The Vitanuls

Course: Science Fiction & Religion

Lecture #3 / Reading #2

The Vitanuls

By John Brunner

INTRODUCTION:

Medical advances, especially in the field of infant mortality," have already given us one serious ethical problem: over-population. But imagine how that problem could be exacerbated should medical research discover a way substantially to extend our lives-a cure for senility, perhaps. Suppose, for instance, that the earth's population grew to number as many people alive at one time as had ever lived before in man's history. British science-fiction author John Brunner examines that proposition in an unusual but appropriate setting a maternity hospital in India. The setting and a remarkably spiritual central character provide the story. with some considerations of life and death not frequently found in science fiction, nor expressed, as they are here, in Hindu values. Yet Brunner weaves his tale so sympathetically that even to the Western mind, the reaction of a great Indian physician to the crisis seems altogether reasonable and fitting.

The Vitanuls

By John Brunner

Before the soundproof, germproof double glass window of the delivery room the matron of the maternity hospital came to a halt. "And there," she told the tall young. American from the World Health Organization, "is our patron saint."

Barry Chance blinked at her. She was a brisk fortyish Kashmiri woman with an aura of efficiency, not at all the kind of person one would expect to make jokes about her life's work. And indeed there had been no trace of jocularity in her tone. But in this teeming subcontinent of India a stranger could never be sure.

He compromised. "I'm sorry," he lied. "I didn't catch that . . . ?"

Out of the corner of his eye he studied the man the matron had indicated. He was elderly and balding; what little hair remained to him had whitened into a sort of halo around his heavily lined face. Most Indians, the American had noticed, tended to grow fat with age, but this man had gone scrawny, like Gandhi. Surely, though, an ascetic appearance and a halo of hair weren't enough to establish a claim to sainthood?

"Our patron saint," the matron repeated, sublimely unaware of her visitor's bewilderment. "Dr. Ananda Kotiwala. You're very fortunate to see him at work. It's his last day here before he retires."

Struggling to make sense of her remarks, Chance stared unashamedly at the old man. He felt his rudeness was excused by the fact that this corridor adjoining the delivery room was a kind of public gallery. On every side there were relatives and friends of the expectant mothers, down to and including very small children who had to stand on tiptoe to peer in through the double glass window. There was no such thing as privacy in India unless you were rich, and in any overcrowded, underdeveloped country a minimal fraction of the people enjoyed that luxury he'd taken for granted since childhood.

The fact that toddlers could watch, fascinated, the arrival of their new brothers and sisters was accepted here as a part of growing up. Chance reminded himself sternly that he was a foreigner, and-what was more-a doctor himself, trained at one of the few colleges that still administered the Hippocratic Oath in full form to its graduates. He forced his personal preconceptions to the back of his mind and concentrated on unravelling the curious comment the matron had made.

The scene before him offered no hints. All he could see was a typical Indian hospital delivery room, containing thirty-six mothers in labour, of whom two were suffering agonies and screaming-at least, to judge by their open mouths; the soundproofing was extremely good.

He wondered briefly how Indians felt about their children entering the world under such circumstances. What it suggested to him was an assembly-line, the mothers reduced to machines producing their quota of infants according to a preplanned schedule. And all of it so dreadfully public!

Again, though, he was falling into the trap of thinking like a modern American, parochially. For untold generations most of mankind had been born publicly. Although it had been estimated that the world's present living population was just about equal in number to all the human beings there had ever been before the twenty-first century, the majority of Earth's people continued that ancient tradition, and made a birth a social event: in villages, an excuse for a celebration, or as here a sort of family outing to the hospital.

The modern aspects of the event were easily listed. The attitudes of the mothers, for instance: one could tell at a glance which of them had enjoyed up-to-date parental instruction, for their eyes were closed and their faces bore expressions of determination. They knew what miracle was going on in their bodies, and they intended to help it, not resist it. Good. Chance nodded approval. But there remained the women who were screaming, as much from terror as pain, probably...

He shifted his attention with an effort. After all, he was supposed to be conducting a survey of the methods in use here.

The latest recommendations of the experts seemed to be being properly applied-you'd expect as much in a large city where most of the medical staff had had the benefit of training abroad. Some time soon he was committed to going out into the villages, and things would be different there, but he'd think about that when he had to.

