Brave New World

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, narrated by Michael York. Chapter one. A squat gray building of only 34 stories. Over the main entrance, the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, and in a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself. A harsh, thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose flesh. But finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-colored rubber. The light was frozen, dead. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. And this, said the director opening the door, is the fertilizing room. Bent over their instruments, 300 fertilizers were plunged as the director of hatcheries and conditioning entered the room. In the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare privilege. The DHC for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments. Just to give you a general idea, he would explain to them. For, of course, some sort of general idea they must have if they were to do their work intelligently, though as little of one if they were to be good and happy members of society as possible. For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness. Generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. Tomorrow, he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, you'll be settling down to serious work. You won't have time for generalities. Meanwhile, meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the notebook, the boys scribbled like mad. Tall and rather thin, but upright, the director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big, rather prominent teeth, just covered when he was not talking by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young, 30, 50, 55, it was hard to say. And anyhow, the question didn't arise. In this year of stability, AF 632, it didn't occur to you to ask it. I shall begin at the beginning, said the DHC. And the more zealous students recorded his intentions in their notebooks. Begin at the beginning. These, he waved his hand, are the incubators. And opening an insulated door, he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test tubes. The weak supply of ova, kept, he explained, at blood heat. Whereas the male game eats, and here he opened another door, they have to be kept at 35 instead of 37. Full blood heat sterilizes. Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs. Still leaning against the incubators, he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process. Spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction. The operation undergone voluntarily for the good of society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary. Continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive.