Voice repeated. "At peace, at peace." It trembled, sank into a whisper and
momentarily expired. "Oh, I do want you to be happy," it began, with a yearning
earnestness. "I do so want you to be good! Please, please be good and …"
Two minutes later the Voice and the soma vapour had produced their effect. In
tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one another–half a dozen twins at a
time in a comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were almost
crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought in from the Bursary; a new
distribution was hastily made and, to the sound of the Voice's ricuy affectionate,
baritone valedictions, the twins dispersed, blubbering as though their hearts would
break. "Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you! Good-bye, my
dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you. Good-bye my dearest, dearest …"
When the last of the Deltas had gone the policeman switched off the current. The
angelic Voice fell silent.
"Will you come quietly?" asked the Sergeant, "or must we an?sthetize?" He pointed
his water pistol menacingly.
"Oh, we'll come quietly," the Savage answered, dabbing alternately a cut lip, a
scratched neck, and a bitten left hand.
Still keeping his handkerchief to his bleeding nose Helmholtz nodded in
confirmation.
Awake and having recovered the use of his legs, Bernard had chosen this moment
to move as inconspicuously as he could towards the door.
"Hi, you there," called the Sergeant, and a swine-masked policeman hurried across
the room and laid a hand on the young man's shoulder.
Bernard turned with an expression of indignant innocence. Escaping? He hadn't
dreamed of such a thing. "Though what on earth you want me for," he said to the
Sergeant, "I really can't imagine."
"You're a friend of the prisoner's, aren't you?"
"Well …" said Bernard, and hesitated. No, he really couldn't deny it. "Why shouldn't I
be?" he asked.
"Come on then," said the Sergeant, and led the way towards the door and the
waiting police car.
Chapter Sixteen
THE ROOM into which the three were ushered was the Controller's study.
"His fordship will be down in a moment." The Gamma butler left them to themselves.
Helmholtz laughed aloud.
"It's more like a caffeine-solution party than a trial," he said, and let himself fall
into the most luxurious of the pneumatic arm-chairs. "Cheer up, Bernard," he
added, catching sight of his friend's green unhappy face. But Bernard would not be
cheered; without answering, without even looking at Helmholtz, he went and sat
down on the most uncomfortable chair in the room, carefully chosen in the obscure
hope of somehow deprecating the wrath of the higher powers.
The Savage meanwhile wandered restlessly round the room, peering with a vague
superficial inquisitiveness at the books in the shelves, at the sound-track rolls and
reading machine bobbins in their numbered pigeon-holes. On the table under the
window lay a massive volume bound in limp black leather-surrogate, and stamped
with large golden T's. He picked it up and opened it. MY LIFE AND WORK, BY OUR
FORD. The book had been published at Detroit by the Society for the Propagation of
Fordian Knowledge. Idly he turned the pages, read a sentence here, a paragraph
there, and had just come to the conclusion that the book didn't interest him, when
the door opened, and the Resident World Controller for Western Europe walked
briskly into the room.
Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that
he addressed himself. "So you don't much like civilization, Mr. Savage," he said.
The Savage looked at him. He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to remain
sullenly unresponsive; but, reassured by the good-humoured intelligence of the
Controller's face, he decided to tell the truth, straightforwardly. "No." He shook his
head.
Bernard started and looked horrified. What would the Controller think? To be
labelled as the friend of a man who said that he didn't like civilization–said it openly
and, of all people, to the Controller–it was terrible. "But, John," he began. A look
from Mustapha Mond reduced him to an abject silence.
"Of course," the Savage went on to admit, "there are some very nice things. All that
music in the air, for instance …"
"Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and
sometimes voices."
The Savage's face lit up with a sudden pleasure. "Have you read it too?" he asked.
"I thought nobody knew about that book here, in England."
"Almost nobody. I'm one of the very few. It's prohibited, you see. But as I make
the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity, Mr. Marx," he added, turning
to Bernard. "Which I'm afraid you can't do."
Bernard sank into a yet more hopeless misery.
"But why is it prohibited?" asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting a man
who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else.
The Controller shrugged his shoulders. "Because it's old; that's the chief reason. We
haven't any use for old things here."
"Even when they're beautiful?"
"Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to
be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones."
"But the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Those plays, where there's nothing
but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing." He made a grimace.
"Goats and monkeys!" Only in Othello's word could he find an adequate vehicle for
his contempt and hatred.
"Nice tame animals, anyhow," the Controller murmured parenthetically.
"Why don't you let them see Othello instead?"
"I've told you; it's old. Besides, they couldn't understand it."
Yes, that was true. He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and Juliet.
"Well then," he said, after a pause, "something new that's like Othello, and that
they could understand."
"That's what we've all been wanting to write," said Helmholtz, breaking a long
silence.
"And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like
Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it
couldn't possibly be like Othello."
"Why not?"
"Yes, why not?" Helmholtz repeated. He too was forgetting the unpleasant realities
of the situation. Green with anxiety and apprehension, only Bernard remembered
them; the others ignored him. "Why not?"
"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers
without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's
stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what
they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of
death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no
mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly
about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought
to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck
out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!" He laughed.
"Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand
Othello! My good boy!"
The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's
good, Othello's better than those feelies."
"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for
stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high
art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."
"But they don't mean anything."
"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."
"But they're … they're told by an idiot."
The Controller laughed. "You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr. Watson.
One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers …"
"But he's right," said Helmholtz gloomily. "Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's
nothing to say …"
"Precisely. But that require the most enormous ingenuity. You're making fiivvers out
of the absolute minimum of steel–works of art out of practically nothing but pure
sensation."
The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."
"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with
the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so
spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good
fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation,
or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
"I suppose not," said the Savage after a silence. "But need it be quite so bad as
those twins?" He passed his hand over his eyes as though he were trying to wipe
away the remembered image of those long rows of identical midgets at the
assembling tables, those queued-up twin-herds at the entrance to the Brentford
monorail station, those human maggots swarming round Linda's bed of death, the
endlessly repeated face of his assailants. He looked at his bandaged left hand and
shuddered. "Horrible!"
"But how useful! I see you don't like our Bokanovsky Groups; but, I assure you,
they're the foundation on which everything else is built. They're the gyroscope that
stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course." The deep voice
thrillingly vibrated; the gesticulating hand implied all space and the onrush of the
irresistible machine. Mustapha Mond's oratory was almost up to synthetic standards.
"I was wondering," said the Savage, "why you had them at all–seeing that you can
get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don't you make everybody an
Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?"
Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut," he
answered. "We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn't fail to
be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas–that is to say by
separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be
capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities.
Imagine it!" he repeated.
The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he
had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas
can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha
work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good
reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His
conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself;
he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle–an invisible bottle
of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course," the Controller
meditatively continued, "goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be
Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if
we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste
champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has
also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was
convincing."
"What was that?" asked the Savage.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like.
It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its
existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two
thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them
and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the
theoretical prediotions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the
factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for
a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the
people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they
were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of
the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the
World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that
was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
The Savage sighed, profoundly.
"The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the
iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above."
"And they're happy below the water line?"
"Happier than above it. Happier than your friend here, for example." He pointed.
"In spite of that awful work?"
"Awful? They don't find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It's light, it's childishly
simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild,
unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted
copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True," he added, "they