The elderly doctor who had been called "our patron saint" was just completing the delivery of a boy. Gloved hand held up the latest recruit to the army of humanity, glistening. A slap-correction: a beautifully restrained tap with the open palm, enough to provoke a squall and the first deep breath, but not enough to aggravate the birth-trauma. And handed over to the waiting nurse to be laid on the little bench beside the bed, lower than the mother so that the last few precious ounces of maternal blood could seep down from the placenta before the cord was severed.

Excellent. All in accordance with the best modern practice. Except-why was the doctor having to explain so much so patiently to the awkward girl holding the child? Chance's puzzlement was brief; then he remembered. Of course. There weren't enough trained nurses in this country to allot one to every new mother. So those girls standing neat and scared in their disposable plastic overalls, their lank black hair bound in sterile plastic snoods, would be younger sisters or eldest daughters doing their best to help out.

Then the old man, with a final smile of reassurance, was leaving the worried girl and going to hold the hand of one of the women screaming.

Chance watched with satisfaction as he soothed her, bringing about a complete relaxation within moments, and-as far as could be guessed through the double barrier of soundproof glass and incomprehensible language-instructing her how best to hasten the delivery. Yet there was nothing more here than he'd seen in a hundred hospitals.

He turned to the matron and asked directly, "Why do you call him 'patron saint"?"

"Dr. Kotiwala," the matron said, "is the most-now what would it be in English? Is there the word 'empathetic"?"

"From 'empathy"?". Chance frowned. "I don't think so. But I get what you mean, anyway."

"Yes," the matron said. "Did you not see how he quieted the one who was screaming?"

Chance gave a slow nod. Yes, come to think of it, it must be regarded as a special gift in a country like this-to be able to break through the superstitious fright of a woman barely above peasant level and make her see what it had taken other women around her the full nine months of pregnancy and much skilled instruction to understand. Now there was only one woman screaming with her mouth wide, and the doctor was soothing her in her turn. The other he'd just spoken to was struggling to encourage her contractions.

"Dr. Kotiwala is wonderful," the matron went on. "Everybody loves him. I have known parents 'to consult astrologers not to determine the most fortunate birthday for their child but only how to make sure it is born during Dr. Kotiwala's shift in the delivery room."

Shift? Oh yes: they operated a three-shift day. Once more the image of the assembly-line came to him. But it was far too advanced a concept to reconcile with the idea of applying to astrologers. What a crazy country! Chance repressed a shiver and admitted to himself that he'd be glad when he was allowed to return home.

For long moments after that he was silent, noticing something he hadn't previously spotted: how, when the labour pains permitted, the mothers opened their eyes and hopefully followed Dr. Kotiwala's progress around the room as if wanting to invite him to spend a minute or two at their bedside.

This time their hopes weren't fulfilled. There was a breech presentation at the far end, and it would take careful manipulation to reverse the baby. Plastic-clad, a beautiful dark girl of about fifteen bent to watch what the doctor was doing, putting out her right hand so that the tense anxious mother could clasp it for comfort.

By his own standards, Chance thought, there was nothing extraordinary about Kotiwala. He was obviously competent, and his patients appeared to like him, but he was old and rather slow, and one could see how cautiously he moved now the end of his shift was near and he was tiring.

On the other hand, it was admirable to find the human touch in a birth-factory like this. He'd asked the matron, within minutes of his arrival, how long the average stay of a patient might be, and she'd said with a wry smile, "Oh-twenty-four hours for the easy ones, and perhaps thirty-six for cases with complications."

Looking at Dr. Kotiwala, one might have assumed there was all the time in the world.

From an American standpoint even that didn't constitute a claim to sanctity, but through Indian eyes doubtless things looked different. The matron had warned him that he'd come at a busy time, nine months after a big spring religious festival which people regarded as auspicious for increasing their families. The warning hadn't prepared him for the reality; the hospital was packed.

Yet it could have been worse. He shuddered a little. The back of the problem was broken, but there were still something like 180,000 new mouths to feed every day. At the peak of the population explosion there had been just under a quarter-million per day; then the impact of modern medicine was felt, even people in India, China and Africa began to recognize the need to plan for the children they could afford to feed, clothe and educate, and the crisis diminished.

