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  the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until that's under control. As population rushes up, prosperity goes down." He traced the descending curve with an outstretched finger. "And as prosperity goes down, discontent and rebellion" (the forefinger moved up again), "political ruthlessness and one-party rule, nationalism and bellicosity begin to rise. Another ten or fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world, from China to Peru via Africa and the Middle East, will be fairly crawling with Great Leaders, all dedicated to the suppression of freedom, all armed to the teeth by Russia or America or, better still, by both at once, all waving flags, all screaming for Lebensraum."

  "What about Pala?" Will asked. "Will you be blessed with a Great Leader ten years from now?"

  "Not if we can help it," Dr. Robert answered. "We've always done everything possible to make it very difficult for a Great Leader to arise."

  Out of the corner of his eye Will saw that Murugan was making a face of indignant and contemptuous disgust. In his fancy Antinoiis evidently saw himself as a Carlylean Hero. Will turned back to Dr. Robert.

  "Tell me how you do it," he said.

  "Well, to begin with we don't fight wars or prepare for them. Consequently, we have no need for conscription, or military hierarchies, or a unified command. Then there's our economic system: it doesn't permit anybody to become more than four or five times as rich as the average. That means that we don't have any captains of industry or omnipotent financiers. Better still, we have no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats. Pala's a federation of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units—so there's plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government. Another point: we have no established church, and our religion stresses immedi-

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  ate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires. So we're preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist revivalism, on the other. And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate skepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyze whatever they hear or read—this is an integral part of the school curriculum. Result: the eloquent rabble-rouser, like Hitler or our neighbor across the Strait, Colonel Dipa, just doesn't have a chance here in Pala."

  This was too much for Murugan. Unable to contain himself, "But look at the energy Colonel Dipa generates in his people," he burst out. "Look at all the devotion and self-sacrifice. We don't have anything like that here."

  "Thank God," said Dr. Robert devoutly.

  "Thank God," Vijaya echoed.

  "But these things are good," the boy protested. "I admire them."

  "I admire them too," said Dr. Robert. "Admire them in the same way as I admire a typhoon. Unfortunately that kind of energy and devotion and self-sacrifice happens to be incompatible with liberty, not to mention reason and human decency. But decency, reason and liberty are what Pala has been working for, ever since the time of your namesake, Murugan the Reformer."

  From under his seat Vijaya pulled out a tin box and, lifting the lid, distributed a first round of cheese and avocado sandwiches. "We'll have to eat as we go." He started the motor and with one hand, the other being busy with his sandwich, swung the little car onto the road. "Tomorrow," he said to Will, "I'll show you the sights of the village, and the still more remarkable sight of my family eating their lunch. Today we have an appointment in the mountains."

  Near the entrance to the village he turned the jeep into a side road that went winding steeply up between terraced fields of rice

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  and vegetables, interspersed with-orchards and, here and there, plantations of young trees destined, Dr. Robert explained, to supply the pulp mills of Shivapuram with their raw material.

  "How many papers does Pala support?" Will enquired and was surprised to learn that there was only one. "Who enjoys the monopoly? The government? The party in power? The local Joe Aldehyde?"

  "Nobody enjoys a monopoly," Dr. Robert assured him. "There's a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests. Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism. The reader's in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind. I remember how shocked I was the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sided-ness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters—and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking."

  The car climbed on and now they were on a ridge between two headlong descents, with a tree-fringed lake down at the bottom of a gorge to their left and to the right a broader valley where, between two tree-shaded villages, like an incongruous piece of pure geometry, sprawled a huge factory.

  "Cement?" Will questioned.

  Dr. Robert nodded. "One of the indispensable industries. We produce all we need and a surplus for export."

  "And those villages supply the manpower?"

  "In the intervals of agriculture and work in the forest and the sawmills."

  "Does that kind of part-time system work well?"

  "It depends what you mean by 'well.' It doesn't result in maximum efficiency. But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn't

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  the categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn't make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it's a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction."

  "When I was twenty," Vijaya now volunteered, "I put in four months at that cement plant—and after that ten weeks making superphosphates and then six months in the jungle, as a lumberjack."

  "All this ghastly honest toil!"

  "Twenty years earlier," said Dr. Robert, "I did a stint at the copper smelters. After which I had a taste of the sea on a fishing boat. Sampling all kinds of work—it's part of everybody's education. One learns an enormous amount that way—about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking."

