THE ROOM into which the three were ushered was the
Controller's study.
"His fordship will be down in a moment." The Gamma butler left them to
themselves.
Helmholtz laughed aloud.
"It's more like a caffeine-solution party than a trial," he said, and let
himself fall into the most luxurious of the pneumatic arm-chairs. "Cheer up,
Bernard," he added, catching sight of his friend's green unhappy face. But
Bernard would not be cheered; without answering, without even looking at
Helmholtz, he went and sat down on the most uncomfortable chair in the room,
carefully chosen in the obscure hope of somehow deprecating the wrath of the
higher powers.
The Savage meanwhile wandered restlessly round the room, peering with a
vague superficial inquisitiveness at the books in the shelves, at the
sound-track rolls and reading machine bobbins in their numbered pigeon-holes.
On the table under the window lay a massive volume bound in limp black
leather-surrogate, and stamped with large golden T's. He picked it up and
opened it. MY LIFE AND WORK, BY OUR FORD. The book had been published at
Detroit by the Society for the Propagation of Fordian Knowledge. Idly he
turned the pages, read a sentence here, a paragraph there, and had just come
to the conclusion that the book didn't interest him, when the door opened, and
the Resident World Controller for Western Europe walked briskly into the room.
Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage
that he addressed himself. "So you don't much like civilization, Mr. Savage,"
he said.
The Savage looked at him. He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to
remain sullenly unresponsive; but, reassured by the good-humoured intelligence
of the Controller's face, he decided to tell the truth, straightforwardly.
"No." He shook his head.
Bernard started and looked horrified. What would the Controller think? To
be labelled as the friend of a man who said that he didn't like
civilization–said it openly and, of all people, to the Controller–it was
terrible. "But, John," he began. A look from Mustapha Mond reduced him to an
abject silence.
"Of course," the Savage went on to admit, "there are some very nice
things. All that music in the air, for instance …"
"Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and
sometimes voices."
The Savage's face lit up with a sudden pleasure. "Have you read it too?"
he asked. "I thought nobody knew about that book here, in England."
"Almost nobody. I'm one of the very few. It's prohibited, you see. But as
I make the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity, Mr. Marx," he
added, turning to Bernard. "Which I'm afraid you can't do."
Bernard sank into a yet more hopeless misery.
"But why is it prohibited?" asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting
a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else.
The Controller shrugged his shoulders. "Because it's old; that's the chief
reason. We haven't any use for old things here."
"Even when they're beautiful?"
"Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't
want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones."
"But the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Those plays, where there's
nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing."
He made a grimace. "Goats and monkeys!" Only in Othello's word could he find
an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred.
"Nice tame animals, anyhow," the Controller murmured parenthetically.
"Why don't you let them see Othello instead?"
"I've told you; it's old. Besides, they couldn't understand it."
Yes, that was true. He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo
and Juliet. "Well then," he said, after a pause, "something new that's
like Othello, and that they could understand."
"That's what we've all been wanting to write," said Helmholtz, breaking a
long silence.
"And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it
were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it
might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello."
"Why not?"
"Yes, why not?" Helmholtz repeated. He too was forgetting the unpleasant
realities of the situation. Green with anxiety and apprehension, only Bernard
remembered them; the others ignored him. "Why not?"
"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make
flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social
instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they
want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe;
they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of
passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got
no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so
conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.
And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck
out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!" He
laughed. "Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to
understand Othello! My good boy!"
The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted
obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those
feelies."
"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to
pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used
to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the
scent organ instead."
"But they don't mean anything."
"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the
audience."
"But they're … they're told by an idiot."
The Controller laughed. "You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr.
Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers …"
"But he's right," said Helmholtz gloomily. "Because it is idiotic. Writing
when there's nothing to say …"
"Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making
flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel–works of art out of practically
nothing but pure sensation."
The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."
"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in
comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability
isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of
the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of
a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.
Happiness is never grand."
"I suppose not," said the Savage after a silence. "But need it be quite so
bad as those twins?" He passed his hand over his eyes as though he were trying
to wipe away the remembered image of those long rows of identical midgets at
the assembling tables, those queued-up twin-herds at the entrance to the
Brentford monorail station, those human maggots swarming round Linda's bed of
death, the endlessly repeated face of his assailants. He looked at his
bandaged left hand and shuddered. "Horrible!"
"But how useful! I see you don't like our Bokanovsky Groups; but, I assure
you, they're the foundation on which everything else is built. They're the
gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course."
The deep voice thrillingly vibrated; the gesticulating hand implied all space
and the onrush of the irresistible machine. Mustapha Mond's oratory was almost
up to synthetic standards.
"I was wondering," said the Savage, "why you had them at all–seeing that
you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don't you make
everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you're about it?"
Mustapha Mond laughed. "Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,"
he answered. "We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas
couldn't fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by
Alphas–that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity
and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice
and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!" he repeated.
The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.
"It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad
if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up.
Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them
do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for
the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least
resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run.
He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still
inside a bottle–an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each
one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, "goes through
life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are,
relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in
a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into
lower-caste bottles. It's obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved
in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing."
