"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 diminished 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 disc 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."These Atlantic services-they're really scandalously unpunctual."
He took his foot off the accelerator.The humming of the screws overhead dropped an octave and a half,back through wasp and hornet to bumble-bee,to cockchafer,to stag-beetle.The upward rush of the machine slackened off;a moment later they were hanging motionless in the air.Henry pushed at a lever;there was a click.Slowly at first,then faster and faster,till it was a circular mist before their eyes,the propeller in front of them began to revolve.The wind of a horizontal speed whistled ever more shrilly in the stays.Henry kept his eye on the revolution-counter;when the needle touched the twelve hundred mark,he threw the helicopter screws out of gear.The machine had enough forward momentum to be able to fly on its planes.
Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet.They were flying over the six kilometre zone of parkland that separated Central London from its first ring of satellite suburbs.The green was maggoty with fore-shortened life.Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees.Near Shepherd's Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing Riemann-surface tennis.A double row of Escalator Fives Courts lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden.In the Ealing stadium 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.
The buildings of the Hounslow Feely Studio covered seven and a half hectares.Near them a black and khaki army of labourers was busy revitrifying the surface of the Great West Road.One of the huge travelling crucibles was being tapped as they flew over.The molten stone poured out in a stream of dazzling incandescence across the road;the asbestos rollers came and went;at the tail of an insulated watering-cart the steam rose in white clouds.
At Brentford the Television Corporation's factory was like a small town.
"They must be changing the shift,"said Lenina.
Like aphides and ants,the leaf-green Gamma girls,the black Semi-Morons swarmed round the entrances,or stood in queues to take their places in the monorail tramcars.Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went among the crowd.The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and departure of helicopters.
"My word,"said Lenina,"I'm glad I'm not a Gamma."
Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf.
2
With eyes for the most part downcast and,if ever they lighted on a fellow creature,at once and furtively averted,Bernard hastened across the roof.He was like a man pursued,but pursued by enemies he does not wish to see,lest they should seem more hostile even than he had supposed,and he himself be made to feel guiltier and even more helplessly alone.
"That horrible Benito Hoover!"And yet the man had meant well enough.Which only made it,in a way,much worse.Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.Even Lenina was making him suffer.He remembered those weeks of timid indecision,during which he had looked and longed and despaired of ever having the courage to ask her.Dared he face the risk of being humiliated by a contemptuous refusal?But if she were to say yes,what rapture!Well,now she had said it and he was still wretched-wretched that she should have thought it such a perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf,that she should have trotted away to join Henry Foster,that she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public.Wretched,in a word,because she had behaved as any healthy virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other,abnormal extraordinary way.