"He patted me on the behind this afternoon," said Lenina.
"There, you see!" Fanny was triumphant.
"That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality."
"Stability," said the Controller, "stability.
No civilization without social stability.
No social stability without individual stability."
His voice was a trumpet. Listening they felt larger, warmer.
The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning-for ever.
It is death if it stands still.
A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth.
The wheels began to turn.
In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions.
Stop all the wheels.
In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.
Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended.
There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.
Crying: My baby, my mother, my only, only love groaning: My sin, my terrible God; screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty-how can they tend the wheels?
And if they cannot tend the wheels ...
The corpses of a thousand thousand thousand men and women would be hard to bury or burn.
"And after all," Fanny's tone was coaxing, "it's not as though there were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or two men besides Henry.
And seeing that you ought to be a little more promiscuous ..."
"Stability," insisted the Controller, "stability.
The primal and the ultimate need.
Stability.
Hence all this."
With a wave of his hand he indicated the gardens, the huge building of the Conditioning Centre, the naked children furtive in the undergrowth or running across the lawns.
Lenina shook her head. "Somehow," she mused, "I hadn't been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately.
There are times when one doesn't. Haven't you found that too, Fanny?"
Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding.
"But one's got to make the effort," she said, sententiously, "one's got to play the game.
After all, every one belongs to every one else."
"Yes, every one belongs to every one else," Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny's hand, gave it a little squeeze. "You're quite right, Fanny.
As usual.
I'll make the effort."
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier.
The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute.
The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion.
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.
Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
"Fortunate boys!" said the Controller.
"No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy-to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all."
"Ford's in his flivver," murmured the D.H.C. "All's well with the world."
"Lenina Crowne?" said Henry Foster, echoing the Assistant Predestina-tor's question as he zipped up his trousers.
"Oh, she's a splendid girl.
Wonderfully pneumatic.
I'm surprised you haven't had her."
"I can't think how it is I haven't," said the Assistant Predestinator.
"I certainly will.
At the first opportunity."
From his place on the opposite side of the changing-room aisle, Bernard Marx overheard what they were saying and turned pale.