1
A squat grey building of
only thirty-four stories. Over the main
entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in
a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous
room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer
beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin
light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure,
some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and
nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded
to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved
with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.
Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich
and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak
after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.
“And this,”
said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing Room.”
Brave New
World, p. 3 |