Rumors spread in Pertane and residents flee is a campaign of disinformation whose force comes not from proof but from repetition: an atrocity story travels by word of mouth until residents try to escape it, and the authorities respond by containing the population. The panic links Mowry’s search for local dissent to a wider contest over who can shape public belief. In wartime, the government’s power is substantial but never absolute; the episode turns that limit into an opening for rumor and then shows coercion attempting to close it again.

Causes and Preparation

Mowry has been assessing public opinion, especially minority views, and first needs to establish that a disaffected minority actually exists on Jaimec. By midnight he is back at the hotel confident that Pertane contains enough potential scapegoats. That groundwork matters: the rumor campaign does not emerge from a general account of wartime uncertainty alone. It is directed into a community where suspicion and grievance can make alarming claims feel plausible, even when listeners cannot verify them.

The episode’s news concerns the supposed devastation of Shugruma and Gooma. In one version, a speaker says that her brother met a man who escaped the disaster with only the clothes he wore. The alleged survivor’s account is extravagant: Shugruma has been practically wiped off the map, not one stone remains upon another, and three hundred thousand people are dead. The tale adds the stench of bodies and warnings of bacteriological warfare and still worse horrors to come. Its borrowed authority—a brother’s report of an escapee’s report—also keeps the evidence at a distance. The story sounds firsthand while reaching its hearers through successive relays.

How the Story Spreads

By mid-afternoon, thirty people have heard the story of the disasters, accompanied by supposed firsthand warnings of biological warfare. The narration stresses that these hearers cannot keep the news to themselves. From thirty, it predicts a thousand recipients by early evening, ten thousand by midnight, and a hundred thousand the following morning, until the whole city is discussing it. The figures describe an accelerating chain of transmission, not a verified count of those who believed every detail. Their progression conveys how quickly the story can outrun any effort to check it.

The rumor also gains apparent confirmation through ordinary conversation. One person says that the report is true and describes two windows collapsing in their house and a bottle of zith jumping off a table. The detail is small beside the claimed mass death, but precisely because it is personal and tangible it can make the larger catastrophe feel immediate. The talk thus gathers force from additions that listeners can repeat as experience, even as the central claims remain hearsay. The movement from an alleged survivor to neighborhood testimony turns uncertainty into a story with many apparent witnesses.

Flight and Government Response

The rumors have consequences beyond conversation. When Mowry encounters a captain overseeing a round-up, the officer explains that his men are collecting people he disparages as “windy” and taking them back where they belong. He says residents are worried about their own skins and that more followed the first group early the previous morning. By then, he estimates, half the city would have left if the authorities had not pinned them in. His contemptuous account identifies the immediate stakes: people are trying to get away, and the state is preventing them from doing so.

Mowry presses the captain about what set the residents running. The answer is talk—dismissed by the officer as mere talk, though the round-up itself shows that its effects cannot be dismissed. The government’s response combines action against a jittery populace with action against subversive forces. As the last trucks leave the road, Mowry drives onward. The city would have been ringed in any event, the narration observes, whether or not Gurd had been extracted from prison. The blockade therefore belongs to a broader security response, not simply to the immediate pursuit of the jailbreakers.

Significance

The sequence sets two forms of control against each other. Mowry’s side exploits the gaps in official authority by circulating a story that grows more terrifying as it passes from person to person; the authorities answer not by settling the truth of the reports but by stopping residents from leaving. Rumor’s reach is measurable in its expanding imagined audience and in the captain’s claim that half the city might have fled. The state’s reach appears in the trucks, the round-up, and the ring around Pertane.

The scene also keeps the reader attentive to information’s shifting status. A catastrophe is presented through a chain of reported speech, supplemented by a domestic detail that sounds like corroboration, while the captain reduces the resulting panic to empty talk. Neither form of speech restores certainty: one magnifies danger, the other belittles the people reacting to it. As Mowry drives through the security operation, his thoughts turn to whether Gurd and Skriva have been caught. The rumor crisis and the jailbreak thus converge in the same enclosed city, where movement—of news, civilians, and prisoners—has become a matter of strategic control.