"So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people-is that it?"
"Precisely. And when they've had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies."
Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.
"What's the joke?"
"I was thinking of my father. A little woodchopping might have been the making of him-not to mention the salvation of his wretched family. Unfortunately he was an English gentleman. Woodchopping was out of the question."
"Didn't he have any physical outlet for his energies?" Will shook his head. "Besides being a gentleman," he explained, "my father thought he was an intellectual. But an intellectual doesn't hunt or shoot or play golf; he just thinks and drinks. Apart from brandy, my father's only amusements were bullying, auction bridge, and the theory of politics. He fancied himself as a twentietly century version of Lord Acton- the last, lonely philosopher of Liberalism. You should have heard him on the iniquities of the modern omnipotent state! 'Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely.' After which he'd down another brandy and go back with renewed gusto to his favorite pastime-trampling on his wife and children."
"And if Acton himself didn't behave in that way," said Dr. Robert, "it was merely because he happened to be virtuous and intelligent. There was nothing in his theories to restrain a delinquent Muscle Man or an untreated Peter Pan from trampling on anyone he could get his feet on. That was Acton's fatal weakness. As a political theorist he was altogether admirable. As a practical psychologist he was almost nonexistent. He seems to have thought that the power problem could be solved by good social arrangements, supplemented, of course, by sound morality and a spot of revealed religion. But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that's obvious. But it's also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I'd like to write a little book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law."
"Law," Will echoed. "I was just going to ask you about law. Are you absolutely swordless and punishmentless? Or do you still need judges and policemen?"
"We still need them," said Dr. Robert. "But we don't need nearly so many of them as you do. In the first place, thanks to preventive medicine and preventive education, we don't commit many crimes. And in the second place, most of the few crimes that are committed are dealt with by the criminal's MAC. Group therapy within a community that has assumed group responsibility for the delinquent. And in difficult cases the group therapy is supplemented by medical treatment and a course of moksha-medicme experiences, directed by somebody with an exceptional degree of insight."
"So where do the judges come in?"
"The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he's guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts. At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge. When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed."
"And if they're never satisfactory?"
"In the long run," said Dr. Robert, "they always are."
There was a silence.
"Did you ever do any rock climbing?" Vijaya suddenly asked.
Will laughed. "How do you think I came by my game leg?"
"That was forced climbing. Did you ever climb for fun?"
"Enough," said Will, "to convince me that I wasn't much good at it."
Vijaya glanced at Murugan. "What about you, while you were in Switzerland?"
The boy blushed deeply and shook his head. "You can't do any of those things," he muttered, "if you have a tendency to TB."
"What a pity!" said Vijaya. "It would have been so good for you."
Will asked, "Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?"
"Climbing's an integral part of the school curriculum."
"For everybody?"
"A little for everybody. With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People-that's about one in twelve of the boys and one in twenty-seven of the girls. We shall soon be seeing some youngsters tackling their first post-elementary climb."
The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles. There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool. Dr. Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the center of the plateau.
"That's the High Altitude Station," he said. "Seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe. Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won't set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots. Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude-including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of."
"Is this the place we're bound for?" Will asked.
"No, we're going higher." Dr. Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark-red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle and on the other mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the clouds. "Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox. It's one of my favorite places in the whole island. When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week. How many years ago!" A note of sadness had come into his voice. He sighed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.
They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.
"Entering the last, worst lap," said Vijaya. "Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel."
He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible. Ten minutes later they had arrived.
10
Cautiously maneuvering his immobilized leg, Will climbed out of the car and looked about him. Between the red soaring crags to the south and the headlong descents in every other direction the crest of the ridge had been leveled, and at the midpoint of this long narrow terrace stood the temple-a great red tower of the same substance as the mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the pragmatic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing; for all the temple's richly textured surfaces, all its bounding contours against the sky curved organically inwards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble, above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed dome that crowned the whole.