We can’t do without any one …” Lenina remembered her first shock of fear and surprise her speculations through half a wakeful hour and then, under the influence of those endless repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind, the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of sleep. She saw again the beam of moonlight, the row of small white beds heard once more the soft, soft voice that said (the words were there, unforgotten, unforgettable after so many night-long repetitions): “Every one works for every one else. “Even an Epsilon …” Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps. “Besides, even Epsilons perform indispensable services.” “All men are physico-chemically equal,” said Henry sententiously.
“But queer that Alphas and Betas won’t make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there.” Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly downwards at the monorail station. “Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England alone.” Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. P 2O 5 used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated some one. “On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. “Phosphorus recovery,” explained Henry telegraphically. “Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?” enquired Lenina.
For the safety of night-flying planes, its four tall chimneys were flood-lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. Following its southeasterly course across the dark plain their eyes were drawn to the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium. From under the glass vault a lighted train shot out into the open. The approaches to the monorail station were black with the antlike pullulation of lower-caste activity. Beneath them lay the buildings of the Golf Club-the huge Lower Caste barracks and, on the other side of a dividing wall, the smaller houses reserved for Alpha and Beta members.
Northwards, beyond and above the trees, the Internal and External Secretions factory glared with a fierce electric brilliance from every window of its twenty stories. Crimson at the horizon, the last of the sunset faded, through orange, upwards into yellow and a pale watery green. The forest of Burnham Beeches stretched like a great pool of darkness towards the bright shore of the western sky. At eight hundred feet Henry slowed down the helicopter screws, and they hung for a minute or two poised above the fading landscape. Lenina and Henry climbed into their machine and started off. Every two and a half minutes a bell and the screech of whistles announced the departure of one of the light monorail trains which carried the lower caste golfers back from their separate course to the metropolis. From the grounds of the Internal and External Secretion Trust came the lowing of those thousands of cattle which provided, with their hormones and their milk, the raw materials for the great factory at Farnham Royal.Īn incessant buzzing of helicopters filled the twilight. Lenina and Henry abandoned their game and walked back towards the Club. The loud speaker in the tower of the Stoke Poges Club House began, in a more than human tenor, to announce the closing of the courses.
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