Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma.

Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.

Lenina and the Arch-Community-Songster stepped out on to the roof of the Singery. ‘Hurry up, my young friend—I mean, Lenina,’ called the Arch-Songster impatiently from the lift gates. Lenina, who had lingered for a moment to look at the moon, dropped her eyes and came hurrying across the roof to rejoin him.

‘A New Theory of Biology’ was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: ‘The author’s mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.’ He underlined the words. ‘The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary.’ A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily de-condition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words ‘Not to be published’ drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed. ‘What fun it would be,’ he thought, ‘if one didn’t have to think about happiness!’

With closed eyes, his face shining with rapture, John was softly declaiming to vacancy:

‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!   It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night   Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;   Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. …’

The golden T lay shining on Lenina’s bosom. Sportively, the Arch-Community-Songster caught hold of it, sportively he pulled, pulled. ‘I think,’ said Lenina suddenly, breaking a long silence, ‘I’d better take a couple of grammes of soma.’

Bernard, by this time, was fast asleep and smiling at the private paradise of his dreams. Smiling, smiling. But inexorably, every thirty seconds, the minute hand of the electric clock above his bed jumped forward with an almost imperceptible click. Click, click, click, click … And it was morning. Bernard was back among the miseries of space and time. It was in the lowest spirits that he taxied across to his work at the Conditioning Centre. The intoxication of success had evaporated; he was soberly his old self; and by contrast with the temporary balloon of these last weeks, the old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.

To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic.

‘You’re more like what you were at Malpais,’ he said, when Bernard had told him his plaintive story. ‘Do you remember when we first talked together? Outside the little house. You’re like what you were then.’

‘Because I’m unhappy again; that’s why.’

‘Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.’

‘I like that,’ said Bernard bitterly. ‘When it’s you who were the cause of it all. Refusing to come to my party and so turning them all against me!’ He knew that what he was saying was absurd in its injustice; he admitted inwardly, and at last even aloud, the truth of all that the Savage now said about the worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies. But in spite of this knowledge and these admissions, in spite of the fact that his friend’s support and sympathy were