"Well," began one of the boys, and hesitated.
"Speak up," said the D.H.C. "Don't keep his fordship waiting."
"I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her."
"And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?"
"Horrible!"
"Horrible; precisely," said the Controller. "Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn't have anything to do with them."
"Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat." Bernard ground his teeth. "Have her here, have her there." Like mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton. She said she'd think it over, she said she'd give me an answer this week. Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford." He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face–hard, again and again.
"Yes, I really do advise you to try her," Henry Foster was saying.
"Take Ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous."
"He's so ugly!" said Fanny.
"But I rather like his looks."
"And then so
"I think that's rather sweet," said Lenina. "One feels one would like to pet him. You know. Like a cat."
Fanny was shocked. "They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle–thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That's why he's so stunted."
"What nonsense!" Lenina was indignant.
"Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."
"But, my dear chap, you're welcome, I assure you. You're welcome." Henry Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder. "Every one belongs to every one else, after all."
One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnop?dia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
"Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal."
"Well, all I can say is that I'm going to accept his invitation."
Bernard hated them, hated them. But they were two, they were large, they were strong.
"The Nine Years' War began in A.F. 141."
"Not even if it
"Which I simply don't believe," Lenina concluded.
"The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eighth Arrondissement, the explosion of the anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag."
"Because I
"You're hopeless, Lenina, I give you up."
"The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious."
Back turned to back, Fanny and Lenina continued their changing in silence.
"The Nine Years' War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and …"
"Fanny Crowne's a nice girl too," said the Assistant Predestinator.
In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. "I do love flying," they whispered, "I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love …"
"Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn't do things by force."
"Not nearly so pneumatic as Lenina. Oh, not nearly."
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …"
"Government's an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption."
"There, I'm ready," said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted. "Let's make peace, Fanny darling."
"Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result …"
"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches …"
"One of these days," said Fanny, with dismal emphasis, "you'll get into trouble."
"Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature."
"I do love flying. I do love flying."
"Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books."
"Do I look all right?" Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.
"Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green."
"Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending."
Green corduroy shorts and white viscose-woollen stockings turned down below the knee.
"Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide."
A green-and-white jockey cap shaded Lenina's eyes; her shoes were bright green and highly polished.
"In the end," said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnop?dia …"
And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of contraceptives.
"The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction …"
"Perfect!" cried Fanny enthusiastically. She could never resist Lenina's charm for long. "And what a perfectly
"I simply must get one like it," said Fanny.
"There were some things called the pyramids, for example.
"My old black-patent bandolier …"
"And a man called Shakespeare. You've never heard of them of course."
"It's an absolute disgrace–that bandolier of mine."
"Such are the advantages of a really scientific education."
"The more stitches the less riches; the more stitches the less …"
"The introduction of Our Ford's first T-Model …"
"I've had it nearly three months."
"Chosen as the opening date of the new era."
"Ending is better than mending; ending is better …"
"There was a thing, as I've said before, called Christianity."
"Ending is better than mending."
"The ethics and philosophy of under-consumption …"
"I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love …"
"So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen–positively a crime against society."
"Henry Foster gave it me."
"All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. There was also a thing called God."
"It's real morocco-surrogate."
"We have the World State now. And Ford's Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services."
"Ford, how I hate them!" Bernard Marx was thinking.
"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
"Like meat, like so much meat."
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
"Do ask Henry where he got it."
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
"And what makes it worse, she thinks of herself as meat."
"Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178."
"He does look glum," said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx.
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
"Let's bait him."
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
"Glum, Marx, glum." The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. "What you need is a gramme of
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
"Take it," insisted Henry Foster, "take it."
"Stability was practically assured."
"One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments," said the Assistant Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnop?dic wisdom.
"It only remained to conquer old age."
"Damn you, damn you!" shouted Bernard Marx.
"Hoity-toity."
"Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts …"
"And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn." They went out, laughing.
"All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course …"
"Don't forget to ask him about that Malthusian belt," said Fanny.
"Along with them all the old man's mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime."
"… two rounds of Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly."
"Work, play–at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking–
soma
"Go away, little girl," shouted the D.H.C. angrily. "Go away, little boy! Can't you see that his fordship's busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else."
"Suffer little children," said the Controller.
Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies.