![]() ![]() But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. “Bokanovsky’s Process,” repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks. Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried il- legibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction- “the operation undergone vo- luntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months’ salary” continued with some account of the tech- nique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially war- med slides of the microscopes how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa-at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled while the Gammas, Del- tas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky’s Process. Full blood heat sterilizes.” Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs. