Will Farnaby pricked up his ears. This lack of interest was profoundly interesting. "Can you guess why?" he asked.

"I don't guess," the boy answered. "I know." And as though he had suddenly decided to stage a parody of his mother, he began to speak in a tone of righteous indignation that was absurdly out of keeping with his age and appearance. "To begin with, they're much too busy with ..." He hesitated, then the abhorred word was hissed out with a disgustful emphasis. "With sex."

"But everybody's busy with sex. Which doesn't keep them from whoring after sleek speedsters."

"Sex is different here," Murugan insisted.

"Because of the yoga of love?" Will asked, remembering the little nurse's rapturous face.

The boy nodded. "They've got something that makes them think they're perfectly happy, and they don't want anything else."

"What a blessed state!"

"There's nothing blessed about it," Murugan snapped. "It's just stupid and disgusting. No progress, only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they're all given."

"Dope?" Will repeated in some astonishment. Dope in a place where Susila had said there were no addicts? "What kind of dope?"

"It's made out of toadstools. Toadstools!" He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani's vibrant tone of outraged spirituality. "Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?" "No, these are yellow. People used to go out and collect them in the mountains. Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station. Scientifically cultivated dope. Pretty, isn't it?"

A door slammed and there was a sound of voices, of footsteps approaching along a corridor. Abruptly, the indignant spirit of the Rani took flight, and Murugan was once again the conscience-stricken schoolboy furtively trying to cover up his delinquencies. In a trice Elementary Ecology had taken the place of Sears, Roebuck, and the suspiciously bulging briefcase was under the table. A moment later, stripped to the waist and shining like oiled bronze with the sweat of labor in the noonday sun, Vijaya came striding into the room. Behind him came Dr. Robert. With the air of a model student, interrupted in the midst of his reading by trespassers from the frivolous outside world, Murugan looked up from his book. Amused, Will threw himself at once wholeheartedly into the part that had been assigned to him.

"It was I who got here too early," he said in response to Vijaya's apologies for their being so late. "With the result that our young friend here hasn't been able to get on with his lessons. We've been talking our heads off."

"What about?" Dr. Robert asked.

"Everything. Cabbages, kings, motor scooters, pendulous abdomens. And when you came in, we'd just embarked on toadstools. Murugan was telling me about the fungi that are used here as a source of dope."

"What's in a name?" said Dr. Robert, with a laugh. "Answer, practically everything. Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names-the moksha-medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no firsthand knowledge of the stuff and can't be persuaded even to give it a try. For him, it's dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in."

"What does His Highness say to that?" Will asked.

Murugan shook his head. "All it gives you is a lot of illusions," he muttered. "Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of?"

"Why indeed?" said Vijaya with good-humored irony. "Seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!"

"I never said that," Murugan protested. "All I mean is that I don't want any of your false samadhi."

"How do you know it's false?" Dr. Robert enquired.

"Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and tapas and . . . well, you know-not going with women."

"Murugan," Vijaya explained to Will, "is one of the Puritans. He's outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine in their bloodstreams, even beginners-yes, and even boys and girls who make love together-can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego."

"But it isn't real," Murugan insisted.

"Not real!" Dr. Robert repeated. "You might as well say that the experience of feeling well isn't real."

"You're begging the question," Will objected. "An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull but completely irrelevant to anything outside."

"Of course," Dr. Robert agreed.

"Do you know what goes on inside your skull, when you've taken a dose of the mushroom?"

"We know a little."

"And we're trying all the time to find out more," Vijaya added.

"For example," said Dr. Robert, "we've found that the people whose EEG doesn't show any alpha-wave activity when they're relaxed aren't likely to respond significantly to the moksha-medicine. That means that, for about fifteen percent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation."

"Another thing we're just beginning to understand," said Vijaya, "is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What's happening in the brain when you're having a vision? And what's happening when you pass from a premystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?"

"Do you know?" Will asked.

" 'Know' is a big word. Let's say we're in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas-they're all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection- the visual cortex, for example. Just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven't yet found out. The important fact is that, somehow or other, it does produce them. And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling."

"And how do the silent areas respond?" Will enquired.

"Let's start with what they don't respond with. They don't respond with visions or auditions, they don't respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological performance. None of that amusing premystical stuff. Their response is the full-blown mystical experience. You know-One in all and All in one. The basic experience with its corollaries- boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning."

"Not to mention joy," said Dr. Robert, "inexpressible joy."

"And the whole caboodle is inside your skull," said Will. "Strictly private. No reference to any external fact except a toadstool."

"Not real," Murugan chimed in. "That's exactly what I was trying to say."

"You're assuming," said Dr. Robert, "that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is no more farfetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the moksha-mcdicmc does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name 'mystical experience.' / say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large 'M' to flow into your mind with a small 'm.' You can't demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can't demonstrate the truth of mine. And even if you could prove that I'm wrong, would it make any practical difference?"