“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 soma.”
“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
“Ford, I should like to kill him!” But all he did was to say, “No, thank you,” and fend off the tube of tablets.
“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.
“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.”
“Idiots, swine!” Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor to the lift.
“Now-such is progress-the old men work, the old men copulate-and there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon. Returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…”
Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimeters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies.
Chapter Four
1
The lift was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina was greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.
In the corner, she saw the small thin body and the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.
“Bernard!” she stepped up to him. “I was looking for you. I wanted to talk to you about our New Mexico plan.” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment. It annoyed her. “I’d love to come with you for a week in July,” she went on. “That is, if you still want to have me.”
Bernard’s pale face flushed.
“Shouldn’t we talk about it somewhere else?” he stammered. “With all these people about…”
Lenina laughed. “How funny you are! You’ll give me at least a week’s warning, won’t you?”
Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill. They walked out to the roof.
It was warm and bright. The summer afternoon was drowsy with the hum of passing helicopters. Bernard Marx drew a deep breath. He looked up into the sky and round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina’s face.
She smiled at him. “I must fly, Bernard. Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting. Let me know in good time about the date.” And waving her hand she ran away towards the hangars.
Henry Foster was already seated in the cockpit of his machine, waiting, when Lenina arrived.
“Four minutes late,” was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He started the engines. The machine shot vertically into the air. The speedometer showed that they were rising at the best part of two kilometres a minute. London diminished beneath them. The huge table-topped buildings[22] were no more, in a few seconds, than a bed of geometrical mushrooms sprouting from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them, a taller fungus, the Charing-T Tower, lifted towards the sky.
Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet. They were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that separated Central London from its first ring of suburbs. Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees. Below, a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress.
“What a hideous colour khaki is,” remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopaedic prejudices of her caste. “I’m glad I’m not a Delta or a Gamma.”
Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf.
2
Bernard has tened across the roof.
Lenina was making him suffer. He remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had no courage to ask her. Dared he face the risk of being humiliated? But if she were to say yes! Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched-wretched that she went to join Henry Foster, that she found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public. Wretched because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl would have.
He opened the door of his lock-up and called to a lounging couple of Delta-Minus attendants to come and push his machine out on to the roof. The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky Group, and the men were twins, identically small, black and hideous. For whatever the cause Bernard’s physique was hardly better than that of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was too slender. Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him of this.
Slackly, it seemed to him, and with reluctance, the twin attendants wheeled his plane out on the roof.
“Hurry up!” said Bernard irritably. One of them glanced at him. “Hurry up!” he shouted more loudly, and there was an ugly rasp in his voice.
He climbed into the plane and, a minute later, was flying southwards, towards the river.
The various Bureau of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street. In the basement and on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great London newspapers – 777e Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureau of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively-twenty-two floors of them. Above were the search laboratories and the Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers rooms. The top eighteen floors were occupied the College of Emotional Engineering.
Bernard landed on the roof of Propaganda House and stepped out.
“Ring down to Mr. Helmholtz Watson,” he ordered the Gamma-Plus porter, “and tell him that Mr. Bernard Marx is waiting for him on the roof.”
He sat down and lit a cigarette.
Helmholtz Watson was writing when the message came down.
“Tell him I’m coming at once,” he said and hung up the receiver. Then he got up and walked briskly to the door.