Chapter Three

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Six or seven hundred of naked little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

“That’s a charming little group,” said the Director, pointing.

In a little grassy bay two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.

From a neighbouring shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small boy, who cried as he went. An anxious-looking little girl followed them.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Director.

The nurse shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing much,” she answered. “This little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play. I’d noticed it once or twice before. And now again today. He started yelling just now…”

“I didn’t mean to hurt him or anything. Honestly,” said the anxious-looking little girl.

“Of course you didn’t, dear,” said the nurse reassuringly. She turned back to the Director. “I’m taking him to see the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology. Just to see if anything’s at all abnormal.”

“Quite right,” said the Director. “Take him. You stay here, little girl,” he added, as the nurse and the boy walked away. “What’s your name?”

“Polly Trotsky.”

“Run away now and see if you can find some other little boy to play with.”

The child scampered off into the bushes and was lost to sight.

The Director turned to his students. “What I’m going to tell you now,” he said, “may sound incredible. But then, when you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do.”

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!); and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

An astonished look appeared on the faces of his listeners. They could not believe it.

“Even adolescents,” the D.H.C. was saying, “even adolescents like yourselves…”

“Not possible! Nothing?”

“In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.”

“Twenty years old?” echoed the students in disbelief.

“I told you that you’d find it incredible.”

“But what happened?” they asked. “What were the results?”

“The results were terrible.” A deep resonant voice broke startlingly into the dialogue.

They looked around. On the side stood a stranger-a man of middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark.

The D.H.C. darted forward, his hand outstretched, smiling with all his teeth.

“Controller! What an unexpected pleasure! Boys, what are you thinking of? This is the Controller; this is his fordship, Mustapha Mond.”

The clock struck four. Voices called from the trumpet mouths.

“Main Day-shift off duty. Second Day-shift take over. Main Day-shift off…”

In the lift, on their way up to the changing rooms, Henry Foster and the Assistant Director of Predestination rather pointedly turned their backs on Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau.

Despite the change between shifts, machinery was still humming in the Embryo Store. The conveyors crept forward with their load of future men and women no matter what.

Lenina Crowne walked briskly towards the door.

His fordship Mustapha Mond! The eyes of the students almost popped out of their heads. Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for Western Europe! One of the Ten World Controllers. One of the Ten… and he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to them… straight from the horse’s mouth. Straight from the mouth of Ford himself.

“You all remember,” said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, “you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,” he repeated slowly, “is bunk.”

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk-and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where was Jesus? Whisk-and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom-all were gone. Whisk-the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk…

“Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?” enquired the Assistant Predestinator. “I hear the new one at the Alhambra is great. There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects.”

“That’s why you’re taught no history,” the Controller was saying. “But now the time has come…”

The D.H.C. looked at him nervously.

Mustapha Mond intercepted his anxious glance and the corners of his red lips twitched ironically.

“It’s all right, Director,” he said in a tone of faint derision, “I won’t corrupt them.”

The D.H.C. was overwhelmed with confusion.

Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising. The smile on Bernard Marx’s face was contemptuous. Every hair on the bear indeed!

“I shall make a point of going,” said Henry Foster.

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them. “Just try to realize it,” he said. “Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.”

That smutty word again. But none of them smiled this time.

“Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.”

They tried; obviously without success.

“And do you know what a ‘home’ was?”

They shook their heads.

Lenina Crowne opened the door marked GIRLS’ DRESSING-ROOM and walked into a deafening chaos of arms and bosoms and underclothing.

“Hullo, Fanny,” said she to the young woman who had the locker next to hers.

Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the plant had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising.

Lenina pulled at her zippers-downwards on the jacket, downwards at the two that held trousers, downwards again to loosen her undergarment. Still wearing her shoes and stockings, she walked off towards the bathrooms.

Home, home-a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by people. No air, no space; a prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

(The Controller’s description was so vivid that one of the boys, more sensitive than the rest, turned pale at the mere description and was on the point of being sick.)

Lenina got out of the bath and toweled herself dry. Eight different scents and eau-de-cologne were laid on in little taps over the wash-basin. She turned on the third from the left, dabbed herself with chypre and, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand, went out to see if one of the vibro-vacuum machines were free.

