get onto ’em.”
Shevek took another piece of paper out of his pocket and showed it to Efor. “Do you know where this came from?”
It was the note he had found in his coat, “Join with us your brothers.”
After a pause — he read slowly, moving his closed lips — Efor said, “I don’t know where it come from.”
Shevek was disappointed. It had occurred to him that Efor himself was in an excellent position to slip something into his “master’s” pocket.
“Know who it come from. In a manner.”
“Who? How can I get to them?”
Another pause. “Dangerous business, Mr, Shevek.” Ho turned away and increased the rush of water from the taps.
“I don’t want to involve you. If you can just tell me — tell me where to go. What I should ask for. Even one name.”
A still longer pause. Efor’s face looked pinched and hard. “I don’t—” he said, and stopped. Then he said, abruptly, and very low, “Look, Mr. Shevek, God knows they want you, we need you, but look, you don’t know what it’s like. How you going to hide? A man like you? Looking like you look? This a trap here, but it’s a trap anywhere. You can run but you can’t hide. I don’t know what to tell you. Give you names, sure. Ask any Nioti, he tell you where to go. We had about enough. We got to have some air to breathe. But you get caught, shot, how do I feel? I work for you eight months, I come to like you. To admire you. They approach me all the time. I say, “No. Let him be. A good man and he got no part of our troubles. Let him go back where he come from where the people are free. Let somebody go free from this God damned prison we living in!’”
“I cant go back. Not yet I want to meet these people.”
Efor stood silent Perhaps it was his life’s habit as a servant, as one who obeys, that made him nod at last and say, whispering, “Tuio Maedda, he who you want. In Joking Lane, in Old Town. The grocery.”
“Pae says I am forbidden to leave the campus. They can stop me if they see me take the train.”
“Taxi, maybe,” Efor said. “I call you one, you go down by the stairs. I know Kae Oimon on the stand. He got sense. But I don’t know.”
“All right. Right now. Pae was just here, he saw me, he thinks I’m staying in because I’m ill. What time is it?”
“Half past seven.”
“If I go now, I have the night to find where I should go. Call the taxi, Efor.”
“Ill pack you a bag, sir—”
“A bag of what?”
“You’ll need clothes—”
“I’m wearing clothes! Go on.”
“You cant just go with nothing,” Efor protested. This made him more anxious and uneasy than anything else. “You got money?”
“Oh — yes. I should take that”
Shevek was on the move already; Efor scratched his head, looked grim and dour, but went off to the hall phone to call the taxi He returned to find Shevek waiting outside the hall door with his coat on. “Go downstairs,” Efor said, grudgingly. “Kae be at the back door, five minutes. Tell him go out by Grove Road, no checkpoint there like at the main gate. Don’t go by the gate, they stop you there sure.”
“Will you be blamed for this, Efor?”
They were both whispering.
“I don’t know you gone. Morning, I say you don’t get up yet. Sleeping. Keep ’em off a while.”
Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook his hand. “Thank you, Efor!”
“Good luck,” the man said, bewildered. Shevek was already gone.
Shevek’s costly day with Vea had taken most of his ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more. He got out at a major subway station and by using his map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old Town. When he came up from the spacious marble station into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not look like Nio Esseia.
A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark; there were no street lights. The lampposts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there. Down the street, light streamed from an open doorway, around which a group of men were lounging, talking loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank, shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows.
An old woman was coming up the stairs behind him, and he turned to her to ask his way. In the light of the yellow globe that marked the subway entrance he saw her face clearly: white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare of weariness. Big glass earrings bobbed on her cheeks. She climbed the stairs laboriously, hunched over with fatigue or with arthritis or some deformity of the spine. But she was not old, as he had thought; she was not even thirty.
“Can you tell me where Joking Lane is,” he asked her, stammering. She glanced at him with indifference, hurried her pace as she reached the top of the stairs, and went on without a word.
He set off at random down the street The excitement of his sudden decision and flight from Ieu Eun had turned to apprehension, a sense of being driven, hunted. He avoided the group of men around the door, instinct warning him that the single stranger does not approach that kind of group. When he saw a man ahead of him walking alone, he caught up and repeated his question. The man said, MI don’t know,” and turned aside,
There was nothing to do but go on. He came to a better-lighted cross street, which wound off into the misty rain in both directions in a dim, grim garishness of lighted signs and advertisements. There were many wineshops and pawnshops, some of them still open. A good many people were in the street, jostling past, going in and out of the wineshops. There was a man lying down, lying in the gutter, his coat bunched up over his head, lying in the rain, asleep, sick, dead. Shevek stared at him with horror, and at the others who walked past without looking.