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 Hypnopaedic 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 hypnopaedic 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,
