Chapter Two

Mr. Foster was left in the Decanting Room. The D.H.C. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor.

INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.

The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny. Half a dozen nurses were setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Thousands of petals, silkily smooth.

The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in.

“Set out the books,” he said curtly.

In silence the nurses obeyed his command and set out nursery book in between the bowls, each opened at a colourful image of beast or fish or bird.

“Now bring in the children.”

They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike and all dressed in khaki.

“Put them down on the floor.”

The infants were unloaded.

“Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.”

Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of colours. Babies squealed with excitement.

The Director rubbed his hands. “Excellent!” he said.

The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands touched, grasped, the roses and the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, “Watch carefully,” he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.

The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.

There was a violent explosion. A siren shrieked. Alarm bells rang.

The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.

“And now,” the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), “now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.”

He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about their sharp yelps. Their little bodies twitched, their limbs jerked as if to the tug of unseen wires.

“We can electrify that whole strip of floor,” explained the Director. “But that’s enough,” he signaled to the nurse.

The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down. The little bodies relaxed, and yelping turned into a normal cry of ordinary terror.

“Offer them the flowers and the books again.”

The nurses obeyed; but at the sight of the flowers and the colourful books, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their crying increased.

“Observe,” said the Director triumphantly, “observe.”

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks-already in the infant mind they were linked.

“They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.” The Director turned to his nurses. “Take them away again.”

Still yelling, the khaki babies were loaded on to their dumb-waiters and wheeled out.

One of the students held up his hand; he could see quite well why you couldn’t have lower-caste people wasting time on books, he couldn’t understand about the flowers. Why go to the trouble of making it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flowers?

Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago, Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers-flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to go out into the country, and so compel them to consume transport.

“And didn’t they consume transport?” asked the student.

“Quite a lot,” the D.H.C. replied. “But nothing else.”

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; but to keep the tendency to consume transport.

“We condition the masses to hate the country,” concluded the Director. “But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport.”

“I see,” said the student, lost in admiration.

There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, “Once upon a time,” the Director began, “while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.” The Director interrupted himself. “You know what Polish is, I suppose?”

“A dead language.”

“And ‘parent’?” questioned the D.H.C.

There was an uneasy silence. Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to draw the distinction between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the courage to raise a hand.

“Human beings used to be…” he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks. “Well, they used to be viviparous.”

“Quite right.” The Director nodded approvingly.

“And when the babies were decanted…”

“‘Born,’” came the correction.

“Well, then they were the parents-I mean, not the babies, of course; the other ones.” The poor boy was overwhelmed with confusion.

“In brief,” the Director summed up, “the parents were the father and the mother. These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.”

He returned to Little Reuben-to Little Reuben, in whose room, one evening, by an oversight, his father and mother happened to leave the radio turned on.

While the child was asleep, a broadcast programme from London suddenly started to come through; and the next morning Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word a long lecture by George Bernard Shaw. To Little Reuben this lecture was, of course, incomprehensible and, imagining that their child had suddenly gone mad, the parents sent for a doctor. He, fortunately, understood English, recognized the discourse as that which Shaw had broadcasted the previous evening, realized the significance of what had happened, and sent a letter to the medical press about it.

“The principle of sleep-teaching, or hypnopaedia, had been discovered.” The D.H.C. made an impressive pause.

“The case of Little Reuben occurred only twenty-three years after Our Ford’s first T-Model was put on the market. And yet these early experimenters were on the wrong track. They thought that hypnopaedia could be made an instrument of intellectual education…”

(A small boy asleep on his right side. Through a round grating in the side of a box a voice speaks softly.

“The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length of the Mississippi-Missouri…”

At breakfast the next morning, “Tommy,” someone says, “do you know which is the longest river in Africa?” A shaking of the head. “But don’t you remember something that begins: The Nile is the…”

“The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa-and-the-second-in-length-of-all-the-rivers-of-the-globe…” The words come rushing out. “Although-falling-short-of…”

“Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?”

The eyes are blank. “I don’t know.”

“But the Nile, Tommy.”

“The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa-and-second…”

“Then which river is the longest, Tommy?”

Tommy burst into tears. “I don’t know,” he cries.)

That discouraged the earliest investigators. The experiments were abandoned. No further attempt was made to teach children the length of the Nile in their sleep. You can’t learn a science unless you know what it’s all about.

“Whereas, if they’d only started on moral education,” said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him. “Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.”

“Silence, silence,” whispered a loud speaker as they stepped out at the fourteenth floor. The students and even the Director himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes. They were Alphas, of course, but even Alphas have been well conditioned.

Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to a door which the Director cautiously opened. Eighty cots stood in a row against the wall. There was a sound of light regular breathing and a continuous murmur.

A nurse rose as they entered and came to the Director.

“What’s the lesson this afternoon?” he asked.

“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”

Eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. stopped and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

“Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let’s have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.”

At the end of the room was a speaker. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

“… all wear green,” said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, “and Delta Children wear khaki. I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able…”

The Director pushed back the switch.

“They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. After that they go on to a more advanced lesson.”

Once more the Director touched the switch.

“… so clever,” the soft voice was saying, “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because…”

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the suggestions are the child’s mind. And the adult’s mind too-all his life long. These are suggestions from the State.” He banged the nearest table. “It therefore follows…”

A noise made him turn round.

“Oh, Ford!” he said in another tone, “I’ve woken the children.”