Chapter Fifteen

The menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying consisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas; two groups of female and male twins. At six, when their working day was over, they assembled in the hall of the Hospital and were served their soma ration.

From the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them. His mind was elsewhere-with death, with his grief, and his remorse; mechanically, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd.

“Who are you pushing? Where do you think you’re going?”

High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices talked around him. Only two faces, one hairless and freckled, haloed in orange, the other thin, stubbly with two days’ beard, turned angrily towards him. Their words and the sharp nudging of their elbows, broke through his unawareness. He woke once more to external reality. Twins, twins… He halted and, with bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the midst of which he stood. “How many goodly creatures are there here!” The singing words mocked him. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world…”

“Soma distribution!” shouted a loud voice. “In good order, please. Hurry up there.”

A door had been opened, a table and chair carried into the hall. A young Alpha entered, carrying a black iron cash-box. The twins forgot all about the Savage. Their attention was now focused on the black cash-box, which the young man had placed on the table, and was now in process of unlocking. The lid was lifted.

“Oo-oh!” said all the hundred and sixty-two simultaneously, as though they were looking at fireworks.

The young man took out a handful of tiny pill-boxes. “Now,” he said, “step forward, please. One at a time, and no shoving.”

One at a time, with no shoving, the twins stepped forward. First two males, then a female, then another male, then three females, then…

The Savage stood looking on. “O brave new world, O brave new world…” In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse. It was a challenge, a command.

Linda had been a slave, Linda had died; others should live in freedom, and the world be made beautiful. A reparation, a duty. And suddenly it was clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a curtain was drawn back.

“Stop!” called the Savage in a loud and ringing voice. “Stop!”

He pushed his way to the table; the Deltas stared at him with astonishment.

“Listen, I beg of you,” cried the Savage earnestly. “Lend me your ears…” He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say. “Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.”

“I say, Mr. Savage,” said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, who was overseeing the distribution. “Would you mind letting me…”

“Poison to soul as well as body.”

“Yes, but let me get on with it, won’t you? There’s a good fellow.” With the cautious tenderness of one who strokes a notoriously vicious animal, he patted the Savage’s arm. “Just let me…”

“Never!” cried the Savage.

“But look here, old man…”

“Throw it all away, that horrible poison.”

The words “Throw it all away” pierced through the layers of incomprehension to the Delta’s consciousness. An angry murmur went up from the crowd.

“I come to bring you freedom,” said the Savage, turning back towards the twins. “I come…”

The Deputy Sub-Bursar heard no more; he had slipped out of the vestibule and was looking up a number in the telephone book.

“Not in his own rooms,” Bernard summed up. “Not in mine, not in yours. Not at the Aphroditaum; not at the Centre or the College. Where can he have got to?”

Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. They had come back from their work expecting to find the Savage waiting for them at one or other of the usual meeting-places, and there was no sign of the fellow.

“We’ll give him five more minutes,” said Helmholtz. “If he doesn’t turn up by then, we’ll…”

The ringing of the telephone bell interrupted him. He picked up the receiver. “Hullo. Speaking.” Then, after a long interval of listening, “I’ll come at once.””

“What is it?” Bernard asked.

“The Savage is at the Park Lane Hospital. Seems to have gone mad. It’s urgent. Will you come with me?”

Together they hurried along the corridor to the lifts.

“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright. “Don’t you want to be free? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in handfuls out of the window.

For a moment the khaki mob was silent, petrified.

“He’s mad,” whispered Bernard, staring with wide open eyes. “They’ll kill him. They’ll…” A great shout suddenly went up from the mob; a wave of people moved towards the Savage. “Ford help him!” said Bernard, and averted his eyes.

“Ford helps those who help themselves.” And with a laugh, actually a laugh of exultation, Helmholtz Watson pushed his way through the crowd.

“Free, free!” the Savage shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma while, with the other, he punched the indistinguishable faces of his assailants. “Free!” And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side-“Good old Helmholtz!”-also punching-and in the interval also throwing the poison out by handfuls through the open window. And then there was no more poison left. “You’re free!”

Howling, the Deltas charged with fury.

Hesitant on the fringes of the battle. “They’re done for,” said Bernard and, urged by a sudden impulse, ran forward to help them; then thought better of it and halted; then, ashamed, stepped forward again; then again thought better of it-thinking that they might be killed if he didn’t help them, and that he might be killed if he did-when (Ford be praised!), goggle-eyed and in their gas-masks, in ran the police.

Bernard dashed to meet them. He waved his arms; and it was action, he was doing something. He shouted “Help!” several times, more and more loudly so as to give himself the illusion of helping. “Help! Help! HELP!”

The policemen pushed him out of the way and got on with their work. Three men with spraying machines buckled to their shoulders pumped thick clouds of soma vapour into the air. Two more were busy round the portable Synthetic Music Box. Carrying water pistols charged with a powerful anaesthetic, four others had pushed their way into the crowd and were methodically laying out the more ferocious of the fighters.

