BRAVE NEW WORLD
by
Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Chapter One
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main
entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND
CONDITIONING CENTRE, 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-coloured
rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. 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, three hundred 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 D. H. C. 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 every one
knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are
intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but
fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone
of society.
"To-morrow," 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? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It
was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn't arise; in
this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn't occur to you to
ask it.
"I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the
more zealous students recorded his intention 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 week's supply of ova. Kept," he
explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male gametes,"
and here he opened another door, "they have to be kept
at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat
sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogene 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 and
actively developing; passed on to a consideration of
optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the
liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept;
and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually
showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the
test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the
specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs
which it contained were inspected for abnormalities,
counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and
he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle
was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming
spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one hundred
thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how,
after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the
liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of the
eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if
necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to
the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until
definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons
were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to
undergo Bokanovsky's Process.
"Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the
students underlined the words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a
bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide.
From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow
into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a
full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow
where only one grew before. Progress.
"Essentially," the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification
consists of a series of arrests of development. We check
the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg
responds by budding."
Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.
He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of
test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another,
rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took
eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them.
Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an
egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least
susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds;
some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where
the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were
suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight,
the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were
dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently
burgeoned again and having budded–bud out of bud out of
bud–were thereafter–further arrest being generally
fatal–left to develop in peace. By which time the original
egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to
ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will
agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos
and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg
would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens,
by scores at a time.
"Scores," the s