Nonetheless it would be years before the children of that peak period could become teachers, workers, doctors to cope with the tremendous pressure. Thinking along these lines brought him to a subject which had been engaging a lot of his attention recently, and he spoke aloud without intending to.

"People like him, in this of all jobs-that's who they ought to choose!"

"I beg your pardon?" the matron said with positively British formality. The British had left ineradicable traces on the intellectuals of this country.

"Nothing," Chance muttered.

"But did you not say someone ought to choose Dr. Kotiwala for something?"

Annoyed with himself, yet once reminded of the dilemma shortly to be sprung on the world-unable to hold his tongue, Chance gave ground.

"You said it was Dr. Kotiwala's last day here, didn't you?"

"Why, yes. He retires tomorrow."

"You have someone in mind to replace him?"

The matron shook her head vigorously. "Oh no! In the physical sense, yes, in that another doctor will take his shifts, but men like Dr. Kotiwala are rare in any generation and in modern times most of all. We're dreadfully sorry to lose him."

"Has he-uh-passed some arbitrary retirement age?" The matron smiled thinly. "Hardly, in India! We can't afford the luxuries you Americans go in for, and that includes putting usable material-human or otherwise— on a scrapheap before it's worn out."

With his eyes on the elderly doctor, who had successfully reversed the breech presentation and moved on to attend to the woman in the next bed, Chance said, "He's retiring voluntarily, then."

"Yes."

"Why? Has he lost interest in his work?"

The matron was shocked. "Of course not! I'm not sure I can make his reasons clear, though." She bit her lip. "Well, he is very old now, and he fears that one day soon a child may die because he has let his attention wander. It would set him back many steps on the road to enlightenment if that happened."

Chance felt a surge of enlightenment himself. Believing he completely understood what the matron meant, he said, "In that case he damned well deserves-"

And broke off, because strictly he ought not to be thinking about this subject, or talking about it.

"What?" the matron said, and when Chance shook his head, went on: "You see, when he was young Dr. Kotiwala was much influenced by the teachings of the Jains, to whom the taking of any life at all is repugnant. When his desire to cherish life led him to study as a doctor, he had to accept that some killing-of bacteria, for example-is inevitable to ensure human survival. His kindliness is based on religious principles. And it would be more than he could bear to think that his own arrogance in continuing to work when it was no longer safe had cost an innocent baby its life."

"He can hardly be a Jain now," Chance said, lacking anything else by way of comment. Privately he was thinking that if what the matron said was correct, there were some old fossils back home who could do with a dose of Kotiwala's humility instead of hanging on until they were practically senile.

"He's a Hindu, as are most of our people," the matron explained. "Though he tells me his thinking has been much influenced by the teachings of Buddhism-which began, after all, as a Hindu heresy." She didn't sound greatly interested in what she was saying. "But I'm afraid I still don't understand to what you were referring a moment ago," she added.

Chance thought of gigantic factories owned by Du Pont, Bayer, Glaxo and heaven knows who else, labouring night and day with more expenditure of energy than a million mothers bringing forth commonplace human beings, and decided that the facts were going to be public knowledge soon enough for him to risk lifting a corner of the curtain of secrecy. It was getting him down to keep his mouth shut all the time.

He said, "Well, what I mean was that if I have any say in the matter people like him would get priority when it comes to-uh-the most advanced kinds of medical treatment. To preserve somebody who's liked and admired seems better than saving someone who is mainly feared."

There was a pause.

"I think I follow you," the matron said wisely. "I take it that the anti-death pill is a success?"

Chance started. She gave him another of her wry smiles. "Oh, it's difficult for us to keep up with the literature when we work under such pressure, but there have been hints, haven't there? You in the rich countries like America and Russia have been trying for years to find a broad-spectrum specific against aging, and I think-knowing your countries by hearsay-there must have been a long angry argument over who should benefit first."

Chance surrendered completely and gave a miserable nod. "Yes, there's a specific against senility. It isn't perfect, but pressure on the drug companies to put it into commercial production had grown so great that just before I left WHO Headquarters to come here I heard the contracts were being placed. A course of treatment will cost five or six hundred dollars and last for eight to ten years. I don't have to tell you what it'll mean. But if I had my way, I'd pick someone like your Dr. Kotiwala to enjoy the results before all the stupid old men with power and wealth who are going to have their obsolete ideas carried into the future by this break-through!"

