Will took a seat and while his companions lathered themselves at the basins, went on with their conversations "Would it be permissible," he asked, "for a miseducated alien to try a truth-and-beauty pill?"

The answer was another question. "Is your liver in good order?" Dr. Robert enquired.

"Excellent."

"And you don't seem to be more than mildly schizophrenic. So I can't see any counterindication."

"Then I can make the experiment?"

"Whenever you like."

He stepped into the nearest shower stall and turned on the water. Vijaya followed suit.

"Aren't you supposed to be intellectuals?" Will asked when the two men had emerged again and were drying themselves.

"We do intellectual work," Vijaya answered.

"Then why all this horrible honest toil?"

"For a very simple reason: this morning I had some spare time."

"So did I," said Dr. Robert.

"So you went out into the fields and did a Tolstoy act."

Vijaya laughed. "You seem to imagine we do it for ethical reasons."

"Don't you?"

"Certainly not. I do muscular work, because I have muscles; and if I don't use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict."

"With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks," said Dr. Robert. "Or rather with everything-but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome. In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a moneylender, even a metaphysician. And when they weren't using their legs, they were jogging about on horses. Whereas now, from the tycoon to his typist, from the logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine tenths of your time on foam rubber. Spongy seats for spongy bottoms-at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses. No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity- just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting. The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them."

"So you take to digging and delving as a form of therapy?" "As prevention-to make therapy unnecessary. In Pala even a professor, even a government official, generally puts in two hours of digging and delving each day." "As part of his duties?" "And as part of his pleasure."

Will made a grimace. "It wouldn't be part of my pleasure." "That's because you weren't taught to use your mind-body in the right way," Vijaya explained. "If you'd been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum of awareness, you'd enjoy even honest toil."

"I take it that your children all get this kind of training." "From the first moment they start doing for themselves. For example, what's the proper way of handling yourself while you're buttoning your clothes?" And suiting action to words, Vijaya started to button the shirt he had just slipped into. "We answer the question by actually putting their heads and bodies into the physiologically best position. And we encourage them at the same time to notice how it feels to be in the physiologically best position, to be aware of what the process of doing up buttons consists of in terms of touches and pressures and muscular sensations. By the time they're fourteen they've learned how to get the most and the best-objectively and subjectively-out of any activity they may undertake. And that's when we start them working. Ninety minutes a day at some kind of manual job." "Back to good old child labor!"

"Or rather," said Dr. Robert, "forward from bad new child idleness. You don't allow your teen-agers to work; so they have to blow off steam in delinquency or else throttle down steam till they're ready to become domesticated sitting-addicts. And now," he added, "it's time to be going. I'll lead the way."

In the laboratory, when they entered, Murugan was in the act of locking his briefcase against all prying eyes. "I'm ready," he said and, tucking the thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages of the Newest Testament under his arm, he followed them out into the sunshine. A few minutes later, crammed into an ancient jeep, the four of them were rolling along the road that led, past the paddock of the white bull, past the lotus pool and the huge stone Buddha, out through the gate of the Station Compound to the highway. "I'm sorry we can't provide more comfortable transportation," said Vijaya as they bumped and rattled along.

Will patted Murugan's knee. "This is the man you should be apologizing to," he said. "The one whose soul yearns for Jaguars and Thunder birds."

"It's a yearning, I'm afraid," said Dr. Robert from the back seat, "that will have to remain unsatisfied."

Murugan made no comment, but smiled the secret contemptuous smile of one who knows better.

"We can't import toys," Dr. Robert went on. "Only essentials."

"Such as?"

"You'll see in a moment." They rounded a curve, and there beneath them were the thatched roofs and tree-shaded gardens of a considerable village. Vijaya pulled up at the side of the road and turned off the motor. "You're looking at New Rothamsted," he said. "Alias Madalia. Rice, vegetables, poultry, fruit. Not to mention two potteries and a furniture factory. Hence those wires." He waved his hand in the direction of the long row of pylons that climbed up the terraced slope behind the village, dipped out of sight over the ridge, and reappeared, far away, marching up from the floor of the next valley towards the green belt of mountain jungle and the cloudy peaks beyond and above. "That's one of the indispensable imports-electrical equipment. And when the waterfalls have been harnessed and you've strung up the transmission lines, here's something else with a high priority." He directed a pointing finger at a windowless block of cement that rose incongruously from among the wooden houses near the upper entrance to the village.

"What is it?" Will asked. "Some kind of electric oven?"

"No, the kilns are over on the other side of the village. This is the communal freezer."

"In the old days," Dr. Robert explained, "we used to lose about half of all the perishables we produced. Now we lose practically nothing. Whatever we grow is for us, not for the circumambient bacteria."

"So now you have enough to eat."

"More than enough. We eat better than any other country in Asia, and there's a surplus for export. Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war."

"Incidentally," Will asked, "who owns all this? Are you capitalists or state socialists?"

"Neither. Most of the time we're co-operators. Palanese agriculture has always been an affair of terracing and irrigation. But terracing and irrigation call for pooled efforts and friendly agreements. Cutthroat competition isn't compatible with rice-growing in a mountainous country. Our people found it quite easy to pass from mutual aid in a village community to streamlined cooperative techniques for buying and selling and profit sharing and financing."

"Even co-operative financing?"

Dr. Robert nodded. "None of those bloodsucking usurers that you find all over the Indian countryside. And no commercial banks in your Western style. Our borrowing and lending system was modeled on those credit unions that Wilhelm Raiffeisen set up more than a century ago in Germany. Dr. Andrew persuaded the Raja to invite one of Raiffeisen's young men to come here and organize a cooperative banking system. It's still going strong."

"And what do you use for money?" Will asked.

Dr. Robert dipped into his trouser pocket and pulled out a handful of silver, gold and copper.