Their attention was now focused on the black cash-box, which the young man had placed on the table, and was now in process of unlocking. A murmur of satisfaction went up from the expectant twins.
The voice was that of a jaunty young Alpha, who had entered carrying a black iron cash-box. Hurry up there." A door had been opened, a table and chair carried into the vestibule. "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world …" " soma distribution!" shouted a loud voice. "How many goodly creatures are there here!" The singing words mocked him derisively. He halted and, with bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the midst of which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. … Like maggots they had swarmed defillingly over the mystery of Linda's death. He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw–knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Their words and, in his ribs, the sharp nudging of elbows, broke through his unawareness. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors, two faces, one a hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked bird-mask, stubbly with two days' beard, turned angrily towards him. "Who are you pushing? Where do you think you're going?" High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. But his mind was elsewhere–with death, with his grief, and his remorse mechanically, without consciousness of what he was doing, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd. From the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them.
At six, when their working day was over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of the Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar with their soma ration. THE menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying consisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas divided into two Bokanovsky Groups of eighty-four red headed female and seventy-eight dark dolichocephalic male twins, respectively.
0 kommentar(er)
