amuse themselves? They could not believe it.
'Even adolescents,' the D.H.C. was saying, 'even adolescents like yourselves...'
'Not possible!'
'Barring a little surreptitious auto-erotism and homosexuality--absolutely nothing.'
'Nothing?'
'In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.'
'Twenty years old?' echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief.
'Twenty,' the Director repeated. '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 round. On the fringe of the little group stood a stranger--a man of middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark. 'Terrible,' he repeated.
The D.H.C. had at that moment sat down on one of the steel and rubber benches conveniently scattered through the gardens; but at the sight of the stranger, he sprang to his feet and darted forward, his hands outstretched, smiling with all his teeth, effusive.
'Controller! What an unexpected pleasure! Boys, what are you thinking of? This is the Controller; this is his fordship, Mustapha Mond.'
****
In the four thousand rooms of the Centre the four thousand electric clocks simultaneously struck four. Discarnate 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: averted themselves from that unsavoury reputation.
The faint hum and rattle of machinery still stirred the crimson air in the Embryo-Store. Shifts might come and go, one lupus-coloured face give place to another; majestically and for ever the conveyors crept forward with their load of future men and women.
Lenina Crowne walked briskly towards the door.
****
His fordship Mustapha Mond! The eyes of the saluting 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 sat down on the bench with the D.H.C., 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.
Two shrimp-brown children emerged from a neighbouring shrubbery, stared at them for a moment with large, astonished eyes, then returned to their amusements among the leaves.
'You all remember,' said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, 'you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired 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 were Jupiter and Gotama and 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 first-rate. There's a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it's marvellous. 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. There were those strange rumours of old forbidden books hidden in a safe in the Controller's study. Bibles, poetry--Ford knew what.
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, and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering along their diaphragms. 'Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.'
That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.
'Try to imagine what "living with one's family" meant.'
They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.
'And do you know what a "home" was?'
They shook their heads.
****
From her dim crimson cellar Lenina Crowne shot up seventeen stories, turned to the right as she stepped out of the lift, walked down a long corridor and, opening the door marked GIRLS' DRESSING-ROOM, plunged into a deafening chaos of arms and bosoms and underclothing. Torrents of hot water were splashing into or gurgling out of a hundred baths. Rumbling and hissing, eighty vibro-vacuum massage machines were simultaneously kneading and sucking the firm and sunburnt flesh of eighty superb female specimens. Every one was talking at the top of her voice. A Synthetic Music machine was warbling out a super-cornet solo.
'Hullo, Fanny,' said Lenina to the young woman who had the pegs and 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 planet had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising.
Lenina pulled at her zippers--downwards on the jacket, downwards with a double-handed gesture 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 a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.
(The Controller's evocation 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
