"It doesn't get really interesting," said Murugan, "until near the end of the book. It has thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages," he added parenthetically. "Imagine! Thirteen hundred and fifty-eight!"
Will skipped the next seven hundred and fifty pages. "Ah, this is more like it," he said. " 'Our Famous .22 Revolvers and Automatics.' " And here, a little further on, were the Fibre Glass Boats, here were the High Thrust Inboard Engines, here was a 12-hp Outboard for only $234.95-and the Fuel Tank was included. "That's extraordinarily generous!"
But Murugan, it was evident, was no sailor. Taking the book, he leafed impatiently through a score of additional pages.
"Look at this Italian Style Motor Scooter!" And while Will looked, Murugan read aloud. " 'This sleek Speedster gives up to 110 Miles per Gallon of Fuel.' Just imagine!" His normally sulky face was glowing with enthusiasm. "And you can get up to sixty miles per gallon even on this 14.5-hp Motorcycle. And it's guaranteed to do seventy-five miles an hour-guaranteed!"
"Remarkable!" said Will. Then, curiously, "Did somebody in America send you this glorious book?" he asked.
Murugan shook his head. "Colonel Dipa gave it to me." "Colonel Dipa?" What an odd kind of present from Hadrian to Antinoiis! He looked again at the picture of the motorbike, then back at Murugan's glowing face. Light dawned; the Colonel's purpose revealed itself. The serpent tempted me, and I did eat. The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every underdeveloped Eden the tiniest taste of its fruit, and even the sight of its thirteen hundred and fifty-eight leaves, had power to bring the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark-naked. The future Raja of Pala was being made to realize that he was no more than the untrousered ruler of a tribe of savages.
"You ought," Will said aloud, "to import a million of these catalogues and distribute them-gratis, of course, like contraceptives-to all your subjects.
"What for?"
"To whet their appetite for possessions. Then they'll start clamoring for Progress-oil wells, armaments, Joe Aldehyde, Soviet technicians."
Murugan frowned and shook his head. "It wouldn't work."
"You mean, they wouldn't be tempted? Not even by Sleek Speedsters and Whisper-Pink Bras? But that's incredible!"
"It may be incredible," said Murugan bitterly, "but it's a fact. They're just not interested."
"Not even the young ones?"
"I'd say especially the young ones."
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."