… Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly 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. High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. “Who are you pushing? Where do you think you’re going?”
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. 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.įrom the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them. 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 dolychocephalic male twins, respectively.
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