"So it was never a temptation?"

"Never." Then after a pause, "Let's get down to business," Will added in another tone.

"To business," Mr. Bahu repeated. "Tell me something about Lord Aldehyde."

"Well, as the Rani said, he's remarkably generous."

"I'm not interested in his virtues, only his intelligence. How bright is he?"

"Bright enough to know that nobody does anything for nothing."

"Good," said Mr. Bahu. "Then tell him from me that for effective work by experts in strategic positions he must be prepared to lay out at least ten times what he's going to pay you."

"I'll write him a letter to that effect."

"And do it today," Mr. Bahu advised. "The plane leaves Shiv-apuram tomorrow evening, and there won't be another outgo- ing mail for a whole week."

"Thank you for telling me," said Will. "And now-Her Highness and the shockable stripling being gone-let's move on to the next temptation. What about sex?"

With the gesture of a man who tries to rid himself of a cloud of importunate insects, Mr. Bahu waved a brown and bony hand back and forth in front of his face. "Just a distraction, that's all. Just a nagging, humiliating vexation. But an intelligent man can always cope with it."

"How difficult it is," said Will, "to understand another man's vices!"

"You're right. Everybody should stick to the insanity that God has seen fit to curse him with. Pecca fortiter-that was Luther's advice. But make a point of sinning your own sins, not someone else's. And above all don't do what the people of this island do. Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat-and the boat is perpetually sinking."

"In spite of which, no rat is justified in leaving it. Is that what you're saying?"

"A few of them may sometimes try to leave. But they never they drown with the rest of us. That's why Pala doesn't have the ghost of a chance."

Carrying a tray, the little nurse re-entered the room.

"Buddhist food," she said, as she tied a napkin round Will's neck. "All except the fish. But we've decided that fishes are vegetables within the meaning of the act."

Will started to eat.

"Apart from the Rani and Murugan and us two here," he asked after swallowing the first mouthful, "how many people from the outside have you ever met?"

"Well, there was that group of American doctors," she answered. "They came to Shivapuram last year, while I was working at the Central Hospital."

"What were they doing here?"

"They wanted to find out why we have such a low rate of neurosis and cardiovascular trouble. Those doctors!" She shook her head. "I tell you, Mr. Farnaby, they really made my hair stand on end-made everybody's hair stand on end in the whole hospital."

"So you think our medicine's pretty primitive?"

"That's the wrong word. It isn't primitive. It's fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics-but absolutely no methods for increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won't be necessary. Fantastic operations-but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it's the same all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you've started to fall apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don't seem to do anything at all about prevention. And yet you've got a proverb: prevention is better than cure."

"But cure," said Will, "is so much more dramatic than prevention. And for the doctors it's also a lot more profitable.

"Maybe for your doctors," said the little nurse. "Not for ours. Ours get paid for keeping people well."

"How is it to be done?"

"We've been asking that question for a hundred years, and we've found a lot of answers. Chemical answers, psychological answers, answers in terms of what you eat, how you make love, what you see and hear, how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world."

"And which are the best answers?"

"None of them is best without the others."

"So there's no panacea."

"How can there be?" And she quoted the little rhyme that every student nurse had to learn by heart on the first day of her training.

"So whether it's prevention or whether it's cure, we attack on all the fronts at once. All the fronts," she insisted, "from diet to autosuggestion, from negative ions to meditation."

"Very sensible," was Will's comment.

"Perhaps a little too sensible," said Mr. Bahu. "Did you ever try to talk sense to a maniac?" Will shook his head. "I did once." He lifted the graying lock that slanted obliquely across his forehead. Just below the hairline a jagged scar stood out, strangely pale against the brown skin. "Luckily for me, the bottle he hit me with was pretty flimsy." Smoothing his ruffled hair, he turned to the little nurse. "Don't ever forget, Miss Radha; to the senseless nothing is more maddening than sense. Pala is a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases. So beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king." Mr. Bahu's face was positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. "He gets lynched."

Will laughed perfunctorily, then turned again to the little nurse.

"Don't you have any candidates for the asylum?" he asked.

"Just as many as you have-I mean in proportion to the population. At least that's what the textbook says."

"So living in a sensible world doesn't seem to make any difference."

"Not to the people with the kind of body chemistry that'll turn them into psychotics. They're born vulnerable. Little troubles that other people hardly notice can bring them down. We're just beginning to find out what it is that makes them so vulnerable. We're beginning to be able to spot them in advance of a breakdown. And once they've been spotted, we can do something to raise their resistance. Prevention again—and, of course, on all the fronts at once."

"So being born into a sensible world will make a difference even for the predestined psychotic."

"And for the neurotics it has already made a difference. Your neurosis rate is about one in five or even four. Ours is about one in twenty. The one that breaks down gets treatment, on all fronts, and the nineteen who don't break down have had prevention on all the fronts. Which brings me back to those American doctors. Three of them were psychiatrists, and one of the psychiatrists smoked cigars without stopping and had a German accent. He was the one that was chosen to give us a lecture. What a lecture!" The little nurse held her head between her hands. "I never heard anything like it."

"What was it about?"

"About the way they treat people with neurotic symptoms. We just couldn't believe our ears. They never attack on all the fronts; they only attack on about half of one front. So far as they're concerned, the physical fronts don't exist. Except for a mouth and an anus, their patient doesn't have a body. He isn't an organism, he wasn't born with a constitution or a temperament. All he has is the two ends of a digestive tube, a family and a psyche. But what sort of psyche? Obviously not the whole mind, not the mind as it really is. How could it be that when they take no account of a person's anatomy, or biochemistry or physiology? Mind abstracted from body-that's the only front they attack on. And not even on the whole of that front. The man with the cigar kept talking about the unconscious. But the only unconscious they ever pay attention to is the negative unconscious, the garbage that people have tried to get rid of by burying it in the basement. Not a single word about the positive unconscious. No attempt to help the patient to open himself up to the life force or the Buddha Nature. And no attempt even to teach him to be a little more conscious in his everyday life. You know: 'Here and now, boys.' 'Attention.' " She gave an imitation of the mynah birds. "These people just leave the unfortunate neurotic to wallow in his old bad habits of never being all there in present time. The whole thing is just pure idiocy! No, the man with the cigar didn't even have that excuse; he was as clever as clever can be. So it's not idiocy. It must be something voluntary, something self-induced-like getting drunk or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what's normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society." Once again the little nurse held her head between her hands. "It's unimaginable! No question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you're supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it's pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it?"