off their upper garments and, with knotted whips, began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans.

‘But why do they laugh?’ asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.

‘Why?’ The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. ‘Why? But because it’s so extraordinarily funny.’

In the cinematographic twilight, Bernard risked a gesture which, in the past, even total darkness would hardly have emboldened him to make. Strong in his new importance, he put his arm round the Head Mistress’s waist. It yielded, willowily. He was just about to snatch a kiss or two and perhaps a gentle pinch, when the shutters clicked open again.

‘Perhaps we had better go on,’ said Miss Keate, and moved towards the door.

‘And this,’ said the Provost a moment later, ‘is the Hypnopædic Control Room.’

Hundreds of synthetic music boxes, one for each dormitory, stood ranged in shelves round three sides of the room; pigeon-holed on the fourth were the paper sound-track rolls on which the various hypnopædic lessons were printed.

‘You slip the roll in here,’ explained Bernard, interrupting Dr. Gaffney, ‘press down this switch …’

‘No, that one,’ corrected the Provost, annoyed.

‘That one, then. The roll unwinds. The selenium cells transform the light impulses into sound waves, and …’

‘And there you are,’ Dr. Gaffney concluded.

‘Do they read Shakespeare?’ asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library.

‘Certainly not,’ said the Head Mistress, blushing.

‘Our library,’ said Dr. Gaffney, ‘contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements.’

Five bus-loads of boys and girls, singing or in a silent embracement, rolled past them over the vitrified highway.

‘Just returned,’ explained Dr. Gaffney, while Bernard, whispering, made an appointment with the Head Mistress for that very evening, ‘from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.’

‘Like any other physiological process,’ put in the Head Mistress professionally.

Eight o’clock at the Savoy. It was all arranged.

On their way back to London they stopped at the Television Corporation’s factory at Brentford.

‘Do you mind waiting here a moment while I go and telephone?’ asked Bernard.

The Savage waited and watched. The Main Day-Shift was just going off duty. Crowds of lower-caste workers were queued up in front of the monorail station—seven or eight hundred Gamma, Delta and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a dozen faces and statures between them. To each of