Chapter one. The Centre

A low grey building, of only 34 floors. Over the main entrance the words CENTRAL LONDON HATCHING AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and below that the motto of the World State, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold in spite of the summer outside, in spite of the high temperature of the room itself, a thin, unfriendly light came in through the windows, falling on the glass and bright metal and coldly shining white surfaces of a laboratory. The feeling of winter was strong there. The clothes which the workers wore were white, and their hands were covered with pale rubber, the colour of a dead man’s face. The light was frozen and dead. Only from the shining equipment on the long work tables did it borrow a certain rich life, lying along the polished surfaces like butter.

‘And this,’ said the Director, opening the door, ‘is the Fertilizing Room.’

Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were working away, as the Director of Hatching and Conditioning entered the room, deep in the silence of people completely occupied by their task, A group of newly arrived students, very young, pink and inexperienced, followed nervously, rather unhappily, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he wrote desperately. The occasion was an unusual one. Opportunities of hearing from the DHC for Central London about the work of the Centre were rare, but he always insisted on 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 general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently - though as little of one as possible, if they were to be good and happy members of society. For details, as everyone knows, lead to virtue and happiness; generalities, though necessary for some purposes, are dangerous. A peaceful and efficient society is based on practical workers, not on thinkers.

‘Tomorrow,’ he would add, with a mixture of friendliness and firmness in his manner, ‘you will be settling down to serious work. You won’t have time for generalities. Meanwhile...’

Meanwhile it was a privilege. Straight from the Director’s mouth into the notebook. The boys wrote their notes as fast as they could.

Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big teeth which were only just covered by his full, curved lips when he was not speaking. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? It was hard to say, and anyhow, in this year of stability AF 632, nobody thought of asking such a question.

‘I shall begin at the beginning,’ said the DHC, and the more eager students wrote in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. ‘This is where the process starts.’ And opening a door specially constructed to prevent heat from escaping he showed them shelf after shelf of numbered test tubes. ‘The week’s supply of eggs. These are kept at blood heat, while the male fertilizing agents,’ and here he opened another door, ‘have to be kept at thirty-five degrees instead of thirty-seven. Blood heat would destroy their fertilizing power.’

While the pencils raced over the pages of the notebooks, he gave them a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of the operation necessary for its beginning - ‘the operation accepted willingly for the good of Society, not to mention that those on whom it is performed are paid six months’ extra salary’; described how the eggs after removal from the body were kept alive and developing; mentioned the liquid in which they were kept; and leading the students to the work tables, showed how this liquid was taken from the test tubes; how, drop by drop, it was carefully examined on specially warmed slides; how the eggs were examined to make sure they were normal and then counted; how they were afterwards transferred to a container which (and he now took them to watch the operation) was placed in a warm solution in which the male fertilizing agents swam freely, at least one hundred thousand of them in every thousandth of a litre of solution; how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the solution; how the fertilized eggs went back on the shelves. There the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled, but the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only 36 hours, to be treated by Bokanovsky’s Process.

‘Bokanovsky’s Process,’ repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks. ‘One egg, one embryo, one adult - that is normal. But a bokanovskified egg will divide into many others - from eight to ninety-six - and every one will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Producing ninety-six human beings instead of one. Progress.’

But one of the students was foolish enough to ask what advantage this method of producing human beings had over the natural way.

‘My good boy!’ The Director turned sharply and stared at him. ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Balanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!’

Social stability. Standard men and women, all exactly the same. The staff for the whole of a small factory from one single bokanovskified egg.