The way to Mount Everest, Tropile glumly found, lay through supervising
the colony's nursery school. It wasn't what he had expected, but it had
the advantages that while his charges were learning, he was learning,
too.
One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found that the "wolves," far
from being predators on the "sheep," existed with them in a far more
complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through
sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society.
In barbarously simple prose, a primer said: "The Sons of the Wolf are
good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost
as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound
interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this."
True, thought Tropile subvocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was
how it had been with him.
"Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among
them are in constant danger of detection and death--although ordinarily
a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of sheep." True, too.
"It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to
live among the sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would
die--of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger."
It didn't have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can't mend their
own fences.
The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly--he
choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind--_competitive_.
The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the
barriers of behavior.
But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would
have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were
learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big
Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called "Zeckendorf and
Hilton" sometimes ended in bloody noses.
And nobody--nobody at all--meditated on Connectivity.
Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: "We
don't understand it and we don't like what we don't understand. We're
suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older, we give
them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get
the feel of it--or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as
Citizens, they'll need that much. But more than that we do not allow."
"Allow?" Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to
pulse.
"_Allow!_ We have our suspicions and we know for a fact that sometimes
people disappear when they meditate. We don't want to disappear. We
think it's not a good thing to disappear. Don't meditate, Tropile. You
hear?"
* * * * *
But later, Tropile had to argue the point. He picked a time when
Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole
adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground--it had
once been a football field, Haendl said. They had done their regular
twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for
living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid
sheep.
Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near
Haendl, caught his breath and said: "Haendl--about meditation."
"What about it?"
"Well, perhaps you don't really grasp it."
Tropile searched for words. He knew what he wanted to say. How could
anything that felt as good as Oneness be bad? And wasn't Translation,
after all, so rare as hardly to matter? But he wasn't sure he could get
through to Haendl in those terms.
He tried: "When you meditate successfully, Haendl, you're one with the
Universe. Do you know what I mean? There's no feeling like it. It's
indescribable peace, beauty, harmony, repose."
"It's the world's cheapest narcotic," Haendl snorted.
"Oh, now, really--"
"_And_ the world's cheapest religion. The stone-broke mutts can't
afford gilded idols, so they use their own navels. That's all it is.
They can't afford alcohol; they can't even afford the muscular exertion
of deep breathing that would throw them into a state of hyperventilated
oxygen drunkenness. Then what's left? Self-hypnosis. Nothing else. It's
all they can do, so they learn it, they define it as pleasant and good,
and they're all fixed up."
Tropile sighed. The man was so stubborn! Then a thought occurred to him
and he pushed himself up on his elbows. "Aren't you leaving something
out? What about Translation?"