Something's happened. I've killed her."
By the time they were back at the end of the ward Linda was dead.
The Savage stood for a moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside the
bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably.
The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the
scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the twins who had stopped their
hunting of the zipper and were staring from the other end of the ward, staring with
all their eyes and nostrils at the shocking scene that was being enacted round Bed
20. Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind
him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents?
Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry–as
though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all
that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset
them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way.
She stepped forward, she touched him on the shoulder. "Can't you behave?" she
said in a low, angry voice. But, looking around, she saw that half a dozen twins were
already on their feet and advancing down the ward. The circle was distintegrating. In
another moment … No, the risk was too great; the whole Group might be put back
six or seven months in its conditioning. She hurried back towards her menaced
charges.
"Now, who wants a chocolate éclair?" she asked in a loud, cheerful tone.
"Me!" yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely
forgotten.
"Oh, God, God, God …" the Savage kept repeating to himself. In the chaos of grief
and remorse that filled his mind it was the one articulate word. "God!" he whispered
it aloud. "God …"
"Whatever is he saying?" said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the
warblings of the Super-Wurlitzer.
The Savage violently started and, uncovering his face, looked round. Five khaki
twins, each with the stump of a long éclair in his right hand, and their identical faces
variously smeared with liquid chocolate, were standing in a row, puggily goggling at
him.
They met his eyes and simultaneously grinned. One of them pointed with his éclair
butt.
"Is she dead?" he asked.
The Savage stared at them for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his
feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.
"Is she dead?" repeated the inquisitive twin trotting at his side.
The Savage looked down at him and still without speaking pushed him away. The
twin fell on the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not even look
round.
Chapter Fifteen
THE menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying consisted of one hundred
and sixty-two Deltas divided into two Bokanovsky Groups of eighty-four red headed
female and seventy-eight dark dolychocephalic male twins, respectively. At six,
when their working day was over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of the
Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar with their soma ration.
From the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them. But his mind was
elsewhere–with death, with his grief, and his remorse; mechanicaly, without
consciousness of what he was doing, he began to shoulder his way through the
crowd.
"Who are you pushing? Where do you think you're going?"
High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or
growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors, two faces, one a
hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked bird-mask,
stubbly with two days' beard, turned angrily towards him. Their words and, in his
ribs, the sharp nudging of elbows, broke through his unawareness. He woke once
more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw–knew it, with a
sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and
nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Twins, twins. … Like
maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda's death. Maggots
again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance.
He halted and, with bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki
mob, in the midst of which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. "How many
goodly creatures are there here!" The singing words mocked him derisively. "How
beauteous mankind is! O brave new world …"
"Soma distribution!" shouted a loud voice. "In good order, please. Hurry up there."
A door had been opened, a table and chair carried into the vestibule. The voice was
that of a jaunty young Alpha, who had entered carrying a black iron cash-box. A
murmur of satisfaction went up from the expectant twins. They forgot all about the
Savage. Their attention was now focused on the black cash-box, which the young
man had placed on the table, and was now in process of unlocking. The lid was
lifted.
"Oo-oh!" said all the hundred and sixty-two simultaneously, as though they were
looking at fireworks.
The young man took out a handful of tiny pill-boxes. "Now," he said peremptorily,
"step forward, please. One at a time, and no shoving."
One at a time, with no shoving, the twins stepped forward. First two males, then a
female, then another male, then three females, then …
The Savage stood looking on. "O brave new world, O brave new world …" In his mind
the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his
misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision!
Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of
the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. "O brave new world!"
Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming
even the nightmare into something fine and noble. "O brave new world!" It was a
challenge, a command.
"No shoving there now!" shouted the Deputy Sub-Bursar in a fury. He slammed down
he lid of his cash-box. "I shall stop the distribution unless I have good behaviour."
The Deltas muttered, jostled one another a little, and then were still. The threat had
been effective. Deprivation of soma–appalling thought!
"That's better," said the young man, and reopened his cash-box.
Linda had been a slave, Linda had died; others should live in freedom, and the
world be made beautiful. A reparation, a duty. And suddenly it was luminously clear
to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had been opened, a
curtain drawn back.
"Now," said the Deputy Sub-Bursar.
Another khaki female stepped forward.
"Stop!" called the Savage in a loud and ringing voice. "Stop!"
He pushed his way to the table; the Deltas stared at him with astonishment.
"Ford!" said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, below his breath. "It's the Savage." He felt
scared.
"Listen, I beg of you," cried the Savage earnestly. "Lend me your ears …" He had
never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted
to say. "Don't take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's poison."
"I say, Mr. Savage," said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, smiling propitiatingly. "Would you
mind letting me …"
"Poison to soul as well as body."
