"I'd have thought it would make all the difference," said Will.

"Do you like music?" Dr. Robert asked.

"More than most things."

"And what, may I ask, does Mozart's G-Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Atman-Brahman?"

Will laughed. "Let's hope not."

"But that doesn't make the experience of the G-Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it's the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-medicine, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises. Even if it doesn't refer to anything outside itself, it's still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you're prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming. So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one's skull. Maybe it is private and there's no unitive knowledge of anything but one's own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one's eyes and make one blessed and transform one's whole life." There was a long silence. "Let me tell you something," he resumed, turning to Murugan. "Something I hadn't intended to talk about to anybody. But now I feel that perhaps I have a duty, a duty to the throne, a duty to Pala and all its people-an obligation to tell you about this very private experience. Perhaps the telling may help you to be a little more understanding about your country and its ways." He was silent for a moment; then in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, "I suppose you know about my wife," he went on.

His face still averted, Murugan nodded. "I was sorry," he mumbled, "to hear she was so ill."

"It's a matter of a few days now," said Dr. Robert. "Four or five at the most. But she's still perfectly lucid, perfectly conscious of what's happening to her. Yesterday she asked me if we could take the moksha-medicinc together. We'd taken it together," he added parenthetically, "once or twice each year for the last thirty-seven years-ever since we decided to get married. And now once more-for the last time, the last, last time. There was a risk involved, because of the damage to the liver. But we decided it was a risk worth taking. And as it turned out, we were right. The moksha-medicine-the dope, as you prefer to call it- hardly upset her at all. All that happened to her was the mental transformation."

He was silent, and Will suddenly became aware of the squeak and scrabble of caged rats and, through the open window, the babel of tropical life and the call of a distant mynah bird. "Here and now, boys. Here and now ..."

"You're like that mynah," said Dr. Robert at last. "Trained to repeat words you don't understand or know the reason for, 'It isn't real. It isn't real.' But if you'd experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday you'd know better. You'd know it was much more real than what you call reality. More real than what you're thinking and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes. But not real is what you've been taught to say. Not real, not real.'" Dr. Robert laid a hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder. "You've been told that we're just a set of self-indulgent dope takers, wallowing in illusions and false samadhis. Listen, Murugan-forget all the bad language that's been pumped into you. Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you've got to live in, learn in, suffer in, and finally die in. Yes, even you will have to die one day-maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? But it's going to happen, and one's a fool if one doesn't prepare for it." He turned to Will. "Would you like to come along while we take our shower and get into some clothes?"

Without waiting for an answer, he walked out through the door that led into that central corridor of the long building. Will picked up his bamboo staff and, accompanied by Vijaya, followed him out of the room.

"Do you suppose that made any impression on Murugan?" he asked Vijaya when the door had closed behind them.

Vijaya shrugged his shoulders. "I doubt it."

"What with his mother," said Will, "and his passion for internal-combustion engines, he's probably impervious to anything you people can say. You should have heard him on the subject of motor scooters!"

"We have heard him," said Dr. Robert, who had halted in front of a blue door and was waiting for them to come up with him. "Frequently. When he comes of age, scooters are going to become a major political issue."

Vijaya laughed. "To scoot or not to scoot, that is the question."

"And it isn't only in Pala that it's the question," Dr. Robert added. "It's the question that every underdeveloped country has to answer one way or the other."

"And the answer," said Will, "is always the same. Wherever I've been-and I've been almost everywhere-they've opted wholeheartedly for scooting. All of them."

"Without exception," Vijaya agreed. "Scooting for scooting's sake, and to hell with all considerations of fulfillment, self-knowledge, liberation. Not to mention common or garden health or happiness."

"Whereas we" said Dr. Robert, "have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings-not our human beings to somebody else's economy and technology. We import what we can't make; but we make an import only what we can afford. And what we can afford is limited not merely by our supply of pounds and marks and dollars, but also primarily-primarily" he insisted-"by our wish to be happy, our ambition to become fully human. Scooters, we've decided after carefully looking into the matter, are among the things-the very numerous things-we simply can't afford. Which is something poor little Murugan will have to learn the hard way-seeing that he hasn't learned, and doesn't want to learn, the easy way."

"Which is the easy way?" Will asked.

"Education and reality-revealers. Murugan has had neither.

Or rather he's had the opposite of both. He's had miseducation in Europe-Swiss governesses, English tutors, American movies, everybody's advertisements-and he's had reality eclipsed for him by his mother's brand of spirituality. So it's no wonder he pines for scooters."

"But his subjects, I gather, do not."

"Why should they? They've been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness. And, on top of that, they have been shown the world and themselves and other people as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers. Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles. Jewels and miracles," he repeated emphatically. "So why should we resort to scooters or whisky or television or Billy Graham or any other of your distractions and compensations?"

" 'Nothing short of everything will really do,' " Will quoted. "I see now what the Old Raja was talking about. You can't be a good economist unless you're also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician."

"And don't forget all the other sciences," said Dr. Robert. "Pharmacology, sociology, physiology, not to mention pure and applied autology, neurotheology, metachemistry, mycomysti-cism, and the ultimate science," he added, looking away so as to be more alone with his thoughts of Lakshmi in the hospital, "the science that sooner or later we shall all have to be examined in- thanatology." He was silent for a moment; then, in another tone, "Well, let's go and get washed up," he said and, opening the blue door, led the way into a long changing room with a row of showers and wash basins at one end and on the opposite wall, tiers of lockers and a large hanging cupboard.