It was heavy; the yellow cube was solid gold. Shevek stood motionless, holding it.

“I don’t know about you young men,” said Atro, “but I’m going to sit down.” They all sat down in the deep, soft chairs, which Shevek had already examined, puzzled by the material with which they were covered, a nonwoven brown stuff that felt like skin. “How old were you nine years ago, Shevek?”

Atro was the foremost living physicist on Urras. There was about him not only the dignity of age but also the blunt self-assurance of one accustomed to respect. This was nothing new to Shevek. Atro had precisely the one kind of authority that Shevek recognized. Also, it gave him pleasure to be addressed at last simply by his name.

“I was twenty-nine when I finished the Principles, Atro.”

“Twenty-nine? Good God. That makes you the youngest recipient of the Seo Oen for a century or so. Didn’t get around to giving me mine till I was sixty or so… How old were you, then, when you first wrote me?”

“About twenty.”

Atro snorted. “Took you for a man of forty then!”

“What about Sabul?” Oiie inquired. Oiie was even shorter than most Urrasti, who all seemed short to Shevek; he had a flat, bland face and oval, jet-black eyes. “There was a period of six or eight years when you never wrote, and Sabul kept in touch with us; but he never has talked on your radio link-up with us. We’ve wondered what your relationship is.”

“Sabul is the senior member of the Abbenay Institute in physics,” said Shevek. “I used to work with him.”

“An older rival; jealous; meddled with your books; been clear enough. We hardly need an explanation, Oiie,” said the fourth man, Chifoilisk, in a harsh voice. He was middle-aged, a swarthy, stocky man with the fine hands of a desk worker. He was the only one of them whose face was not completely shaven: he had left the chin bristling to match his short, iron-grey head hair. “No need to pretend that all you Odonian brothers are full of brotherly love,” he said. “Human nature is human nature.”

Shevek’s lack of response was saved from seeming significant by a volley of sneezes. “I do not have a handkerchief,” he apologized, wiping his eyes.

“Take mine,” said Atro, and produced a snowy handkerchief from one of his many pockets. Shevek took it, and as he did so an importunate memory wrung his heart. He thought of his daughter Sadik, a little dark-eyed girl, saying, “You can share the handkerchief I use.” That memory, which was very dear to him, was unbearably painful now. Trying to escape it, he smiled at random and said, “I am allergic to your planet. The doctor says this.”

“Good God, you won’t be sneezing like that permanently?” old Atro asked, peering at him.

“Hasn’t your man been in yet?” said Pae.

“My man?”

“The servant. He was supposed to bring you some things. Handkerchiefs included. Just enough to tide you over till you can shop for yourself. Nothing choice — I’m afraid there’s very little choice in ready-made clothes for a man your height!”

When Shevek had sorted this out (Pae spoke in a rapid drawl, which matched with his soft, handsome features), he said, “That is kind of you. I feel—” He looked at Atro. “I am, you know the Beggarman,” he said to the old man, as he had said to Dr. Kimoe on the Mindful. “I could not bring money, we do not use it. I could not bring gifts, we use nothing that you lack. So I come, like a good Odonian, ‘with empty hands.’ ”

Atro and Pae assured him that he was a guest, there was no question of payment, it was their privilege. “Besides,” Chifoilisk said in his sour voice, “the Ioti Government foots the bill.”

Pae gave him a sharp glance, but Chifoilisk, instead of returning it, looked straight at Shevek. On his swarthy face was an expression that he made no effort to hide, but which Shevek could not interpret: warning, or complicity?

“There speaks the unregenerate Thuvian,” old Atro said with his snort. “But you mean to say, Shevek, that you brought nothing at all with you — no papers, no new work? I was looking forward to a book. Another revolution in physics. See these pushy young fellows stood on their heads, the way you stood me with the Principles. What have you been working on?”

“Well, I have been reading Pae — Dr. Pae’s paper on the block universe, on Paradox and Relativity.”

“All very well. Saio’s our current star, no doubt of that. Least of all in his own mind, eh, Saio? But what’s that to do with the price of cheese? Where’s your General Temporal Theory?”

“In my head,” said Shevek with a broad, genial smile.

There was a very little pause.

Oiie asked him if he had seen the work on relativity theory by an alien physicist, Ainsetain of Terra. Shevek had not. They were intensely interested in it, except for Atro, who had outlived intensity. Pae ran off to his room to get Shevek a copy of the translation. “It’s several hundred years old, but there’s fresh ideas in it for us,” he said.

“Maybe,” said Atro, “but none of these offworlders can follow our physics. The Hainish call it materialism, and the Terrans call it mysticism, and then they both give up. Don’t let this fad for everything alien sidetrack you, Shevek. They’ve got nothing for us. Dig your own pigweed, as my father used to say.” He gave his senile snort and levered himself up out of the chair. “Come on out for a turn in the Grove with me. No wonder you’re stuffy, cooped up in here.”

“The doctor says I’m to stay in this room three days. I might be — infected? Infectious?”

“Never pay any attention to doctors, my dear fellow.”

“Perhaps in this case, though, Dr. Atro,” Pae suggested in his easy, conciliating voice.

“After all, the doctor’s from the Government, isn’t he?” said Chifoilisk, with evident malice.

“Best man they could find, I’m sure,” Atro said unsmiling, and took his leave without urging Shevek further. Chifoilisk went with him. The two younger men stayed with Shevek, talking physics, for a long time.

With immense pleasure, and with that same sense of profound recognition, of finding something the way it was meant to be, Shevek discovered for the first time in his life the conversation of his equals.

Mitis, though a splendid teacher, had never been able to follow him into the new areas of theory that he had, with her encouragement, begun to explore. Gvarab was the only person he had met whose training and ability were comparable to his own, and he and Gvarab had met too late, at the very end of her life. Since those days Shevek had worked with many people of talent, but because he had never been a full-time member of the Abbenay Institute, he had never been able to take them far enough; they remained bogged down in the old problems, the classical Sequency physics. He had had no equals. Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last.

It was a revelation, a liberation. Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass, It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Even on that first afternoon at the University, with Oiie and Pae, he knew he had found something he had longed for ever since, as boys and on a boyish level, he and Tirin and Bedap had used to talk half the night, teasing and daring each other into always bolder flights of mind. He vividly remembered some of those nights. He saw Tirin, Tirin saying, “If we knew what Urras was really like, maybe some of us would want to go there.” And he had been so shocked by the idea that he had jumped all over Tirin, and Tir had backed down at once; he had always backed down, poor damned soul, and he had always been right.