Page 41 - BraveNewWorld

IDPH 41

of the white stockings, the sunburnt knees vivaciously bending and unbending
again, again, and the softer rolling of those well-fitted corduroy shorts beneath
the bottle green jacket. His face wore an expression of pain.
“I should say she was pretty,” said a loud and cheery voice just behind him.
Bernard started and looked around. The chubby red face of Benito Hoover was
beaming down at him-beaming with manifest cordiality. Benito was notori-
ously good-natured. People said of him that he could have got through life
without ever touching soma. The malice and bad tempers from which other
people had to take holidays never afflicted him. Reality for Benito was always
sunny.
“Pneumatic too. And how!” Then, in another tone: “But, I say,” he went on,
“you do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.” Diving into his right-
hand trouser-pocket, Benito produced a phial. “One cubic centimetre cures ten
gloomy. But, I say!”
Bernard had suddenly turned and rushed away.
Benito stared after him. “What can be the matter with the fellow?” he won-
dered, and, shaking his head, decided that the story about the alcohol having
been put into the poor chap’s blood-surrogate must be true. “Touched his brain,
I suppose.”
He put away the soma bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone chewing-
gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the han-
gars, ruminating.
Henry Foster had had his machine wheeled out of its lock-up and, when Lenina
arrived, was already seated in the cockpit, waiting.
“Four minutes late,” was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He
started the engines and threw the helicopter screws into gear. The machine
shot vertically into the air. Henry accelerated; the humming of the propeller
shrilled from hornet to wasp, from wasp to mosquito; the speedometer showed
that they were rising at the best part of two kilometres a minute. London di-
minished beneath them. The huge table-topped buildings 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, thin- stalked, a taller, slenderer fungus,
the Charing-T Tower lifted towards the sky a disk of shining concrete.
Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lolled on the blue
air above their heads. Out of one of them suddenly dropped a small scarlet
insect, buzzing as it fell.

“There’s the Red Rocket,” said Henry, “just come in from New York.” Looking
at his watch. “Seven minutes behind time,” he added, and shook his head.

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