He stopped short, alarmed at his own vehemence and hoping that none of the curious spectators surrounding them could speak English.

"Your attitude does you credit," the matron said. "But in one sense it's inexact to say Dr. Kotiwala is retiring. He might prefer to say he's changing his career. And if you offered to give him anti-senility treatment I expect he would smile and refuse."

"Why in the world-?"

"It is hard to make clear in English." The matron frowned. "You know what is a sunnyasi, perhaps?"

Bewildered, Chance said, "One of those holy men I've seen around the place, wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a begging-bowl."

"And a staff, usually."

"A sort of fakir?"

"Not in the least. A sunnyasi is a man in the final stage of his life's work. He can have been anything previously-a businessman, commonly, or a civil servant, or a lawyer, or even a doctor."

"You mean your Dr. Kotiwala is going to throw away. all his medical skills, all the service he could still perform in this overcrowded country even if he did risk the life of a baby one of these days, and go out begging in a loincloth for the sake of his own salvation?"

"This is why we call him our patron saint," the matron said with an affectionate smile in Dr. Kotiwala's direction. "When he is gone from here, and has collected such virtue, he will be a friend for us who remain behind."

Chance was appalled. A moment ago the matron had been saying India could not afford to throw aside people with good work still before them; now here she was seeming to approve a plan that struck him as compounded of equal parts selfishness and superstition.

"Are you telling me he believes this nonsense about stacking up virtue for a future existence?"

The matron gave him a cold stare. "I think that is uncivil of you. The teaching of Hinduism is that the soul is born again, throughout an eternal cycle, until it achieves one-ness with the All. Can you not appreciate how a lifetime of work among the newly-born makes all this real to us?"

"You believe it too?"

"That's irrelevant. But . . . I do witness miracles every time I admit a mother to this hospital. I witness how an animal act, a process with slimy, messy, bloody associations, brings about the growth of a reasoning being. I was born, and you, a squally helpless infant, and here we stand talking in abstract concepts. Maybe it's a mere function of chemical complexity; I don't know. I told you, I find it hard to keep up with the literature."

Chance stared through the window of the delivery room with a puzzled frown. He felt somehow disappointed--even cheated-after his near-acceptance of Dr. Kotiwala in the matron's admiring terms. At length he muttered, "I guess maybe we'd better move on."

The sensation of which Dr. Kotiwala was chiefly aware was weariness. It went all through his body, to the marrow of his bones.

There was no hint of it in his outward behaviour-no suggestion that he was mechanically going through the motions. The mothers who entrusted themselves and their offspring to his care would have detected any such failing, with perceptions deeper than ordinary, and he would have known the truth himself and felt he was betraying his trust.

But he was unspeakably, incredibly tired.

More than sixty years had passed since he graduated from medical school. There had been no change in the way human beings were created. Oh, the trappings had changed as medicine made its successive impacts; he remembered the inarguable disasters caused by drugs like thalidomide, and the upside-down blessings of antibiotics that swamped countries like his own with more mouths than it could possibly feed, and now he was working with techniques which meant that nine out of ten of the children born under his supervision were wished-for, loved by their parents instead of being a burden or condemned to the half-life of illegitimacy.

Sometimes things turned out well, and sometimes badly. In the course of his long and valuable career Dr. Kotiwala had come to place reliance on no other principle.

Tomorrow

His mind threatened to wander away from what he was doing: bringing to independent life the latest of all those he had delivered. How many thousands of mothers had moaned on the bed before him? He dared not count. And how many more thousands of new lives had he helped to launch? Those he less-than-dared to count. Perhaps he'd introduced to life a thief, an ingrate, a murderer, a fratricide...

No matter. Tomorrow-indeed, today, for his shift was over and this baby he was now raising by the feet was the last he would ever deliver in a hospital, though if he were appealed to in some miserable village he would doubtless help . . . Tomorrow there would be an end to worldly attachments. He would commit himself to the life of the spirit, and--

He checked. The woman alongside the mother, her sister- in-law, very much disturbed by the things she had had to do, like sterilising her hands in disinfectant and stripping off her best sari in favour of a clammy plastic overall, spoke a fearful question.

He hesitated over his answer. To the superficial glance nothing about the baby seemed amiss. It was a boy, physically whole, the usual flushed postnatal colour, letting out an acceptable scream to greet the world. All was as it should be. And yet.

