Robert returned from his early-morning visit to the hospital, was drinking his second cup of Palanese tea and eating toasted breadfruit with pumelo marmalade. “Not too much pain in the night,” was Dr. Robert’s response to his enquiries. “Lakshmi had four or five hours of good sleep, and this morning she was able to take some broth.” They could look forward, he continued, to another day of respite. And so, since it tired the patient to have him there all the time, and since life, after all, had to go on and be made the best of, he had decided to drive up to the High Altitude Station and put in a few hours’ work on the research team in the pharmaceutical laboratory. “Work on the moksha-medicine?” Dr. Robert shook his head. “That’s just a matter of repeating a standard operation—something for technicians, not for the researchers. They’re busy with something new.” And he began to talk about the indoles recently isolated from the ololiuqui seeds that had been brought in from Mexico last year and were now being grown in the station’s botanic garden.
