The Director pushed back the switch.
The voice was silent.
Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday.
A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months.
After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafceti-da-wedded indissolubly before the child can speak.
But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour.
For that there must be words, but words without reason.
In brief, hyp-nopaedia.
"The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."
The students took it down in their little books.
Straight from the horse's mouth.
Once more the Director touched the switch.
"... so frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying,
"I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because ..."
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind.
And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too-all his life long.
The mind that judges and desires and decides-made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph.
"Suggestions from the State."
He banged the nearest table.
"It therefore follows ..."
A noise made him turn round.
"Oh, Ford!" he said in another tone,
"I've gone and woken the children."
Chapter Three
OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime.
Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs.
The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees.
The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.
The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.
Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower.
A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.
"Strange," mused the Director, as they turned away, "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting, imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption.
It's madness.
Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games." He interrupted himself. "That's a charming little group," he said, pointing.
In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the fo-cussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.
"Charming, charming!" the D.H.C. repeated sentimentally.
"Charming," the boys politely agreed.
But their smile was rather patronizing.
They had put aside similar childish amusements too recently to be able to watch them now without a touch of contempt.
Charming? but it was just a pair of kids fooling about; that was all.
Just kids.
"I always think," the Director was continuing in the same rather maudlin tone, when he was interrupted by a loud boo-hooing.
From a neighbouring shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small boy, who howled as he went.
An anxious-looking little girl trotted at her heels.
"What's the matter?" asked the Director.
The nurse shrugged her shoulders.
"Nothing much," she answered.