He cradled the baby on his left arm while deftly raising first one, then the other eyelid. Sixty years of practice had made him gentle. He stared deep into the vacant light eyes, contrasting almost frighteningly with the skin around them.

Beyond them was-was …

But what could one say to a child as new as this? He sighed and gave it into the care of the sister-in-law, and the clock on the wall ticked away the last few seconds of his shift.

Nonetheless his mind remained on the indefinable impulse which had compelled him to take a second look at the boy. When the doctor taking over from him arrived, Dr. Kotiwala finished his summary briefing by saying, "And there's something wrong with the boy just born in Bed 32. I can't put my finger on it. But if you get the chance, check him over, would you?"

"Will do," said the relief doctor, a fat young man from Benares with a shiny brown face and shiny soft hands.

The matter continued to irk Dr. Kotiwala even though he'd spoken about it. Changed, showered, ready to leave, he still lingered in the corridor to watch his colleague checking the baby as requested, making a thorough inspection from head to sole. He found nothing wrong, and catching sight of Dr. Kotiwala as he turned away, spread his hands and shrugged, his attitude implying, "Fuss about nothing if you ask me!"

Yet when I looked into those eyes, something behind them suggested . . .

No, it was absurd. What could any adult hope to read in the eyes of a brand-new baby? Wasn't it a kind of arrogance that made him think his colleague was missing something of vital importance? In a dilemma, he considered the idea of going back in the delivery room and taking another look.

"Isn't that your patron saint standing there?" Chance muttered to the matron in a cynical tone.

"Why, so it is. How fortunate! Now you can make his acquaintance yourself-if you wish to."

"You've painted him in such glowing colours," Chance said dryly, "I feel I'd be wasting a chance if I didn't meet him before he takes off his clothes and goes native." The irony was almost completely lost on the matron. She bustled ahead with exclamations, but interrupted herself the moment she noticed Kotiwala's glum expression.

"Doctor! Is something wrong?"

"I don't know," Kotiwala sighed. His English was good, but heavily accented in the singsong rhythm which the departed British rulers of India had nicknamed "Bombay Welsh." It is the child just born in Bed 32, a boy. I am sure something is wrong, but as for what it is, I'm lost."

"In that case we must see to him," the matron said briskly. Clearly she had implicit faith in Kotiwala's opinions.

"Dr. Banerji has examined him and doesn't agree with me," Kotiwala countered.

In the matron's view Kotiwala was Kotiwala and Banerji was nobody; her expression said so, louder than words. It struck Chance that here was his opportunity to find out whether the matron's trust had any real basis.

"Look, rather than taking up Dr. Banerji's time-he has a lot to cope with in there why don't you bring the child out and we'll take a look at him?"

"Dr. Chance, from WHO," the matron explained. Absently Dr. Kotiwala shook hands.

"Yes, that is a good idea. A second opinion, wouldn't you say?"

It had been in the back of Chance's mind that his comparatively fresh training would enable him to apply some tests Kotiwala wasn't accustomed to using. In fact it was the other way around; the slow, thorough palping of the child's body and limbs with which the old Indian began wasn't in Chance's line at all. Of course, it had its advantages, provided one knew the normal location of every bone and major muscle in the infantile frame. Anyway, it revealed nothing..

Heart normal, blood pressure average, all external appearances healthy, reflexes present and vigorous, fontanelle a trifle large but within normal range of variation

After nearly three-quarters of an hour, Chance was convinced the old man was doing it to make an impression, and consequently was losing his temper by degrees. He noticed that Kotiwala again and again rolled up the boy's eyelids and stared into the eyes, as if he could read the brain behind. On the latest repetition of the act he snapped, "Tell me, doctor! What do you see in his eyes, hm?"

"What do you see?" Kotiwala countered, and motioned for Chance to look also.

"Nothing," Chance grunted a moment later. They'd checked the eyes, hadn't they, along with everything else?

"That's what I see, also," Kotiwala said. "Nothing."

Oh, for goodness' sake! Chance spun on his heel and went to the side of the room, peeling off his gloves preparatory to dumping them in the disposer. Over his shoulder he said, "Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with the kid at all. What do you think it is? The soul of an earthworm turned up in his body by mistake, or something?"

