“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^[20]?”

“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^[21], 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.