‘Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.’

‘Take it,’ insisted Henry Foster, ‘take it.’

‘Stability was practically assured.’

‘One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments,’ said the Assistant Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnopædic wisdom.

‘It only remained to conquer old age.’

‘Damn you, damn you!’ shouted Bernard Marx.

‘Hoity-toity.’

‘Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts…’

‘And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.’ They went out, laughing.

‘All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course…’

‘Don’t forget to ask him about that Malthusian belt,’ said Fanny.

‘Along with them all the old man’s mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime.’

‘…two rounds of Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly.’

‘Work, play—at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking—thinking!’

‘Idiots, swine!’ Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor to the lift.

‘Now—such is progress—the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think—or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electro-magnetic Golf Course to…’

‘Go away, little girl,’ shouted the D.H.C. angrily. ‘Go away, little boy! Can’t you see that his fordship’s busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else.’

‘Poor little children!’ said the Controller.

Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimetres an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies.