Free New Atlantis by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

because that was the weekly Watch Those Surplus
Calories! Day for all the women, and so we didn’t have any sandwiches. If I’d
seen a mountain jay I might have snatched the sandwich from his very hand, who
knows. Anyhow it was an exhausting week, and I wished I’d stayed home and
practiced, even though I’d have lost a week’s pay because staying home and
practicing the viola doesn’t count as planned implementation of recreational
leisure as defined by the Federal Union of Unions.
    When I came back from my Antarctican expedition, the man was
reading again, and I got a look at his pamphlet; and that was the odd part of
it. The pamphlet was called “Increasing Efficiency in Public Accountant
Training Schools,” and I could see from the one paragraph I got a glance at
that there was nothing about new continents emerging from the ocean depths in
it — nothing at all.
    Then we had to get out and walk on into Gresham, because
they had decided that the best thing for us all to do was get onto the Greater
Portland Area Rapid Public Transit Lines, since there had been so many
breakdowns that the charter bus company didn’t have any more buses to send out
to pick us up. The walk was wet, and rather dull, except when we passed the
Cold Mountain Commune. They have a wall around it to keep out unauthorized
persons, and a big neon sign out front saying COLD MOUNTAIN COMMUNE and there
were some people in authentic jeans and ponchos by the highway selling macrame
belts and sandcast candies and soybean bread to the tourists. In Gresham, I
took the 4:40 GPARPTL Superjet Flyer train to Burnside and East 230th, and then
walked to 217th and got the bus to the Goldschmidt Overpass, and transferred to
the shuttlebus, but it had boiler trouble, so I didn’t reach the downtown
transfer point until ten after eight, and the buses go on a once-an-hour
schedule at 8:00, so I got a meatless hamburger at the Longhorn Inch-Thick
Steak House Dinerette and caught the nine o’clock bus and got home about ten.
When I let myself into the apartment I flipped the switch to turn on the
lights, but there still weren’t any. There had been a power outage in West
Portland for three weeks. So I went feeling about for the candles in the dark,
and it was a minute or so before I noticed that somebody was lying on my bed.
    I panicked, and tried again to turn the lights on.
    It was a man, lying there in a long thin heap. I thought a
burglar had got in somehow while I was away and died. I opened the door so I
could get out quick or at least my yells could be heard, and then I managed not
to shake long enough to strike a match, and lighted the candle, and came a
little closer to the bed.
    The light disturbed him. He made a sort of snorting in his
throat and turned his head. I saw it was a stranger, but I knew his eyebrows,
then the breadth of his closed eyelids, then I saw my husband.
    He woke up while I was standing there over him with the
candle in my hand. He laughed and said still half-asleep, “Ah, Psyche! From the
regions which are holy land.”
    Neither of us made much fuss. It was unexpected, but it did
seem so natural for him to be there, after all, much more natural than for him
not to be there, and he was too tired to be very emotional. We lay there
together in the dark, and he explained that they had released him from the
Rehabilitation Camp early because he had injured his back in an accident in the
gravel quarry, and they were afraid it might get worse. If he died there it
wouldn’t be good publicity abroad, since there have been some nasty rumors
about deaths from illness in the Rehabilitation Camps and the Federal Medical
Association Hospitals, and there are scientists abroad who have heard of Simon,
since somebody published his proof of Goldbach’s Hypothesis in Peking. So they
let him out early, with eight dollars in his pocket, which is what he had in
his pocket when they arrested him, which made it, of course, fair. He had
walked and