as though all civilized people didn’t do the same? ‘Every one belongs to every …’ Her voice suddenly died into an almost inaudible breathless croaking. her mouth fell open: she made a desperate effort to fill her lungs with air. But it was as though she had forgotten how to breathe. She tried to cry out—but no sound came; only the terror of her staring eyes revealed what she was suffering. Her hands went to her throat, then clawed at the air—the air she could no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had ceased to exist.

The Savage was on his feet, bent over her. ‘What is it, Linda? What is it?’ His voice was imploring; it was as though he were begging to be reassured.

The look she gave him was charged with an unspeakable terror—with terror and, it seemed to him, reproach. She tried to raise herself in bed, but fell back on to the pillows. Her face was horribly distorted, her lips blue.

The Savage turned and ran up the ward.

‘Quick, quick!’ he shouted. ‘Quick!’

Standing in the centre of a ring of zipper-hunting twins, the Head Nurse looked round. The first moment’s astonishment gave place almost instantly to disapproval. ‘Don’t shout! Think of the little ones,’ she said, frowning. ‘You might decondition … But what are you doing?’ He had broken through the ring. ‘Be careful!’ A child was yelling.

‘Quick, quick!’ He caught her by the sleeve, dragged her after him. ‘Quick! Something’s happened. I’ve killed her.’

By the time they were back at the end of the ward Linda was dead.

The Savage stood for a moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside the bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably.

The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the twins who had stopped their hunting of the zipper and were staring from the other end of the ward, staring with all their eyes and nostrils at the shocking scene that was being enacted round Bed 20. Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry—as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way.

She stepped forward, she touched him on the shoulder. ‘Can’t you behave?’ she said in a low, angry voice. But, looking round, she saw that half a dozen twins were already on their feet and advancing down the ward. The circle was disintegrating. In another moment … No, the risk was too great; the whole Group might be put back six or seven months in its conditioning. She hurried back towards her menaced charges.

‘Now, who wants a chocolate éclair?’ she asked in a loud, cheerful tone.

‘Me!’ yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely forgotten.

‘Oh, God, God, God …’ the Savage kept repeating to himself. In the chaos of grief and remorse that filled his mind it was the one articulate word. ‘God!’ he whispered it aloud. ‘God …’

‘Whatever is he saying?’ said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the warblings of the Super- Wurlitzer.