"Yes, but let me get on with my distribution, won't you? There's a good fellow." With
the cautious tenderness of one who strokes a notoriously vicious animal, he patted
the Savage's arm. "Just let me …"
"Never!" cried the Savage.
"But look here, old man …"
"Throw it all away, that horrible poison."
The words "Throw it all away" pierced through the enfolding layers of
incomprehension to the quick of the Delta's consciousness. An angry murmur went
up from the crowd.
"I come to bring you freedom," said the Savage, turning back towards the twins. "I
come …"
The Deputy Sub-Bursar heard no more; he had slipped out of the vestibule and was
looking up a number in the telephone book.
"Not in his own rooms," Bernard summed up. "Not in mine, not in yours. Not at the
Aphroditaum; not at the Centre or the College. Where can he have got to?"
Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. They had come back from their work expecting
to find the Savage waiting for them at one or other of the usual meeting-places,
and there was no sign of the fellow. Which was annoying, as they had meant to nip
across to Biarritz in Helmholtz's four-seater sporticopter. They'd be late for dinner if
he didn't come soon.
"We'll give him five more minutes," said Helmholtz. "If he doesn't turn up by then,
we'll …"
The ringing of the telephone bell interrupted him. He picked up the receiver. "Hullo.
Speaking." Then, after a long interval of listening, "Ford in Flivver!" he swore. "I'll
come at once."
"What is it?" Bernard asked.
"A fellow I know at the Park Lane Hospital," said Helmholtz. "The Savage is there.
Seems to have gone mad. Anyhow, it's urgent. Will you come with me?"
Together they hurried along the corridor to the lifts.
"But do you like being slaves?" the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital.
His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. "Do you like being
babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking," he added, exasperated by their bestial
stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off
their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull
and sullen resentment in their eyes. "Yes, puking!" he fairly shouted. Grief and
remorse, compassion and duty–all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into
an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. "Don't you
want to be free and men? Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom
are?" Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. "Don't you?"
he repeated, but got no answer to his question. "Very well then," he went on grimly.
"I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to or not." And pushing open
a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the
little pill-boxes of soma tablets in handfuls out into the area.
For a moment the khaki mob was silent, petrified, at the spectacle of this wanton
sacrilege, with amazement and horror.
"He's mad," whispered Bernard, staring with wide open eyes. "They'll kill him. They'll
…" A great shout suddenly went up from the mob; a wave of movement drove it
menacingly towards the Savage. "Ford help him!" said Bernard, and averted his
eyes.
"Ford helps those who help themselves." And with a laugh, actually a laugh of
exultation, Helmholtz Watson pushed his way through the crowd.
"Free, free!" the Savage shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma
into the area while, with the other, he punched the indistinguishable faces of his
assailants. "Free!" And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side–"Good old
Helmholtz!"–also punching–"Men at last!"–and in the interval also throwing the
poison out by handfuls through the open window. "Yes, men! men!" and there was
no more poison left. He picked up the cash-box and showed them its black
emptiness. "You're free!"
Howling, the Deltas charged with a redoubled fury.
Hesitant on the fringes of the battle. "They're done for," said Bernard and, urged by
a sudden impulse, ran forward to help them; then thought better of it and halted;
then, ashamed, stepped forward again; then again thought better of it, and was
standing in an agony of humiliated indecision–thinking that they might be killed if
he didn't help them, and that he might be killed if he did–when (Ford be praised!),
goggle-eyed and swine-snouted in their gas-masks, in ran the police.
Bernard dashed to meet them. He waved his arms; and it was action, he was doing
something. He shouted "Help!" several times, more and more loudly so as to give
himself the illusion of helping. "Help! Help! HELP!"
The policemen pushed him out of the way and got on with their work. Three men
with spraying machines buckled to their shoulders pumped thick clouds of soma
vapour into the air. Two more were busy round the portable Synthetic Music Box.
Carrying water pistols charged with a powerful an?sthetic, four others had pushed
their way into the crowd and were methodically laying out, squirt by squirt, the more
ferocious of the fighters.
"Quick, quick!" yelled Bernard. "They'll be killed if you don't hurry. They'll … Oh!"
Annoyed by his chatter, one of the policemen had given him a shot from his water
pistol. Bernard stood for a second or two wambling unsteadily on legs that seemed
to have lost their bones, their tendons, their muscles, to have become mere sticks
of jelly, and at last not even jelly-water: he tumbled in a heap on the floor.
Suddenly, from out of the Synthetic Music Box a Voice began to speak. The Voice of
Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The sound-track roll was unwinding itself in
Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two (Medium Strength). Straight from the depths
of a non-existent heart, "My friends, my friends!" said the Voice so pathetically, with
a note of such infinitely tender reproach that, behind their gas masks, even the
policemen's eyes were momentarily dimmed with tears, "what is the meaning of
this? Why aren't you all being happy and good together? Happy and good," the