“Quick, quick!” yelled Bernard. “They’ll be killed if you don’t hurry. They’ll… Oh!” Annoyed by his chatter, one of the policemen had given him a shot from his water pistol. Bernard stood for a second or two, and then tumbled onto the floor.

Suddenly, from out of the Synthetic Music Box a Voice began to speak. The Voice of Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. “My friends, my friends!” said the Voice, so tender that, behind their gas masks, even the policemen’s eyes were momentarily dimmed with tears, “what is the meaning of this? Why aren’t you all being happy and good together? Happy and good,” the Voice repeated. “At peace, at peace.”

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 in an embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were almost crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought in. Once it was distributed, the twins dispersed.

When the last of the Deltas had gone the policeman switched off the Music Box. The angelic Voice fell silent.

“Will you come quietly?” asked the Sergeant, “or must we anaesthetize?” 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 to move as inconspicuously as he could towards the door.

“You there,” called the Sergeant, and one of the policeman hurried across the room and laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder.

Bernard turned with an expression of innocence. Escaping? He hadn’t dreamed of such a thing.

“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 him 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 arm-chair.

The Savage wandered restlessly round the room, looking at the books in the shelves and the sound-track rolls and reading machine bobbins.

The door opened, and the Resident World Controller for Western Europe walked 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 or 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? “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.”

“But why is it prohibited?” asked the Savage.

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 and people kissing.” He made a grimace. “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. And if were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello. Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make tragedies without social instability. And the world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. 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, “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 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 requires the most enormous ingenuity. You’re making 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 bad in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. Happiness is never grand.”

“But does it have to be as bad as those twins?” 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.”

“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; unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned to be capable 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. You cannot pour upper-caste 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 predictions. The land wasn’t properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; orders were disobeyed; all the people that were supposed to do low-grade work were always trying to get high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were trying 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 modeled on the iceberg-eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”

“And they’re happy below the water line?”

“Happier than above it.”

“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 might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. But would they be any happier? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. It’s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. We have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. Even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.”

Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word but could not understand it.

“It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

“What?” said Helmholtz, in astonishment. “But we’re always saying that science is everything. It’s a hypnopaedic platitude.”

“Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen,” put in Bernard.

“And all the science propaganda we do at the College…”

“Yes; but what sort of science?” asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. “You’ve had no scientific training, so you can’t judge. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good-good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question. I’m the head cook now. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact.” He was silent.

“What happened?” asked Helmholtz Watson.

The Controller sighed. “Very nearly what’s going to happen to you, young men. I was on the point of being sent to an island.”

Bernard jumped up. “Send me to an island? You can’t send me. I haven’t done anything. It was the others. I swear it was the others.” He pointed accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. “Oh, please don’t send me to Iceland. I promise I’ll do what I ought to do. Give me another chance. Please give me another chance.” The tears began to flow. He threw himself on his knees before the Controller. Mustapha Mond tried to make him get up; but Bernard persisted in his groveling. In the end the Controller had to ring for his fourth secretary.

“Bring three men,” he ordered, “and take Mr. Marx into a bedroom. Give him a good soma vaporization and then put him to bed and leave him.”

The fourth secretary went out and returned with three green-uniformed twin footmen. Still shouting and sobbing, Bernard was carried out.

“One would think he was going to have his throat cut,” said the Controller, as the door closed. “Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. He’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too individual to fit into community-life. Every one, in a word, who’s any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.”

Helmholtz laughed. “Then why aren’t you on an island yourself?”

“Because I preferred this,” the Controller answered. “I was given the choice: to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my pure science, or to be taken on to the Controllers’ Council with the prospect of succeeding eventually to an actual Controllership. I chose this and let the science go.” He sighed, fell silent, then continued in a brisker tone, “Well, duty’s duty. One can’t consult one’s own preference. We can’t allow science to undo its own good work. That’s why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches-that’s why I almost got sent to an island. It’s curious,” he went on after a little pause, “to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That made them change their tune. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled-after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness.”

“But you didn’t go to an island,” said the Savage, breaking a long silence.

The Controller smiled. “I chose to serve happiness. Other people’s-not mine. It’s lucky,” he added, after a pause, “that there are such a lot of islands in the world. I don’t know what we should do without them. By the way, Mr. Watson, would you like a tropical climate? The Marquesas, for example; or Samoa? Or something rather more bracing?”

Helmholtz rose from his chair. “I should like a thoroughly bad climate,” he answered. “I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example…”

The Controller nodded. “I like your spirit, Mr. Watson. I like it very much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it.” He smiled. “What about the Falkland Islands?”

“Yes, I think that will do,” Helmholtz answered. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go and see how poor Bernard’s getting on.”