"What was that?" asked the Savage.
Mustapha Mond smiled. "Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling
if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus
cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially
prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial
equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own
affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The
land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws
were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of
low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the
people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where
they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When
nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors
unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the
island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas
that the world has ever seen."
The Savage sighed, profoundly.
"The optimum population," said Mustapha Mond, "is modelled on the
iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above."
"And they're happy below the water line?"
"Happier than above it. Happier than your friend here, for example." He
pointed.
"In spite of that awful work?"
"Awful? They don't find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It's
light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and
a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and
games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for?
True," he added, "they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could
give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce
all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any
the happier for that? No, they wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a
century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day.
What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of
soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were
so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take
a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for
labour-saving processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a lavish
gesture. "And why don't we put them into execution? For the sake of the
labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.
It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if
we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the
land. For their own sakes–because it takes longer to get food out of
the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We
don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another
reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure
science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a
possible enemy. Yes, even science."
Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word. But what it exactly
signified he could not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had
never mentioned science, and from Linda he had only gathered the vaguest
hints: science was something you made helicopters with, some thing that caused
you to laugh at the Corn Dances, something that prevented you from being
wrinkled and losing your teeth. He made a desperate effort to take the
Controller's meaning.
"Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of
stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also
science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and
muzzled."
"What?" said Helmholtz, in astonishment. "But we're always saying that
science is everything. It's a hypnopædic platitude."
"Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen," put in Bernard.
"And all the science propaganda we do at the College …"
"Yes; but what sort of science?" asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically.
"You've had no scientific training, so you can't judge. I was a pretty good
physicist in my time. Too good–good enough to realize that all our science is
just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody's allowed
to question, and a list of recipes that mustn't be added to except by special
permission from the head cook. I'm the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive
young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox
cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact." He was silent.
"What happened?" asked Helmholtz Watson.
The Controller sighed. "Very nearly what's going to happen to you young
men. I was on the point of being sent to an island."
The words galvanized Bernard into violent and unseemly activity. "Send
me to an island?" He jumped up, ran across the room, and stood
gesticulating in front of the Controller. "You can't send me. I haven't
done anything. lt was the others. I swear it was the others." He pointed
accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. "Oh, please don't send me to Iceland.
I promise I'll do what I ought to do. Give me another chance. Please give me
another chance." The tears began to flow. "I tell you, it's their fault," he
sobbed. "And not to Iceland. Oh please, your fordship, please …" And in a
paroxysm of abjection he threw himself on his knees before the Controller.
Mustapha Mond tried to make him get up; but Bernard persisted in his
grovelling; the stream of words poured out inexhaustibly. In the end the
Controller had to ring for his fourth secretary.
"Bring three men," he ordered, "and take Mr. Marx into a bedroom. Give him
a good soma vaporization and then put him to bed and leave him."
The fourth secretary went out and returned with three green-uniformed twin
footmen. Still shouting and sobbing. Bernard was carried out.
"One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the
Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd
understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an
island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most
interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the
people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously
individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied
with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a
word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."
Helmholtz laughed. "Then why aren't you on an island yourself?"
"Because, finally, I preferred this," the Controller answered. "I was
given the choice: to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my
pure science, or to be taken on to the Controllers' Council with the prospect
of succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership. I chose this and let
the science go." After a little silence, "Sometimes," he added, "I rather
regret the science. Happiness is a hard master–particularly other people's
happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it
unquestioningly, than truth." He sighed, fell silent again, then continued in
a brisker tone, "Well, duty's duty. One can't consult one's own preference.
I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a
public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has given us the
stablest equilibrium in history. China's was hopelessly insecure by
comparison; even the primitive matriarchies weren't steadier than we are.
Thanks, l repeat, to science. But we can't allow science to undo its own good
work. That's why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches–that's why
I almost got sent to an island. We don't allow it to deal with any but the
most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously
discouraged. It's curious," he went on after a little pause, "to read what
people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They
seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely,
regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the
supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were
beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the
emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production
demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning;
truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political
power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.
Still, in spite of everytung, unrestricted scientific research was still
permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they
were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War.
That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth
or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That
was when science first began to be controlled–after the Nine Years' War.
People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a
quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for
truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have
something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it,
Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I
was too much interested in truth; I paid too."
"But you didn't go to an island," said the Savage, breaking a long
silence.
The Controller smiled. "That's how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness.
Other people's–not mine. It's lucky," he added, after a pause, "that there are
such a lot of islands in the world. I don't know what we should do without
them. Put you all in the lethal chamber, I suppose. By the way, Mr. Watson,
would you like a tropical climate? The Marquesas, for example; or Samoa? Or
something rather more bracing?"
Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. "I should like a thoroughly bad
climate," he answered. "I believe one would write better if the climate were
bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example …"
The Controller nodded his approbation. "I like your spirit, Mr. Watson. I
like it very much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it." He
smiled. "What about the Falkland Islands?"
"Yes, I think that will do," Helmholtz answered. "And now, if you don't
mind, I'll go and see how poor Bernard's getting on."