And home was as squalid psychically as possible. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)… like a cat over its kittens; “My baby, my baby,” over and over again. “My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps…”

“Yes,” said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, “you may well shudder.”

“Who are you going out with tonight?” Lenina asked, returning from the vibro-vac.

“Nobody.”

Lenina raised her eyebrows in astonishment.

“I’ve been feeling rather out of sorts lately,” Fanny explained. “Dr. Wells advised me to have a Pregnancy Substitute.”

“But you’re only nineteen. The first Pregnancy Substitute isn’t compulsory till twenty-one.”

“I know, dear. But some people are better if they begin earlier.” She opened the door of her locker and pointed to the row of boxes and labelled phials on the upper shelf.

“SYRUP OF CORPUS LUTEUM,” Lenina read the names aloud. “OVARIN, GUARANTEED FRESH: NOT TO BE USED AFTER AUGUST 1ST, A.F. 632. MAMMARY GLAND EXTRACT: TO BE TAKEN THREE TIMES DAILY, BEFORE MEALS, WITH A LITTLE WATER. PLACENTIN: 5cc TO BE INJECTED INTRAVENALLY EVERY THIRD DAY… Ugh!” Lenina shuddered. “How I loathe intravenals, don’t you?”

“Yes. But when they do one good…” Fanny was a particularly sensible girl.

Our Ford-or Our Freud, as, for some reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters-had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life.

“Extremes,” said the Controller, “meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.”

“Dr. Wells says that a three months’ Pregnancy Substitute will make all the difference to my health for the next three or four years.”

“Well, I hope he’s right,” said Lenina. “But, Fanny, do you really mean to say that for the next three months you’re not supposed to…”

“Oh no, dear. Only for a week or two, that’s all. I suppose you’re going out?”

Lenina nodded.

“Who with?”

“Henry Foster.”

“Again?” Fanny’s face took on an expression of pained and disapproving astonishment. “Do you mean to tell me you’re still going out with Henry Foster?”

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance.

“Though you probably don’t know what those are,” said Mustapha Mond.

They shook their heads.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness.

“But everyone belongs to everyone else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopaedic proverb.

The students nodded, agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept as self-evident and utterly indisputable.

“But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”

“Only four months! And there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”

Lenina blushed scarlet. “No, there hasn’t been anyone else,” she answered. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”

“Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man-why, he’d be furious if he knew…”

Mother, monogamy, romance. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty-they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly, how could they be stable?

“Of course there’s no need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time, that’s all. He has other girls, doesn’t he?”

Lenina admitted it.

“Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman. And then there’s the Director to think of. You know what a stickler…”

Nodding, “He patted me on the behind this afternoon,” said Lenina.

“There, you see!” Fanny was triumphant. “That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.”

“Stability,” said the Controller. “No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.” His voice was a trumpet.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning-forever. It is death if it stands still. Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men.

Crying, screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty-how can they tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend the wheels…

“And after all,” Fanny’s tone was coaxing, “it’s not as though there were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or two men besides Henry. And seeing that you ought to be a little more promiscuous…”

“Stability,” insisted the Controller, “stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.”

With a wave of his hand he indicated the gardens, the huge building of the Conditioning Centre, the naked children running across the lawns.

Lenina shook her head. “I hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn’t. Haven’t you found that too, Fanny?”

Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. “But one’s got to make the effort,” she said. “One’s got to play the game. After all, everyone belongs to everyone else.”

“Yes, everyone belongs to everyone else,” Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny’s hand, gave it a little squeeze. “You’re quite right, Fanny. As usual. I’ll make the effort.”

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being.

“Fortunate boys!” said the Controller. “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy-to preserve you from having emotions at all.”

“Ford’s in his flivver,” murmured the D.H.C. “All’s well with the world.”

“Lenina Crowne?” said Henry Foster, echoing the Assistant Predestinator’s question. “Oh, she’s a splendid girl. I’m surprised you haven’t had her.”

“I can’t think how it is I haven’t,” said the Assistant Predestinator. “I certainly will. At the first opportunity.”

From his place on the opposite side of the changing-room aisle, Bernard Marx overheard what they were saying and turned pale.

