manner.

The guru got up quite nimbly, joints creaking, skin dry and cracked.
Three strides brought him to a tree with a partly hollow trunk. He
lifted a radio transmitter and began to talk.

* * * * *

In twenty generations, the initially small population of Ophiuchus IX,
all colonists from India on Earth, had increased geometrically. The
colonized planet, now, was as over-populated as the teeming
sub-continent which long ago had sent the colonists seeking a new home.
As a result, unemployment was chronic, discontent widespread, and
whatever inner serenity mysticism might bring was widely sought after.
This did not stop the non-mystics, however, of whom there were many,
from seeking jobs that could pay money that could fill empty bellies....

[Illustration: The crazed mob was bent upon rapine and murder.]

A long line gathered outside the employment office of Denebian Exports
the morning after Mayhem had left the League building in his new body.
Denebian Exports was the largest outworld company currently on
Ophiuchus, a company which had solved the outworlder-suicide problem
quite simply by hiring no one but natives. Still, hoots and catcalls
surrounded those on the employment line. Other jobless Ophiuchans,
apparently preferring near-starvation to working for the outworlders,
threatened to make the situation dangerous.

Pandit Gandhi Menon, a lean, handsome Ophiuchan of perhaps thirty years,
wished there was some way he could shut his ears to the abuse. He needed
work. His father and mother were ill, his child was starving, his wife
already dead. The gurus offered their own unique solution, of course.
The body is nothing, they said. The mind is everything. But thus had the
gurus spoken for four thousand years, on Earth and on Ophiuchus. The
great majority of Ophiuchans, Pandit Gandhi Menon included, preferred
food for the body to food for mystic thought. Still, the crowds were
ugly, threatening to break up the line of job-seekers if Denebian
Exports didn't open its doors soon....

An unkempt little man, not old but with a matted growth of beard, an
unwashed body which gave the impression of wiry strength, and wild eyes,
abruptly flung himself at the young woman in line in front of Pandit.

Shouting, "Not our women, too!" the little man attacked the girl, trying
to drag her from the line. "It is bad enough our men, but not our
women!"

* * * * *