  Will shook his head. "I'd still rather get it out of a book."

  "But what you can get out of a book is never it. At bottom," Dr. Robert added, "all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!"

  "Tell that to the clergymen," said Will. "They're always reproaching us with being crass materialists."

  "Crass," Dr. Robert agreed, "but crass precisely because you're such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism—that's what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely—materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible. Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality."

  "But even the most concrete materialism," Vijaya qualified,

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  "won't get you very far unless you're fully conscious of what you're doing and experiencing. You've got to be completely aware of the bits of matter you're handling, the skills you're practicing, the people you work with."

  "Quite right," said Dr. Robert. "I ought to have made it clear that concrete materialism is only the raw stuff of a fully human life. It's through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality. Be fully aware of what yo
u're doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living."

  Will thought of Ranga and the little nurse. "And what about love?"

  Dr. Robert nodded. "That too. Awareness transfigures it, turns love-making into the yoga of love-making."

  Murugan gave an imitation of his mother looking shocked.

  "Psychophysical means to a transcendental end," said Vijaya, raising his voice against the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted, "that, primarily, is what all these yogas are. But they're also something else, they're also devices for dealing with the problems of power." He shifted back to a quieter gear and lowered his voice to its normal tone. "The problems of power," he repeated. "And they confront you on every level of organization—every level, from national governments down to nurseries and honeymooning couples. For it isn't merely a question of making things hard for the Great Leaders. There are all the millions of small-scale tyrants and persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the Calvins and Torquemadas of the family. Not to mention all the brigands and bullies stupid enough to get themselves labeled as criminals. How does one harness the enormous power these people generate and set it to work in some useful way—or at least prevent it from doing harm?"

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  "That's what I want you to tell me," said Will. "Where do you start?"

  "We start everywhere at once," Vijaya answered. "But since one can't say more than one thing at a time, let's begin by talking about the anatomy and physiology of power. Tell him about your biochemical approach to the subject, Dr. Robert."

  "It started," said Dr. Robert, "nearly forty years ago, while I was studying in London. Started with prison visiting on weekends and reading history whenever I had a free evening. History and prisons," he repeated. "I discovered that they were closely related. The record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind (that's Gibbon, isn't it?) and the place where unsuccessful crimes and follies are visited with a special kind of misfortune. Reading my books and talking to my jailbirds, I found myself asking questions. What kind of people became dangerous delinquents—the grand delinquents of the history books, the little ones of Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubbs? What kinds of people are moved by the lust for power, the passion to bully and domineer? And the ruthless ones, the men and women who know what they want and have no qualms about hurting and killing in order to get it, the monsters who hurt and kill, not for profit, but gratuitously, because hurting and killing are such fun—who are they? I used to discuss these questions with the experts—doctors, psychologists, social scientists, teachers. Man-tegazza and Galton had gone out of fashion, and most of my experts assured me that the only valid answers to these questions were answers in terms of culture, economics, and the family. It was all a matter of mothers and toilet training, of early conditioning and traumatic environments. I was only half convinced. Mothers and toilet training and the circumambient nonsense— these were obviously important. But were they a//-important? In the course of my prison visiting I'd begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern—or rather of two kinds of built-

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  in patterns; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving troublemakers don't belong to a single species. Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species—the Muscle People and the Peter Pans. I've specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans."

  "The boys who never grow up?" Will queried.

  " 'Never' is the wrong word. In real life Peter Pan always ends by growing up. He merely grows up too late—grows up physiologically more slowly than he grows up in terms of birthdays."

  "What about girl Peter Pans?"

  "They're very rare. But the boys are as common as blackberries. You can expect one Peter Pan among every five or six male children. And among problem children, among the boys who can't read, won't learn, don't get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency, seven out of ten turn out, if you take an X ray of the bones of the wrist, to be Peter Pans. The rest are mostly Muscle People of one sort or another."

  "I'm trying to think," said Will, "of a good historical example of a delinquent Peter Pan."

  "You don't have to go far afield. The most recent, as well as the best and biggest, was Adolf Hitler."

  "Hitler?" Murugan's tone was one of shocked astonishment. Hitler was evidently one of his heroes.

