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

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      Henry Foster was already seated in the cockpit of his machine, waiting, when Lenina arrived.

      “Four minutes late,” was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He started the engines. The machine shot vertically into the air. The speedometer showed that they were rising at the best part of two kilometres a minute. London diminished beneath them. The huge table-topped buildings[22] were no more, in a few seconds, than a bed of geometrical mushrooms sprouting from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them, a taller fungus, the Charing-T Tower, lifted towards the sky.

      Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet. They were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that separated Central London from its first ring of suburbs. Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees. Below, a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress.

      “What a hideous colour khaki is,” remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopaedic prejudices of her caste. “I’m glad I’m not a Delta or a Gamma.”

      Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf.

      Bernard has tened across the roof.

      Lenina was making him suffer. He remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had no courage to ask her. Dared he face the risk of being humiliated? But if she were to say yes! Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched-wretched that she went to join Henry Foster, that she found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public. Wretched because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl would have.

      He opened the door of his lock-up and called to a lounging couple of Delta-Minus attendants to come and push his machine out on to the roof. The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky Group, and the men were twins, identically small, black and hideous. For whatever the cause Bernard’s physique was hardly better than that of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was too slender. Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him of this.

      Slackly, it seemed to him, and with reluctance, the twin attendants wheeled his plane out on the roof.

      “Hurry up!” said Bernard irritably. One of them glanced at him. “Hurry up!” he shouted more loudly, and there was an ugly rasp in his voice.

      He climbed into the plane and, a minute later, was flying southwards, towards the river.

      The various Bureau of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street. In the basement and on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great London newspapers – 777e Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureau of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively-twenty-two floors of them. Above were the search laboratories and the Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers rooms. The top eighteen floors were occupied the College of Emotional Engineering.

      Bernard landed on the roof of Propaganda House and stepped out.

      “Ring down to Mr. Helmholtz Watson,” he ordered the Gamma-Plus porter, “and tell him that Mr. Bernard Marx is waiting for him on the roof.”

      He sat down and lit a cigarette.