As he stood there paralyzed, somebody stopped by him and looked up into his face, a short, unshaven, wry-necked fellow of fifty or sixty, with red-rimmed eyes and a toothless mouth opened in a laugh. He stood and laughed wit-lessly at the big, terrified man, pointing a shaky hand at him. “Where you get all that hair, eh, eh, that hair, where you get all that hair,” he mumbled.
“Can — can you tell me how to get to Joking Lane?”
“Sure, joking, I’m joking, no joke I’m broke. Hey you got a little blue for a drink on a cold night? Sure you got a little blue.”
He came closer. Shevek drew away, seeing the open hand but not understanding.
“Come on, take a joke mister, one little blue,” the man mumbled without threat or pleading, mechanically, his mouth still open in the meaningless grin, his hand held out.
Shevek understood. He groped in his pocket, found the last of his money, thrust it into the beggar’s hand, and then, cold with a fear that was not fear for himself, pushed past the man, who was mumbling and trying to catch at his coat, and made for the nearest open door. It was under a sign that read “Pawn and Used Goods Best Values.” In-iside, among the racks of worn-out coats, shoes, shawls, battered instruments, broken lamps, odd dishes, canisters, spoons, beads, wrecks and fragments, every piece of rubbish marked with its price, he stood trying to collect himself.
“Looking for something?”
He put his question once more.
The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but stooped and very thin, looked him over. “What you want to get there for?”
“I’m looking for a person who lives there.”
“Where you from?”
“I need to get to this street, Joking Lane. Is it far from here?”
“Where you from, mister?”
“I am from Anarres, from the Moon,” Shevek said angrily. “I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight”
“You’re him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you doing here?”
“Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell them I’m here, or will you help me?”
“God damn,” the man said. “God damn. Look—” He hesitated, was about to say something, about to say something else, said, “You just go on,” and in the same breath though apparently with a complete change of mind, said, “All right I’m closing. Take you there. Hold on. God damn!”
He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shutters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a sharp pace, saying, “Come oaf.”
They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit darkness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal. They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly shops. Shevek’s guide stopped and knocked on the shuttered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker conferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and they both entered. A girl had let them in. “Tuio’s in back, come on,19 she said, looking up into Shevek’s face in the weak light from a back hallway. “Are you him?” Her voice was faint and urgent; she smiled strangely. “Are you really him?”
Tuio Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which be had been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes off Shevek.
“He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He say be the, you know, the one from Anarres.”
“You are, aren’t you?” Maedda said slowly. “Shevek, What are you doing here?” He stared at Shevek with alarmed, luminous eyes.
“Looking for help.”
“Who sent you to me?”
“The first man I asked. I don’t know who you are. I asked him where I could go, he said to come to you.”
“Does anybody else know you’re here?”
They don’t know I’ve gone. Tomorrow they will.”
“Go get Remeivi,” Maedda said to the girl. “Sit down, Dr. Shevek. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”
Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. “I escaped,” he said. “From the University, from the jail. I don’t know where to go. Maybe it’s all jails here. I came here because they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might help each other.”
“What kind of help are you looking for?”
Shevek made an effort to pull himself together. He looked around the little, Uttered office, and at Maedda. “I have something they want,” he said. “An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn’t understand that here an idea is a property of the State. I don’t work for a State. I cant take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out But I can’t go home. So I came here. You don’t want my science, and maybe you don’t like your government either.”
Maedda smiled. “No. I don’t. But our government don’t like me any better. You didn’t pick the safest place to come, either for you or for us… Don’t worry. Tonight’s tonight; we’ll decide what to do.”
Shevek took out the note he had found in his coat pocket and handed it to Maedda. “This is what brought me. Is it from people you know?”
“Join with us your brothers… I don’t know. Could be.”
“Are you Odonians?”
“Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians. We work with the Thuvianists, the Socialist Workers Union, but we’re anti-centralist. You arrived at a pretty hot moment, you know.”
“The war?”
Maedda nodded. “A demonstration’s been announced for three days from now. against the draft, war taxes, the rise in food prices. There’s four hundred thousand unemployed in Nio Esseia, and they jack up taxes and prices.” He had been watching Shevek steadily all the time they talked; now, as if the examination was done, he looked away, leaning back in his chair. “This city’s about ready for anything. A strike is what we need, a general strike, and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike that Odo led,” he added with a dry, strained smile. “We could use an Odo now. But they’ve got no Moon to buy us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.” He looked back at Shevek, and presently said in a softer voice, “Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years? Do you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream! I wonder if you fully understand why theyVe kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr. Shevek. Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they’ll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you’re gone. It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh, Walking amongst us.”
“Then you’ve got your Odo,” the girl said in her quiet, urgent voice. She had re-entered as Maedda was speaking. “After all, Odo was only an idea. Dr. Shevek is the proof.”
Maedda was silent for a minute. “An undemonstrable proof,” he said.
“Why?”
“If people know he’s here, the police will know it too.”
“Let them come and try to take him,” the girl said, and smiled.
“The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent,” Maedda said with sudden violence. “Even the SWU have accepted that!”