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.”
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[15].
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[16] 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.”