Chapter One
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words,
CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World
State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the
summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin
light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some
pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and
bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The
overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured
rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the
microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the
polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the
work tables.
"And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room."
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director
of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence,
the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop
of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather
abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever
the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It
was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a point of
personally conducting his new students round the various departments.
"Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. For of course some sort
of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently-though as
little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible.
For particulars, as every one knows, make for virture and happiness; generalities
are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp
collectors compose the backbone of society.
"To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality,
"you'll be settling down to serious work. You won't have time for generalities.
Meanwhile ..."
Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the notebook.
The boys scribbled like mad.
Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long
chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his
full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And
anyhow the question didn't arise; in this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn't occur to
you to ask it.
"I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students
recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. "These," he waved
his hand, "are the incubators." And opening an insulated door he showed them
explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male gametes," and here he opened
another door, "they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood
heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly
across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first,
of course, of its surgical introduction-"the operation undergone voluntarily for the
good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six
months' salary"; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the
excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of
optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached
and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually
showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out
drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs
which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a
porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this
receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming
spermatozoa-at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic
centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of