After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapes and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him-had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried hack, carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had counted the dark ringwormy heads), was home.

"Keeping babies alive," he said, "healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply-one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It's the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy."

He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins. "God has nothing to do with it," Ranga retorted, "and the joke isn't cosmic, it's strictly man-made. These things aren't like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics; they don't have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven't allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn't been played on us. We've had good sanitation for the best part of a century-and still we're not overcrowded, we're not miserable, we're not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way."

"How on earth were you able to choose?" Will asked. "The right people were intelligent at the right moment," said Ranga. "But it must be admitted-they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It's had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone's colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us alone and we're still Buddhists or Shivaites-that is, when we're not Tantrik agnostics."

"Is that what you are?" Will enquired. "A Tantrik agnostic?"

"With Mahayana trimmings," Ranga qualified. "Well, to return to Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn't. No harbor, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about its being God's will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. And that isn't our only blessing: After a hundred and twenty years of the Portuguese, Ceylon and Rendang got the Dutch. And after the Dutch came the English. We escaped both those infestations. No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labor, no cash crops for export, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs."

"You certainly were lucky."

"And on top of that amazing good luck," Ranga went on, "there was the amazing good management of Murugan the Reformer and Andrew MacPhail. Has Dr. Robert talked to you about his great-grandfather?"

"Just a few words, that's all."

"Did he tell you about the founding of the Experimental Station?"

Will shook his head.

"The Experimental Station," said Ranga, "had a lot to do with our population policy. It all began with a famine. Before he came to Pala, Dr. Andrew spent a few years in Madras. The second year he was there, the monsoon failed. The crops were burnt up, the tanks and even the wells went dry. Except for the English and the rich, there was no food. People died like flies. There's a famous passage in Dr. Andrew's memoirs about the famine. A description and then a comment. He'd had to listen to a lot of sermons when he was a boy, and there was one he kept remembering now, as he worked among the starving Indians. 'Man cannot live by bread alone'-that was the text, and the preacher had been so eloquent that several people were converted. 'Man cannot live by bread alone.' But without bread, he now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, there is only despair and then apathy and finally death."

"Another of the cosmic jokes," said Will. "And this one was formulated by Jesus himself. 'To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have'-the bare possibility of being human. It's the crudest of all God's jokes, and also the commonest. I've seen it being played on millions of men and women, millions of small children-all over the world."

"So you can understand why that famine made such an indelible impression on Dr. Andrew's mind. He was resolved, and so was his friend the Raja, that in Pala, at least, there should always be bread. Hence their decision to set up the Experimental Station. Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics was a great success. In a few years we had new strains of rice and maize and millet and breadfruit. We had better breeds of cattle and chickens. Better ways of cultivating and composting; and in the fifties we built the first superphosphate factory east of Berlin. Thanks to all these things people were eating better, living longer, losing fewer children. Ten years after the founding of Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics the Raja took a census. The population had been stable, more or less, for a century. Now it had started to rise. In fifty or sixty years, Dr. Andrew foresaw, Pala would be transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today. What was to be clone? Dr. Andrew had read his Malthus. 'Food production increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by amine, pestilence and war: or else (Malthus being a clergyman) he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint.' "

"Mor-ral r-restr-raint," the little nurse repeated, rolling her r's in the Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. "Mor-ral r-restr-raint! Incidentally," she added, "Dr. Andrew had just married the Raja's sixteen-year-old niece."

"And that," said Ranga, "was yet another reason for revising Malthus. Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better, happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides. There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The whole armory of Paleo-Birth Control."

"And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?"

"Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Bud dhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven's sake don't go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphys ical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones. But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the Experimental Station. Out of six chil dren five now survived. The old patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the yoga of love. Dr. Andrew was told about maithunn and, being a true man of science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary instruction."