“And to tell the truth,” said Lenina, “I’m beginning to get just a tiny bit bored with nothing but Henry every day.” She pulled on her left stocking. “Do you know Bernard Marx?”

Fanny looked startled. “You don’t mean to say…?”

“Why not? Bernard’s an Alpha Plus. Besides, he asked me to go to one of the Savage Reservations with him. I’ve always wanted to see a Savage Reservation.”

“But his reputation?”

“What do I care about his reputation?”

“They say he doesn’t like Obstacle Golf.”

“They say, they say,” mocked Lenina.

“And then he spends most of his time by himself-alone.” There was horror in Fanny’s voice.

“Well, he won’t be alone when he’s with me. And why are people so beastly to him? I think he’s rather sweet.” She smiled to herself; how absurdly shy he had been! Frightened almost-as though she were a World Controller.

“Consider your own lives,” said Mustapha Mond. “Has any of you ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?”

The question was answered by a negative silence.

“Has any of you ever had to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fulfillment?”

“Well,” began one of the boys, and hesitated.

“Speak up,” said the D.H.C.

“I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.”

“And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?”

“Horrible!”

“Horrible; precisely,” said the Controller.

“Talking about her as though she is a bit of meat.” Bernard ground his teeth. “Have her here, have her there… She said she’d think it over, she said she’d give me an answer this week. Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford.” He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face-again and again.

“Yes, I really do advise you to try her,” Henry Foster was saying.

“Take Ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.”

“He’s so ugly!” said Fanny.

“But I rather like his looks.”

“And then so small.” Fanny made a grimace.

“I think that’s rather sweet,” said Lenina.

Fanny was shocked. “They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle-thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That’s why he’s so stunted.”

“What nonsense!” Lenina was indignant.

“Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable.”

“You’re welcome, I assure you. You’re welcome.”

Henry Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder. “Everyone belongs to everyone else, after all.”

One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopaedia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

“Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy.”

“Well, all I can say is that I’m going to accept his invitation.”

Bernard hated them, hated them. But they were two, they were large, they were strong.

“The Nine Years’ War began in A.F. 141.”

“Not even if it were true about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate.”

“Phosgene, chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, diphenylcyanarsine, trichlormethyl, chloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. Not to mention hydrocyanic acid.”

“Which I simply don’t believe,” Lenina concluded.

“The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order.”

“Because I do want to see a Savage Reservation.”

CH₃C₆H₂(NO₂)₃+Hg(CNO)₂=well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums!

“You’re hopeless, Lenina, I give up.”

“The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious.”

Back turned to back, Fanny and Lenina continued their changing in silence.

“The Nine Years’ War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and…”

“Fanny Crowne’s a nice girl too,” said the Assistant Predestinator.

In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. “I do love flying,” they whispered, “I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…”

“Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force.”

“Not nearly so as Lenina. Oh, not nearly.”

“But old clothes are beastly,” continued the whisper. “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…”

“Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption.”

“There, I’m ready,” said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless. “Let’s make peace, Fanny, darling.”

“Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result…”

“Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches…”

“One of these days,” said Fanny, “you’ll get into trouble.”

“Objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature.”

“I do love flying. I do love flying.”

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“Do I look all right?” Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.

“Eight hundred people were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green.”

“Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending.”

Green corduroy shorts and white stockings turned down below the knee.

“Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide.”

A green-and-white jockey cap; bright-green, highly polished shoes.

“In the end,” said Mustapha Mond, “the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia…”

And round her waist she wore a green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging with the regulation supply of contraceptives.

“The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction…”

“Perfect!” cried Fanny enthusiastically. She could never resist Lenina’s charm for long. “And what a perfectly sweet Malthusian belt!”

“Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments; by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150.”

“I simply must get one like it,” said Fanny.

“There were some things called the pyramids, for example.”

“My old black-patent bandolier…”

“And a man called Shakespeare. You’ve never heard of them of course.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace-that bandolier of mine.”

“Such are the advantages of a really scientific education.”

“The more stitches the less riches; the more stitches the less…”

“The introduction of Our Ford’s first T-Model…”

“I’ve had it nearly three months.”

“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-positively a crime against society.”

“Henry Foster gave it to 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 thinks 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 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.

“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.”

“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-and 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…”

Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimeters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies.