«Chosen as the opening date of the new era.»
«Ending is better than mending; ending is better…»
«There was a thing, as I’ve said before, called Christianity.»
«Ending is better than mending.»
«The ethics and philosophy of under-consumption…»
«I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love…»
«So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen-positively a crime against society.»
«Henry Foster gave it me.»
«All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.»
«It’s real morocco-surrogate.»
«We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.»
«Ford, how I hate them!» Bernard Marx was thinking.
«There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.»
«Like meat, like so much meat.»
«There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.»
«Do ask Henry where he got it.»
«But they used to take morphia and cocaine.»
«And what makes it worse, she tlainks of herself as meat.»
«Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178.»
«He does look glum,» said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx.
«Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.»
«Let’s bait him.»
«Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.»
«Glum, Marx, glum.» The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. «What you need is a gramme of soma.»
«All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.»
«Ford, I should like to kill him!» But all he did was to say, «No, thank you,» and fend off the proffered tube of tablets.
«Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.»
«Take it,» insisted Henry Foster, «take it.»
«Stability was practically assured.»
«One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments,» said the Assistant Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnopaedic wisdom.
«It only remained to conquer old age.»
«Damn you, damn you!» shouted Bernard Marx.
«Hoity-toity.»
«Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts…»
«And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.» They went out, laughing.
«All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course…»
«Don’t forget to ask him about that Malthusian belt,» said Fanny.
«Along with them all the old man’s mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime.»
«… two rounds of Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly.»
«Work, play-at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking- thinking! «
«Idiots, swine!» Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor to the lift.
«Now-such is progress-the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think-or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time shoud yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to…»
«Go away, little girl,» shouted the D.H.C. angrily. «Go away, little boy! Can’t you see that his fordship’s busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else.»
«Suffer little children,» said the Controller. Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies.
Chapter Four
THE LIFT was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina’s entry wars greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them. They were dear boys, she thought, as she returned their salutations. Charming boys! Still, she did wish that George Edzel’s ears weren’t quite so big (perhaps he’d been given just a spot too much parathyroid at Metre 328?). And looking at Benito Hoover, she couldn’t help remembering that he was really too hairy when he took his clothes off.
Turning, with eyes a little saddened by the recollection, of Benito’s curly blackness, she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.
«Bernard!» she stepped up to him. «I was looking for you.» Her voice rang clear above the hum of the mounting lift. The others looked round curiously. «I wanted to talk to you about our New Mexico plan.» Out of the tail of her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment.
The gape annoyed her. «Surprised I shouldn’t be begging to go with him again!» she said to herself. Then aloud, and more warmly than ever, «I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,» she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) «That is,» Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, «if you still want to have me.» Bernard’s pale face flushed. «What on earth for?» she wondered, astonished, but at the same time touched by this strange tribute to her power.
«Hadn’t we better talk about it somewhere else?» he stammered, looking horribly uncomfortable.
«As though I’d been saying something shocking,» thought Lenina. «He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke-asked him who his mother was, or something like that.»
«I mean, with all these people about…» He was choked with confusion. Lenina’s laugh was frank and wholly unmalicious. «How funny you are!» she said; and she quite genuinely did think him funny. «You’ll give me at least a week’s warning, won’t you,» she went on in another tone. «I suppose we take the Blue Pacific Rocket? Does it start from the Charing-T Tower? Or is it from Hampstead?» Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.
«Roof!» called a creaking voice.
The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.
«Roof!»
He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and blink his eyes. «Oh, roof!» he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. «Roof!» He smiled up with a kind of doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his passengers. Talking and laughing together, they stepped out into the light. The liftman looked after them.
«Roof?» he said once more, questioningly.
Then a bell rang, and from the ceiling of the lift a loud speaker began, very softly and yet very imperiously, to issue its commands.
«Go down,» it said, «go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go…»
The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor. It was warm and bright on the roof. The summer afternoon was drowsy with the hum of passing helicopters; and the deeper drone of the rocket-planes hastening, invisible, through the bright sky five or six miles overhead was like a caress on the soft air. Bernard Marx drew a deep breath. He looked up into the sky and round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina’s face.
«Isn’t it beautiful!» His voice trembled a little. She smiled at him with an expression of the most sympathetic understanding.
«Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf,» she answered rapturously. «And now I must fly, Bernard. Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting. Let me know in good time about the date.» And waving her hand she ran away across the wide flat roof towards the hangars. Bernard stood watching the retreating twinkle of the white stockings, the sunburnt knees vivaciously bending and unbending again, again, and the softer rolling of those well-fitted corduroy shorts beneath the bottle green jacket. His face wore an expression of pain.
«I should say she was pretty,» said a loud and cheery voice just behind him. Bernard started and looked around. The chubby red face of Benito Hoover was beaming down at him-beaming with manifest cordiality. Benito was notoriously good-natured. People said of him that he could have got through life without ever touching soma. The malice and bad tempers from which other people had to take holidays never afflicted him. Reality for Benito was always sunny.
«Pneumatic too. And how!» Then, in another tone: «But, I say,» he went on, «you do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.» Diving into his right-hand trouser-pocket, Benito produced a phial. «One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy…
But, I say!»
Bernard had suddenly turned and rushed away.
Benito stared after him. «What can be the matter with the fellow?» he wondered, and, shaking his head, decided that the story about the alcohol having been put into the poor chap’s blood-surrogate must be true. «Touched his brain, I suppose.» He put away the soma bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone chewing-gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the hangars, ruminating.
Henry Foster had had his machine wheeled out of its lock-up and, when Lenina arrived, was already seated in the cockpit, waiting.
«Four minutes late,» was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He started the engines and threw the helicopter screws into gear. The machine shot vertically into the air. Henry accelerated; the humming of the propeller shrilled from hornet to wasp, from wasp to mosquito;
