infant was at this moment coming towards the knobby one rapidly, though with a peculiar squatting gait caused by a damp and sagging diaper. He approached out of boredom or sociability, but once in the square of sunlight he discovered it was warm there. He sat down heavily beside the knobby one, crowding him into the shade.
The knobby one’s blank rapture gave place at once to a scowl of rage. He pushed the fat one, shouting, “Go ‘way!”
The matron was there at once. She righted the fat one. “Shev, you aren’t to push other people.”
The knobby baby stood up. His face was a glare of sunlight and anger. His diapers were about to fall off. “Mine!” he said in a high, ringing voice. “Mine sun!”
“It is not yours,” the one-eyed woman said with the mildness of utter certainty. “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.” And she picked the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable hands and set him aside, out of the square of sunlight.
The fat baby sat staring, indifferent. The knobby one shook all over, screamed, “Mine sun!” and burst into tears of rage.
The father picked him up and held him. “There, now, Shev,” he said. “Come on, you know you can’t have things. What’s wrong with you?” His voice was soft, and shook as if he also was not far from tears. The thin, long, light child in his arms wept passionately.
“There are some just can’t take life easy,” the one-eyed woman said, watching with sympathy.
“I’ll take him for a dorm visit now. The mother’s leaving tonight, you see.”
“Go on. I hope you get posted together soon,” said the matron, hoisting the fat child like a sack of grain onto her hip, her face melancholy and her good eye squinting. “Byebye, Shev, little heart. Tomorrow, listen, tomorrow we’ll play truck-and-driver.”
The baby did not forgive her yet. He sobbed, clutching his father’s neck, and hid his face in the darkness of the lost sun.
The orchestra needed all the benches that morning for rehearsal, and the dance group was thumping around in the big room of the learning center, so the kids who were working on Speaking-and-Listening sat in a circle on the foamstone floor of the workshop. The first volunteer, a lanky eighty-year-old with long hands and feet, stood up. He stood very erect, as healthy children do; his slightly fuzzy face was pale at first, then turned red as he waited for the other children to listen. “Go on, Shevek,” the group director said.
“Well, I had an idea.”
“Louder,” said the director, a heavy-set man in his early twenties.
The boy smiled with embarrassment. “Well, see, I was thinking, let’s say you throw a rock at something. At a tree. You throw it, and it goes through the air and hits the tree. Right? But it can’t. Because—can I have the slate? Look, here’s you throwing the rock, and here’s the tree,” he scribbled on the slate, “that’s supposed to be a tree, and here’s the rock, see, halfway in between.” The children giggled at his portrayal of a holum tree, and he smiled. “To get from you to the tree, the rock has to be halfway in between you and the tree, doesn’t it. And then it has to be halfway between halfway and the tree. And then it has to be halfway between that and the tree. It doesn’t matter how far it’s gone, there’s always a place, only it’s a time really, that’s halfway between the last place it was and the tree—”
“Do you think this is interesting?” the director interrupted, speaking to the other children.
“Why can’t it reach the tree?” said a girl of ten.
“Because it always has to go half of the way that’s left to go,” said Shevek, “and there’s always half of the way left to go—see?”
“Shall we just say you aimed the rock badly?” the director said with a tight smile.
“It doesn’t matter how you aim it. It can’t reach the tree.”
“Who told you this idea?”
“Nobody. I sort of saw it. I think I see how the rock actually does—”
“That’s enough.”
Some of the other children had been talking, but they stopped as if struck dumb. The little boy with the slate stood there in the silence. He looked frightened, and scowled.
“Speech is sharing—a cooperative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoizing.”
The thin, vigorous harmonies of the orchestra sounded down the hall.
“You didn’t see that for yourself, it wasn’t