Kotiwala could hardly have missed the scorn with which the words were uttered, but his reply was perfectly calm and civil.

"No, Dr. Chance, I think that hardly likely. After a great deal of contemplation I've come to the conclusion that the traditional ideas are inaccurate. The human condition is a human thing. It embraces the imbecile and the genius, but it doen't overlap with any other species. Who could claim that the soul of a monkey, or a dog, is inferior to that which looks out of the dirty windows of a moron's eyes?" *

"I certainly wouldn't," Chance said with sarcasm, and began to strip off his gown. Kotiwala sighed, and shrugged, and was silent.

Later ..

The sunnyasi Ananda Bhagat wore nothing more than a loincloth, owned nothing more in all the world than the begging-bowl and staff he carried. Around him-for it. was cold in the hill-country this bleak December-the people of the village shivered in their cheap coarse clothes, spending as much time as they could spare huddled over their tiny fires. They burned woodchips, rarely charcoal, and even now a great deal of cowdung. The foreign experts had told them to use cowdung for fertiliser, but the warmth of a fire was closer to the present than the mystery of fixed nitrogen and next year's crops.

Ignoring the chill, ignoring the strong smoke of the fire as it wandered upward and filled the gloomy hut, Ananda Bhagat spoke soothingly to a fearful girl of about seventeen at whose breast a baby clung. He had looked into its eyes, and there he had seen-nothing.

It was not the first such in this village; it was not the first village where he had seen the same. He accepted that as a fact of existence. With the abandonment of the name Kotiwala had gone the preconceptions of the Doctor of Medicine, Trinity College, Dublin, who had obeyed the behests of intellectualism in the sterile wards of a big city hospital. Throughout his eighty-five years he had sensed a greater reality looming over him, and his final decision had been to commit himself to it.

Now, as he gazed wonderingly into the empty face of the child, he heard a noise. The young mother heard it also, and cowered because it was loud and growing louder. So far had Ananda Bhagat come from his former world that he had to make a conscious effort before he identified it. A drone in the sky. A helicopter, a rarity here; why should a helicopter come to any particular one of India's seventy thousand villages?

The young mother whimpered. "Be still, my daughter," the sunnyasi said. "I will go and see what it is."

He let her hand fall with a final comforting pat and went out of the misshapen doorway to stand on the cold windy street. The village had only one street. Shading his eyes with his thin hand, he peered upward into the sky.

Yes: a helicopter, circling and glinting in the weak winter sunlight. It was descending, but that was nothing to do with his emergence into plain view. Before he recognised the sound of it, it must already have been coming down.

He waited.

In a little while, the people came chattering out of their homes, wondering why the attention of the outer world in the form of this curious noisy machine should be turned on them. Seeing that their marvellous visitor, the holy man, the sunnyasi-such as he were few these days, and to be cherished-was standing firm, they drew courage from his example and likewise stood up boldly.

The helicopter settled in a blast of whirling dust, a little away from the beaten track called a street, and a man jumped down from it: a tall fair-skinned foreigner. He looked the scene over slowly, spotted the sunnyasi and let out an exclamation. Calling something to his companions, he began to stride up the street. Two others came down to stand beside the machine and talk in low tones: a girl of about twenty, in a sari of blue and green, and a young man in flying overalls, the pilot.

Clutching her baby to her, the young mother also came out to see what was going on, her first child-a toddler pursuing her on unsteady feet with a hand outstretched to catch at her sari if his balance failed him.,

"Dr. Kotiwala!" the young man from the helicopter. said.

"I was," the sunnyasi agreed in a rusty voice. The whole vocabulary of English had sloughed off his mind like a snake's overtight skin.

"For God's sake!" The young man's voice was harsh. "We've had enough trouble finding you without your playing word-games with us now we're here! Thirteen villages we've had to stop at on the way, picking up clues and being told you were here yesterday and moved on . . .

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

"My name's Barry Chance, in case you've forgotten me. We met at the hospital in-"

The sunnyasi interrupted. "I remember very well, thank you. But who am I, that you spend so much time and energy trying to find me?"

"As far as we can tell, you're the first person ever to have recognised a Vitanul."

There was a silence. During it, Chance could almost see the sunnyasi's persona fading, that of Dr. Kotiwala replacing it. The change was reflected in the voice, which resumed its "Bombay Welsh" rhythm on the next words.

