to work on them. He had a class that afternoon, and met it; he took his dinner at the Senior Faculty commons and talked with his colleagues there about the weather, and the war, and whatever else they brought up. If they noticed any change in him he did not know it, for he was not really aware of them at all. He came back to his room and worked.
The Urrasti counted twenty hours in a day. For eight days he spent twelve to sixteen hours daily at his desk, or roaming about his room, his light eyes turned often to the windows, outside which shone the warm spring sunlight, or the stars and the tawny, waning Moon.
Coming in with the breakfast tray, Efor found him lying half-dressed on the bed, his eyes shut, talking in a foreign language. He roused him. Shevek woke with a convulsive start, got up and staggered into the other room, to the desk, which was perfectly empty; he stared at the computer, which had been cleared, and then stood there like a man who has been hit on the head and does not know it yet. Efor succeeded in getting him to lie down again, and said, “Fever there, sir. Call the doctor?”
“No!”
“Sure, sir?”
“No! Don’t let anybody in here. Say I am ill, Efor.”
“Then they’ll fetch the doctor sure. Can say you’re still working, sir. They like that.”
“Lock the door when you go out,” Shevek said. His nontransparent body had let him down; he was weak with exhaustion, and therefore fretful and panicky. He was afraid of Pae, of Oiie, and of a police search party. Everything he had heard, read, half-understood about the Urrasti police, the secret police, came vivid and terrible into his memory, as when a man admitting his illness to himself recalls every word he ever read about cancer. He stared up at Efor in feverish distress.
“You can trust me,” the man said in his subdued, wry, quick way. He brought Shevek a glass of water and went out, and the lock of the outer door clicked behind him.
He looked after Shevek during the next two days, with a tact that owed little to his training as a servant.
“You should have been a doctor, Efor,” Shevek said, when his weakness had become a merely bodily, not unpleasant lassitude.
“What my old sow say. She never wants nobody nurse her beside me when she get the pip. She say, ‘You got the touch.’ I guess I do.”
“Did you ever work with the sick?”
“No sir. Don’t want to mix up with hospitals. Black day the day I got to die in one of them pest-holes.”
“The hospitals? What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing, sir, not them you be took to if you was worse,” Efor said with gentleness.
“What kind did you mean, then?”
“Our kind. Dirty. Like a trashman’s ass-hole,” Efor said, without violence, descriptively. “Old. Kid die in one. There’s holes in the floor, big holes, the beams show through, see? I say, ‘How come?’ See, rats come up the holes, right in the beds. They say, ‘Old building, been a hospital six hundred years.’ Stablishment of the Divine Harmony for the Poor, its name. An ass-hole what it is.”
“It was your child that died in the hospital?”
“Yes, sir, my daughter, Laia.”
“What did she die of?”
“Valve in her heart. They say. She don’t grow much. Two years old when she died.”
“You have other children?”
“Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now she say, ‘Oh, well, don’t have to be heartbreaking over ’em, just as well after all!’ Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” The sudden switch to upper-class syntax jolted Shevek, he said impatiently, “Yes! Go on talking.”
Because he had spoken spontaneously, or because he was unwell and should be humored, this time Efor did not stiffen up. “Think of going for army medic, one time,” he said, “but they get me first Draft. Say, ‘Orderly, you be orderly.’ So I do. Good training, orderly. Come out of the army straight into gentlemen’s service.”
“You could have been trained as a medic, in the army?” The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a