made to modify and even run counter to natural impulses (in this case, the impulse
to recoil from an unpleasant object)."
At Eton they alighted on the roof of Upper School. On the opposite side of School
Yard, the fifty-two stories of Lupton's Tower gleamed white in the sunshine. College
on their left and, on their right, the School Community Singery reared their
venerable piles of ferro-concrete and vita-glass. In the centre of the quadrangle
stood the quaint old chrome-steel statue of Our Ford.
Dr. Gaffney, the Provost, and Miss Keate, the Head Mistress, received them as they
stepped out of the plane.
"Do you have many twins here?" the Savage asked rather apprehensively, as they
set out on their tour of inspection.
"Oh, no," the Provost answered. "Eton is reserved exclusively for upper-caste boys
and girls. One egg, one adult. It makes education more difficult of course. But as
they'll be called upon to take responsibilities and deal with unexpected
emergencies, it can't be helped." He sighed.
Bernard, meanwhile, had taken a strong fancy to Miss Keate. "If you're free any
Monday, Wednesday, or Friday evening," he was saying. Jerking his thumb towards
the Savage, "He's curious, you know," Bernard added. "Quaint."
Miss Keate smiled (and her smile was really charming, he thought); said Thank
you; would be delighted to come to one of his parties. The Provost opened a door.
Five minutes in that Alpha Double Plus classroom left John a trifle bewildered.
"What is elementary relativity?" he whispered to Bernard. Bernard tried to explain,
then thought better of it and suggested that they should go to some other
classroom.
From behind a door in the corridor leading to the Beta-Minus geography room, a
ringing soprano voice called, "One, two, three, four," and then, with a weary
impatience, "As you were."
"Malthusian Drill," explained the Head Mistress. "Most of our girls are freemartins,
of course. I'm a freemartin myself." She smiled at Bernard. "But we have about
eight hundred unsterilized ones who need constant drilling."
In the Beta-Minus geography room John learnt that "a savage reservation is a place
which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural
resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing." A click; the room was
darkened; and suddenly, on the screen above the Master's head, there were the
Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady, and wailing as John
had heard them wail, confessing their sins before Jesus on the Cross, before the
eagle image of Pookong. The young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter. Still
wailing, the Penitentes rose to their feet, stripped off their upper garments and, with
knotted whips, began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the laughted
drowned even the amplified record of their groans.
"But why do they laugh?" asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.
"Why?" The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. "Why? But
because it's so extraordinarily funny."
In the cinematographic twilight, Bernard risked a gesture which, in the past, even
total darkness would hardly have emboldened him to make. Strong in his new
importance, he put his arm around the Head Mistress's waist. It yielded, willowily. He
was just about to snatch a kiss or two and perhaps a gentle pinch, when the shutters
clicked open again.
"Perhaps we had better go on," said Miss Keate, and moved towards the door.
"And this," said the Provost a moment later, "is Hypnop?dic Control Room."
Hundreds of synthetic music boxes, one for each dormitory, stood ranged in shelves
round three sides of the room; pigeon-holed on the fourth were the paper
sound-track rolls on which the various hypnop?dic lessons were printed.
"You slip the roll in here," explained Bernard, initerrupting Dr. Gaffney, "press down
this switch …"
"No, that one," corrected the Provost, annoyed.
"That one, then. The roll unwinds. The selenium cells transform the light impulses
into sound waves, and …"
"And there you are," Dr. Gaffney concluded.
"Do they read Shakespeare?" asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the
Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library.
"Certainly not," said the Head Mistress, blushing.
"Our library," said Dr. Gaffney, "contains only books of reference. If our young
people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don't encourage them to
indulge in any solitary amusements."
Five bus-loads of boys and girls, singing or in a silent embracement, rolled past
them over the vitrified highway.
"Just returned," explained Dr. Gaffney, while Bernard, whispering, made an
appointment with the Head Mistress for that very evening, "from the Slough
Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two
mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and
they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of
course."
"Like any other physiological process," put in the Head Mistress professionally.
Eight o'clock at the Savoy. It was all arranged.
On their way back to London they stopped at the Television Corporation's factory at
Brentford.
"Do you mind waiting here a moment while I go and telephone?" asked Bernard.
The Savage waited and watched. The Main Day-Shift was just going off duty. Crowds
of lower-caste workers were queued up in front of the monorail station-seven or
eight hundred Gamma, Delta and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a
dozen faces and statures between them. To each of them, with his or her ticket, the
booking clerk pushed over a little cardboard pillbox. The long caterpillar of men and
women moved slowly forward.
"What's in those" (remembering The Merchant of Venice) "those caskets?" the Savage
enquired when Bernard had rejoined him.
"The day's soma ration," Bernard answered rather indistinctly; for he was masticating
a piece of Benito Hoover's chewing-gum. "They get it after their work's over. Four
half-gramme tablets. Six on Saturdays."
He took John's arm affectionately and they walked back towards the helicopter.
Lenina came singing into the Changing Room.
"You seem very pleased with yourself," said Fanny.
"I am pleased," she answered. Zip! "Bernard rang up half an hour ago." Zip, zip!
She stepped out of her shorts. "He has an unexpected engagement." Zip! "Asked
me if I'd take the Savage to the feelies this evening. I must fly." She hurried away
towards the bathroom.