"My Latin is negligible, for I only learned what was necessary in medicine, but I take it that would be from vita, a life, and nullus. . . You mean: like this one here?" He gestured for the young mother beside him to advance a pace, and rested his hand lightly on her baby's back. Chance looked the infant over and at length shrugged. "If you say so," he muttered. "She's only about two months old, isn't she? So without tests. .

His voice trailed briefly away.

"Yes, without tests!" he burst out abruptly. "That's the point! Do you know what became of the boy you said had something wrong with him, the very last one you delivered before you-ah-retired?" There was great fierceness in his voice, but it was not directed at the old man he was talking to. It was simply the outward sign that he had been driven to the end of his resources.

"I have seen many others since," Kotiwala said. It was definitely not the sunnyasi speaking now, but the trained doctor with a lifetime's experience behind him. "I can imagine, but tell me anyhow."

Chance gave him a look that reflected something close to awe. The inquisitive villagers gathered nearby recognised the expression, and deduced-though not even the best-educated among them could follow the rapid English words that the stranger from the sky was affected by the aura of their holy man. They relaxed noticeably.

"Well... your friend the matron kept insisting that if you'd said something was wrong with him there must be something wrong, although I'd said he was okay, Dr. Banerji had said he was okay. She went on and on about it until it was interfering with my work and delaying my departure. So I said to hell with it and had him taken out to WHO in Delhi for the most complete battery of tests they could lay on. Can you guess what they found?"

Kotiwala rubbed his forehead wearily. "Total suppression of the alpha and theta rhythms?" he suggested.

"You did know!" The accusation in Chance's voice was enough to shatter the barrier of language and communicate to the listening villagers, some of whom stepped menacingly closer to the sunnyasi as though to defend him if they had to..

Kotiwala waved them back with a reassuring gesture. He said, "No, I didn't know. It just now came to me what you would find."

"Then how in heaven's name did you-?"

"How did I guess the boy wasn't normal? I can't explain that to you, Dr. Chance. It would take sixty years of work in a maternity hospital, seeing scores of babies born every day, to make you see what I saw!"

Chance bit back a fierce retort and let his shoulders droop. "I'll have to swallow that. But the fact remains: you did realise, within minutes of the kid being born, even though he looked healthy and none of our tests has ever revealed any organic deformity, that his brain was-was empty and there was no mind in it! Christ, the job I had convincing them at WHO that you'd really done it, and the weeks of argument before they'd let me come back to India and try to track you down!"

"Your tests," Kotiwala said, as though the last sentence hadn't been spoken. "Many of them?"

Chance threw his hands in the air. "Doctor, where the hell have you been these past two years?"

"Walking barefoot from small village to small village," Kotiwala said, deliberately taking the question literally. "I haven't followed news from the world outside. This is a world for these people." He indicated the rough street, the mean shacks, the ploughed and planted fields, and the blue mountains closing all of it in.

Chance took a deep breath. "So you don't know and don't really care. Let me fill you in. Only a matter of weeks after I saw you, the news broke which led to my recall from India: reports of a sudden appalling rise in congenital imbecility. Normally a child begins to react in at least a sketch for a human pattern while it's still very young. Precocious kids smile quickly, and any kid is likely to distinguish movement and bright colours, and reach out to grasp things . . ."

"Except these you have named Vitanuls?"

"Exactly." Chance clenched his fists as though trying to seize something out of the air. "No life! None of the normal reactions! Absence of normal cerebral waves when you test them on the EEG, as though everything that makes a person human had been-had been left out!"

He levelled a challenging arm at Kotiwala's chest. "And you recognised the very first one of all! Tell me how!"

"Patience." Bowed by the weight of his years, Kotiwala still held himself with immense dignity. "This rise in imbecility-it struck you directly after I retired from the hospital?"

"No, of course not." -

"Why 'of course"?"

"We were too tied up with-Oh, you've been out of touch, haven't you?" Chance spoke with bitter sarcasm.

"A minor triumph of medicine was making all the headlines, and giving WHO enough headaches to be going on with. The anti-senility treatment had been made public a few days after I saw you, and everybody and his uncle was standing on line yelling for it."

"I see," Kotiwala said, and his aged shoulders finally hunched into an attitude of despair.

"You see? What's that supposed to mean?" "Forgive my interrupting. Continue, please."

