О дивный новый мир / Brave New World. 4 уровень. Олдос Хаксли

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СКАЧАТЬ said Mustapha Mond. “Has any of you ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?”

      The question was answered by a negative silence.

      “Has any of you ever had to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fulfillment[20]?”

      “Well,” began one of the boys, and hesitated.

      “Speak up,” said the D.H.C.

      “I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.”

      “And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?”

      “Horrible!”

      “Horrible; precisely,” said the Controller.

      “Talking about her as though she is a bit of meat.” Bernard ground his teeth. “Have her here, have her there… She said she’d think it over, she said she’d give me an answer this week. Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford.” He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face-again and again.

      “Yes, I really do advise you to try her,” Henry Foster was saying.

      “Take Ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.”

      “He’s so ugly!” said Fanny.

      “But I rather like his looks.”

      “And then so small.” Fanny made a grimace.

      “I think that’s rather sweet,” said Lenina.

      Fanny was shocked. “They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle-thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That’s why he’s so stunted.”

      “What nonsense!” Lenina was indignant.

      “Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable.”

      “You’re welcome, I assure you. You’re welcome.”

      Henry Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder. “Everyone belongs to everyone else, after all.”

      One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopaedia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

      “Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy.”

      “Well, all I can say is that I’m going to accept his invitation.”

      Bernard hated them, hated them. But they were two, they were large, they were strong.

      “The Nine Years’ War began in A.F. 141.”

      “Not even if it were true about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate.”

      “Phosgene, chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, diphenylcyanarsine, trichlormethyl, chloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. Not to mention hydrocyanic acid.”

      “Which I simply don’t believe,” Lenina concluded.

      “The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order.”

      “Because I do want to see a Savage Reservation.”

      CH₃C₆H₂(NO₂)₃+Hg(CNO)₂=well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums!

      “You’re hopeless, Lenina, I give up.”

      “The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious.”

      Back turned to back, Fanny and Lenina continued their changing in silence.

      “The Nine Years’ War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and…”

      “Fanny Crowne’s a nice girl too,” said the Assistant Predestinator.

      In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. “I do love flying,” they whispered, “I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love…”

      “Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force.”

      “Not nearly so as Lenina. Oh, not nearly.”

      “But old clothes are beastly,” continued the whisper. “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending[21], ending is better than mending, ending is better…”

      “Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption.”

      “There, I’m ready,” said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless. “Let’s make peace, Fanny, darling.”

      “Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result…”

      “Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches…”

      “One of these days,” said Fanny, “you’ll get into trouble.”

      “Objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature.”

      “I do love flying. I do love flying.”

      “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

      “Do I look all right?” Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.

      “Eight hundred people were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green.”

      “Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending.”

      Green corduroy shorts and white stockings turned down below the knee.

      “Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide.”

      A green-and-white СКАЧАТЬ