  "Read the Fiihrer's biography," said Dr. Robert. "A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co-operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here,

  unfortunately, he couldn't draw. His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for nonstop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars—that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf's retarded maturation. Fortunately most of the boys who grow up too slowly never get a chance of being more than minor delinquents. But even minor delinquents, if there are enough of them, can exact a pretty stiff price. That's why we try to nip them in the bud—or rather, since we're dealing with Peter Pans, that's why we try to make their nipped buds open out and grow."

  "And do you succeed?"

  Dr. Robert nodded. "It isn't hard. Particularly if you start early enough. Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination. Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X ray their wrists and give them an EEC All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately. Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal. A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution's sake, has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed adandena asatthena—without punishment and without a sword. In your part of the world delinquency is still left to clergymen, social workers and the police. Nonstop sermons and supportive therapy; prison sentences galore. With what results? The delinquency rate goes steadily up and up. No wonder. Words about sibling rivalry and hell and the personality of Jesus are no substitutes for biochemistry. A year in jail won't cure a Peter Pan of his endocrine disbalance or help the ex-Peter Pan to get rid of his psychological consequences. For Peter-Panic delinquency, what you need is early diagnosis and three pink capsules a day before meals. Given a tolerable environment, the result will be

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  sweet reasonableness and a modicum of the cardinal virtues within eighteen months. Not to mention a fair chance, where before there hadn't been the faintest possibility, of eventual praj-naparamita and karuna, eventual wisdom and compassion. And now get Vijaya to tell you about the Muscle People. As you may perhaps have observed, he's one of them." Leaning forward, Dr. Robert thumped the giant's broad back. "Solid beef!" And he added, "How lucky for us poor shrimps that the animal isn't savage."

  Vijaya took one hand off the wheel, beat his chest and uttered a loud ferocious roar. "Don't tease the gorilla," he said, and laughed good-humoredly. Then, "Think of the other great dictator," he said to Will, "think of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Hitler's the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan. Stalin's the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man. Predestined, by his shape, to be an extravert. Not one of your soft, round, spill-the-beans extraverts who pine for indiscriminate togetherness. No-—the trampling, driving extravert, the o
ne who always feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility. In his will, Lenin advised his successors to get rid of Stalin: the man was too fond of power and too apt to abuse it. But the advice came too late. Stalin was already so firmly entrenched that he couldn't be ousted. Ten years later his power was absolute. Trotsky had been scotched; all his old friends had been bumped off. Now, like God among the choiring angels, he was alone in a cozy little heaven peopled only by flatterers and yes-men. And all the time he was ruthlessly busy, liquidating kulaks, organizing collectives, building an armament industry, shifting reluctant millions from farm to factory. Working with a tenacity, a lucid efficiency of which the German Peter Pan, with his apocalyptic phantasies and his fluctuating moods, was utterly incapable. And in the last phase of the war, compare Stalin's strategy with Hitler's. Cool calculation pitted against compensatory daydreams, clear-eyed realism against

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  the rhetorical nonsense that Hitler had finally talked himself into believing. Two monsters, equal in delinquency, but profoundly dissimilar in temperament, in unconscious motivation, and finally in efficiency. Peter Pans are wonderfully good at starting wars and revolutions; but it takes Muscle Men to carry them through to a successful conclusion. Here's the jungle," Vijaya added in another tone, waving a hand in the direction of a great cliff of trees that seemed to block their further ascent.

  A moment later they had left the glare of the open hillside and had plunged into a narrow tunnel of green twilight that zigzagged up between walls of tropical foliage. Creepers dangled from the overarching branches and between the trunks of huge trees grew ferns and dark-leaved rhododendrons with a dense profusion of shrubs and bushes that for Will, as he looked about him, were namelessly unfamiliar. The air was stiflingly damp and there was a hot, acrid smell of luxuriant green growth and of that other kind of life which is decay. Muffled by the thick foliage, Will heard the ringing of distant axes, the rhythmic screech of a saw. The road turned yet once more and suddenly the green darkness of the tunnel gave place to sunshine. They had entered a clearing in the forest. Tall and broad-shouldered, half a dozen almost naked woodcutters were engaged in lopping the branches from a newly felled tree. In the sunshine hundreds of blue and amethyst butterflies chased one another, fluttering and soaring in an endless random dance. Over a fire at the further side of the clearing an old man was slowly stirring the contents of an iron caldron. Nearby a small tame deer, fine-limbed and elegantly dappled, was quietly grazing.