THE menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for the
Dying consisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas divided into two
Bokanovsky Groups of eighty-four red headed female and seventy-eight dark
dolychocephalic male twins, respectively. At six, when their working day was
over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of the Hospital and were
served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar with their soma ration.
From the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them. But his mind
was elsewhere–with death, with his grief, and his remorse; mechanicaly,
without consciousness of what he was doing, 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 squeaked
or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors, two faces,
one a hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked
bird-mask, stubbly with two days' beard, turned angrily towards him. Their
words and, in his ribs, the sharp nudging of elbows, broke through his
unawareness. He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew
what he saw–knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the
recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming
indistinguishable sameness. Twins, twins. … Like maggots they had swarmed
defilingly over the mystery of Linda's death. Maggots again, but larger, full
grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. He halted and,
with bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the
midst of which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. "How many goodly
creatures are there here!" The singing words mocked him derisively. "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 vestibule. The
voice was that of a jaunty young Alpha, who had entered carrying a black iron
cash-box. A murmur of satisfaction went up from the expectant twins. They
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
peremptorily, "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, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical
derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the
nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to
arms. "O brave new world!" Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of
loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something
fine and noble. "O brave new world!" It was a challenge, a command.
"No shoving there now!" shouted the Deputy Sub-Bursar in a fury. He
slammed down he lid of his cash-box. "I shall stop the distribution unless I
have good behaviour."
The Deltas muttered, jostled one another a little, and then were still.
The threat had been effective. Deprivation of soma–appalling thought!
"That's better," said the young man, and reopened his cash-box.
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
luminously clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had
been opened, a curtain drawn back.
"Now," said the Deputy Sub-Bursar.
Another khaki female stepped forward.
"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.
"Ford!" said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, below his breath. "It's the Savage."
He felt scared.
"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, smiling propitiatingly.
"Would you mind letting me …"
"Poison to soul as well as body."
"Yes, but let me get on with my distribution, 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 enfolding layers of
incomprehension to the quick of 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. Which was annoying, as
they had meant to nip across to Biarritz in Helmholtz's four-seater
sporticopter. They'd be late for dinner if he didn't come soon.
"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, "Ford
in Flivver!" he swore. "I'll come at once."
"What is it?" Bernard asked.
"A fellow I know at the Park Lane Hospital," said Helmholtz. "The Savage
is there. Seems to have gone mad. Anyhow, 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 with ardour and indignation.
"Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking," he added,
exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had
come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they
stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their
eyes. "Yes, puking!" he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and
duty–all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense
overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. "Don't you want to be
free and men? 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 into the area.
For a moment the khaki mob was silent, petrified, at the spectacle of this
wanton sacrilege, with amazement and horror.
"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
movement drove it menacingly 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 into the area 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–"Men at last!"–and
in the interval also throwing the poison out by handfuls through the open
window. "Yes, men! men!" and there was no more poison left. He picked up the
cash-box and showed them its black emptiness. "You're free!"
Howling, the Deltas charged with a redoubled 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, and was standing in an agony of humiliated indecision–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
swine-snouted 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
anæsthetic, four others had pushed their way into the crowd and were
methodically laying out, squirt by squirt, 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 wambling
unsteadily on legs that seemed to have lost their bones, their tendons, their
muscles, to have become mere sticks of jelly, and at last not even
jelly-water: he tumbled in a heap on the floor.
Suddenly, from out of the Synthetic Music Box a Voice began to speak. The
Voice of Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The sound-track roll was unwinding
itself in Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two (Medium Strength). Straight
from the depths of a non-existent heart, "My friends, my friends!" said the
Voice so pathetically, with a note of such infinitely tender reproach 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." It
trembled, sank into a whisper and momentarily expired. "Oh, I do want you to
be happy," it began, with a yearning earnestness. "I do so want you to be
good! Please, please be good and …"
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 at a time in a comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were
almost crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought in from the Bursary; a
new distribution was hastily made and, to the sound of the Voice's richly
affectionate, baritone valedictions, the twins dispersed, blubbering as though
their hearts would break. "Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep
you! Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you. Good-bye my
dearest, dearest …"
When the last of the Deltas had gone the policeman switched off the
current. The angelic Voice fell silent.
"Will you come quietly?" asked the Sergeant, "or must we anæsthetize?" 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 this
moment to move as inconspicuously as he could towards the door.
"Hi, you there," called the Sergeant, and a swine-masked policeman hurried
across the room and laid a hand on the young man's shoulder.
Bernard turned with an expression of indignant innocence. Escaping? He
hadn't dreamed of such a thing. "Though what on earth you want me for," he
said to the Sergeant, "I really can't imagine."
"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 the way towards the door and
the waiting police car.