Chance shivered, apparently as much at what he was remembering as at the chill December air. "We'd done our best, and postponed announcement of the treatment until there were stocks enough to treat several million applicants, but of course that was as bad as announcing it in the lab stage, because everybody's grandmother seemed to have died last Friday and here were people screaming at us for killing them by neglect, and-hell, you get the picture. Whichever way we handled it we came out wrong.

"And then shoveled in on top of that mess came the new one. Congenital imbecility hits ten per cent of birth, twenty, thirty! What's going on? Everybody whizzes around in little circles because just as we were congratulating ourselves on sorting out the row about the antisenility treatment, here comes the most fantastic crisis in history and it's not going to break, it's going to get worse, and worse, and worse... Over the past two weeks the rate has topped eighty per cent. Do you understand that, or are you so sunk in your superstitions it doesn't bother you any longer? Out of every ten children born last week, no matter in what country or continent, eight are mindless animals!"

"And you think the one we examined together was the very first?" Kotiwala disregarded the harshness of the younger man's words; his eyes were staring, unfocused, into the blue distance over the mountains.

"As far as we can work it out." Chance spread his hands. "At any rate, when we checked back we found the first kids of which this had been reported had been born on that particular day, and I happened to remember that the time of birth of the earliest we'd heard about was an hour or so after I met you."

"What happened on that day?"

"Nothing that could account for it. Every resource of the UN has been put to work; we've sifted the world's records to the very bottom, and not that day only but the time nine months earlier when these kids must have been conceived-only that doesn't fit either, because some of them were preemies as much as six weeks early, and they're the same, they're hollow, empty, drained. If we weren't at the end of our tether, I'd never have done such a crazy thing as coming to look for you. Because after all, I guess there isn't anything you can do to help, is there?"

The fire and rage which had burned in Chance when he arrived had died to ashes now, and he seemed to have no more words. Kotiwala stood thinking for a minute or more, and the villagers, growing restless, chattered among themselves.

At last the old man said, "The-the anti-senility drug. It's a success?"

"Oh yes. Thank God. If we hadn't some consolation in the midst of this mess I think we'd all go crazy. We've cut the death-rate fantastically, and because we planned well we can hope to feed the surplus mouths, and-" "I think," Kotiwala broke in, "I can tell you what happened on the day we met."

Dazed, Chance stared at him. "Then for heaven's sake tell me! You're my last hope-you're our last hope."

"I can't offer hope, my friend." A sound like the echo of doom's own knell coloured the soft words. "But I can make what they call an educated guess. Did I not read once a calculation which showed that as many people are alive in this twenty-first century as have ever lived since the evolution of human beings?"

"Why-yes. I saw that myself, a long time back." "Then I say that what happened on the day we met was this: the precise number of all the human beings there have ever been was exceeded for the very first time."

Chance shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't see--or or do I?"

"And it so turns out," Kotiwala continued, "that at the same time or very shortly afterward, you find, and make available the world over, a drug which cures old age. Dr. Chance, you will not accept this, because I remember you made a kind of joke about an earthworm, but I do. I say that you have made me understand what I saw when I looked into the eyes of that new-born child, when I looked into the eyes of this little girl here." He touched the arm of the young mother at his side, and she gave him a shy quick smile.

"Not the lack of mind, as you have been saying. But the lack of a soul."

For a few seconds Chance imagined that he heard the hollow laughter of demons in the whisper of the winter wind. With a violent effort he rid himself of the delusion.

"No, that's absurd! You can't mean to make out that we've run short of human souls, as though they were stored up in some cosmic warehouse and issued off the shelf every time a child is born! Oh, come now, doctor--you're an educated man, and this is absurd.”

"As you say," Kotiwala agreed politely. "That is something I won't venture to dispute with you. But I owe you my thanks, anyhow. You've shown me what I must do."

"That's great," Chance said. "Here I come half across the world hoping that you'll tell me what I must do, and instead you claim I've told you. . . What? What must you do?" A final flicker of hope leapt up in his face.

"I must die," said the sunnyasi, and took his staff, and his bowl, and without another word to anyone, even the young mother whom he had been comforting when Chance arrived, he set off with slow old-man's paces along the road that led to the tall blue mountains and the eternal ice by whose aid it was lawful for him to set free his soul.