"She's a lucky girl," Fanny said to herself as she watched Lenina go.
There was no envy in the comment; good-natured Fanny was merely stating a faet.
Lenina was lucky; lucky in having shared with Bernard a generous portion of the
Savage's immense celebrity, lucky in reflecting from her insignificant person the
moment's supremely fashionable glory. Had not the Secretary of the Young
Women's Fordian Association asked her to give a lecture about her experiences?
Had she not been invited to the Annual Dinner of the Aphroditeum Club? Had she
not already appeared in the Feelytone News–visibly, audibly and tactually appeared
to countless millions all over the planet?
Hardly less flattering had been the attentions paid her by conspicuous individuals.
The Resident World Controller's Second Secretary had asked her to dinner and
breakfast. She had spent one week-end with the Ford Chief-Justice, and another
with the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. The President of the Internal and
External Secretions Corporation was perpetually on the phone, and she had been to
Deauville with the Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Europe.
"It's wonderful, of course. And yet in a way," she had confessed to Fanny, "I feel as
though I were getting something on false presences. Because, of course, the first
thing they all want to know is what it's like to make love to a Savage. And I have to
say I don't know." She shook her head. "Most of the men don't believe me, of
course. But it's true. I wish it weren't," she added sadly and sighed. "He's terribly
good-looking; don't you think so?"
"But doesn't he like you?" asked Fanny.
"Sometimes I think he does and sometimes I think he doesn't. He always does his
best to avoid me; goes out of the room when I come in; won't touch me; won't even
look at me. But sometimes if I turn round suddenly, I catch him staring; and
then–well, you know how men look when they like you."
Yes, Fanny knew.
"I can't make it out," said Lenina.
She couldn't make it out; and not only was bewildered; was also rather upset.
"Because, you see, Fanny, I like him."
Liked him more and more. Well, now there'd be a real chance, she thought, as she
scented herself after her bath. Dab, dab, dab–a real chance. Her high spirits
overflowed in a song.
''Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma;
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love's as good as soma."
The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio–rippling
arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of
daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return
through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle
touches of discord–a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung)
back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme
died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up. In the synthetic music
machine the sound-track roll began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin,
super-cello and oboe-surrogate that now filled the air with its agreeable languor.
Thirty or forty bars–and then, against this instrumental background, a much more
than human voice began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now hollow as
a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics, it effortlessly passed from Gaspard's
Forster's low record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled bat-note high
above the highest C to which (in 1770, at the Ducal opera of Parma, and to the
astonishment of Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugari, alone of all the singers in history, once
piercingly gave utterance.
Sunk in their pneumatic stalls, Lenina and the Savage sniffed and listened. It was
now the turn also for eyes and skin.
The house lights went down; fiery letters stood out solid and as though
self-supported in the darkness. THREE WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER . AN
ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALK1NG, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY.
WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT.
"Take hold of those metal knobs on the arms of your chair," whispered Lenina.
"Otherwise you won't get any of the feely effects."
The Savage did as he was told.
Those fiery letters, meanwhile, had disappeared; there were ten seconds of
complete darkness; then suddenly, dazzling and incomparably more solid-looking
than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality,
there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in one another's arms, of a gigantic
negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female.
The Savage started. That sensation on his lips! He liited a hand to his mouth; the
titillation ceased; let his hand fall back on the metal knob; it began again. The
scent organ, meanwhile, breathed pure musk. Expiringly, a sound-track super-dove
cooed "Oo-ooh"; and vibrating only thirty-two times a second, a deeper than African
bass made answer: "Aa-aah." "Ooh-ah! Ooh-ah!" the stereoscopic lips came
together again, and once more the facial erogenous zones of the six thousand
spectators in the Alhambra tingled with almost intolerable galvanic pleasure. "Ooh …"
The plot of the film was extremely simple. A few minutes after the first Oohs and
Aahs (a duet having been sung and a little love made on that famous bearskin,
every hair of which–the Assistant Predestinator was perfectly right–could be
separately and distinctly felt), the negro had a helicopter accident, fell on his head.
Thump! whata twinge through the forehead! A chorus of ow's and aie's went up from
the audience.
The concussion knocked all the negro's conditionimg into a cocked hat. He
developed for the Beta blonde an exclusive and maniacal passion. She protested.
He persisted. There were struggles, pursuits, an assault on a rival, finally a
sensational kidnapping. The Beta blond was ravished away into the sky and kept
there, hovering, for three weeks in a wildly anti-social tête-à-tête with the black
madman. Finally, after a whole series of adventures and much aerial acrobacy three
handsome young Alphas succeeded in rescuing her. The negro was packed off to an
Adult Re-conditioning Centre and the film ended happily and decorously, with the
Beta blonde becoming the mistress of all her three rescuers. They interrupted
themselves for a moment to sing a synthetic quartet, with full super-orchestral
accompaniment and gardenias on the scent organ. Then the bearskin made a final
appearance and, amid a blare of saxophones, the last stereoscopic kiss faded into
darkness, the last electric titillation died on the lips like a dying moth that quivers,
quivers, ever more feebly, ever more faintly, and at last is quiet, quite still.
But for Lenina the moth did not completely die. Even after the lights had gone up,
while they were shuffling slowly along with the crowd towards the lifts, its ghost still
fluttered against her lips, still traced fine shuddering roads of anxiety and pleasure
