"John!"
He came in at once, paused for a moment just inside the door, looked round, then soft on his moccasined feet strode quickly across the room, fell on his knees in front of the Director, and said in a clear voice:
"My father!"
The word (for "father" was not so much obscene as-with its connotation of something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral obliquity of child-bearing-merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety); the comically smutty word relieved what had become a quite intolerable tension.
Laughter broke out, enormous, almost hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never stop.
My father-and it was the Director!
My father!
Oh Ford, oh Ford!
That was really too good.
The whooping and the roaring renewed themselves, faces seemed on the point of disintegration, tears were streaming.
Six more test-tubes of spermatozoa were upset.
My father!
Pale, wild-eyed, the Director glared about him in an agony of bewildered humiliation.
My father!
The laughter, which had shown signs of dying away, broke out again more loudly than ever.
He put his hands over his ears and rushed out of the room.
Chapter Eleven
AFTER the scene in the Fertilizing Room, all upper-caste London was wild to see this delicious creature who had fallen on his knees before the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning-or rather the ex-Director, for the poor man had resigned immediately afterwards and never set foot inside the Centre again-had flopped down and called him (the joke was almost too good to be true!) "my father."
Linda, on the contrary, cut no ice; nobody had the smallest desire to see Linda.
To say one was a mother-that was past a joke: it was an obscenity.
Moreover, she wasn't a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else: so couldn't have really quaint ideas.
Final-ly-and this was by far the strongest reason for people's not wanting to see poor Linda-there was her appearance.
Fat; having lost her youth; with bad teeth, and a blotched complexion, and that figure (Fordl)-you simply couldn't look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively sick.
So the best people were quite determined not to see Linda.
And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them.
The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again.
Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks.
The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday.
The remedy was to make the holiday continuous.
Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses.
Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted.
She took as much as twenty grammes a day.
"Which will finish her off in a month or two," the doctor confided to Bernard.
"One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed.
No more breathing.
Finished.
And a good thing too.
If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different.
But we can't."
Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most conveniently out of the way), John raised objections.
"But aren't you shortening her life by giving her so much?"
"In one sense, yes," Dr. Shaw admitted. "But in another we're actually lengthening it." The young man stared, uncomprehending.
"Soma may make you lose a few years in time," the doctor went on.
"But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time.
Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity."
John began to understand. "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," he murmured.
"Eh?"
"Nothing."
"Of course," Dr. Shaw went on, "you can't allow people to go popping off into eternity if they've got any serious work to do.
But as she hasn't got any serious work ..."