thin-stalked, a taller, slenderer fungus, the Charing-T Tower lifted towards the sky a
disk of shining concrete.
Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lolled on the blue air
above their heads. Out of one of them suddenly dropped a small scarlet insect,
buzzing as it fell.
"There's the Red Rocket," said Henry, "just come in from New York." Looking at his
watch. "Seven minutes behind time," he added, and shook his head. "These Atlantic
services–they're really scandalously unpunctual."
He took his foot off the accelerator. The humming of the screws overhead dropped
an octave and a half, back through wasp and hornet to bumble bee, to cockchafer,
to stag-beetle. The upward rush of the machine slackened off; a moment later they
were hanging motionless in the air. Henry pushed at a lever; there was a click.
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, till it was a circular mist before their eyes, the
propeller in front of them began to revolve. The wind of a horizontal speed whistled
ever more shrilly in the stays. Henry kept his eye on the revolution-counter; when
the needle touched the twelve hundred mark, he threw the helicopter screws out of
gear. The machine had enough forward momentum to be able to fly on its planes.
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 satellite suburbs. The green was maggoty with fore-shortened life.
Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees. Near
Shepherd's Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing
Riemann-surface tennis. A double row of Escalator Fives Courts lined the main road
from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing stadium a Delta gymnastic display and
community sing was in progress.
"What a hideous colour khaki is," remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnop?dic
prejudices of her caste.
The buildings of the Hounslow Feely Studio covered seven and a half hectares. Near
them a black and khaki army of labourers was busy revitrifying the surface of the
Great West Road. One of the huge travelling crucibles was being tapped as they flew
over. The molten stone poured out in a stream of dazzling incandescence across
the road, the asbestos rollers came and went; at the tail of an insulated watering
cart the steam rose in white clouds.
At Brentford the Television Corporation's factory was like a small town.
"They must be changing the shift," said Lenina.
Like aphides and ants, the leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons
swarmed round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their places in the
monorail tram-cars. Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went among the
crowd. The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and departure of
helicopters.
"My word," said Lenina, "I'm glad I'm not a Gamma."
Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of
Obstacle Golf.
§ 2
WITH eyes for the most part downcast and, if ever they lighted on a fellow creature,
at once and furtively averted, Bernard hastened across the roof. He was like a man
pursued, but pursued by enemies he does not wish to see, lest they should seem
more hostile even than he had supposed, and he himself be made to feel guiltier
and even more helplessly alone.
"That horrible Benito Hoover!" And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only
made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as
those who meant badly. Even Lenina was making him suffer. He remembered those
weeks of timid indecision, during which he had looked and longed and despaired of
ever having the courage to ask her. Dared he face the risk of being humiliated by a
contemptuous refusal? But if she were to say yes, what rapture! Well, now she had
said it and he was still wretched–wretched that she should have thought it such a
perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf, that she should have trotted away to join Henry
Foster, that she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most
private affairs in public. Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any
healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal,
extraordinary way.
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. Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even
offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority. To
have dealings with members of the lower castes was always, for Bernard, a most
distressing experience. For whatever the cause (and the current gossip about the
alcohol in his blood-surrogate may very likely–for accidents will happen–have been
true) Bernard's physique as hardly better than that of the average Gamma. He
stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was slender in
proportion. Contact with members of he lower castes always reminded him painfully
of this physical inadequacy. "I am I, and wish I wasn't"; his self-consciousness was
acute and stressing. Each time he found himself looking on the level, instead of
downward, into a Delta's face, he felt humiliated. Would the creature treat him with
the respect due to his caste? The question haunted him. Not without reason. For
Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate
corporeal mass with social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnop?dic prejudice in
favour of size was universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he made
proposals, the practical joking of his equals among the men. The mockery made
him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased
the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his
physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A
chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where
his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity. How bitterly he envied
men like Henry Foster and Benito Hoover! Men who never had to shout at an Epsilon
to get an order obeyed; men who took their position for granted; men who moved
through the caste system as a fish through water–so utterly at home as to be
unaware either of themselves or of the beneficent and comfortable element in which
they had their being.
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. Was that a kind of
bestial derision that he detected in those blank grey eyes? "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 Bureaux 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 Lodon newspapers–The
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
Bureaux 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 padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did
the delicate work. 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, turning to
his secretary, "I'll leave you to put my things away," he went on in the same official
and impersonal tone; and, ignoring her lustrous smile, got up and walked briskly to
the door.
He was a powerfully built man, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, massive, and yet
quick in his movements, springy and agile. The round strong pillar of his neck
supported a beautifully shaped head. His hair was dark and curly, his features
strongly marked. In a forcible emphatic way, he was handsome and looked, as his
secretety was never tired of repeating, every centimetre an Alpha Plus. By
profession he was a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of
Writing) and the intervals of his educational activities, a working Emotional Engineer.
He wrote regularly for The Hourly Radio, composed feely scenarios, and had the
happiest knack for slogans and hypnop?dic rhymes.
"Able," was the verdict of his superiors. "Perhaps, (and they would shake their
heads, would significantly lower their voices) "a little too able."
Yes, a little too able; they were right. A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz
Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a
physical defect. Too little bone and brawn had isolated Bernard from his fellow men,
and the sense of this apartness, being, by all the current standards, a mental
excess, became in its turn a cause of wider separation. That which had made
Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and and all alone was too much
ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But
whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the
consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his
mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the
people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable
lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four
years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly
that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned,
second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But
in what? In what? That was the problem which Bernard had come to discuss with
him–or rather, since it was always Helmholtz who did all the talking, to listen to his
friend discussing, yet once more.
Three charming girls from the Bureau of Propaganda by Synthetic Voice waylaid him
as he stepped out of the lift.
"Oh, Helmholtz, darling, do come and have a picnic supper with us on Exmoor."
They clung round him imploringly.
He shook his head, he pushed his way through them. "No, no."
"We're not inviting any other man."
But Helmholtz remained unshaken even by this delightful promise. "No," he
repeated, "I'm busy." And he held resolutely on his course. The girls trailed after
him. It was not till he had actually climbed into Bernard's plane and slammed the
door that they gave up pursuit. Not without reproaches.
"These women!" he said, as the machine rose into the air. "These women!" And he
shook his head, he frowned. "Too awful," Bernard hypocritically agreed, wishing, as
he spoke the words, that he could have as many girls as Helmholtz did, and with as
little trouble. He was seized with a sudden urgent need to boast. "I'm taking Lenina
Crowne to New Mexico with me," he said in a tone as casual as he could make it.
"Are you?" said Helmholtz, with a total absence of interest. Then after a little pause,
"This last week or two," he went on, "I've been cutting all my committees and all my
girls. You can't imagine what a hullabaloo they've been making about it at the
College. Still, it's been worth it, I think. The effects …" He hesitated. "Well, they're
odd, they're very odd."
A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it
seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the
voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of
asceticism.
The rest of the short flight was accomplished in silence. When they had arrived and
were comfortably stretched out on the pneumatic sofas in Bernard's room,
Helmholtz began again.
Speaking very slowly, "Did you ever feel," he asked, "as though you had something
inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort
of extra power that you aren't using–you know, like all the water that goes down the
falls instead of through the turbines?" He looked at Bernard questioningly.
"You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?"
Helmholtz shook his head. "Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes
get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it–only
I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power. If there was some
different way of writing … Or else something else to write about …" He was silent;
then, "You see," he went on at last, "I'm pretty good at inventing phrases–you
know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat
on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something
hypnop?dically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the
phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too."
"But your things are good, Helmholtz."
"Oh, as far as they go." Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. "But they go such a little
way. They aren't important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much
more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more
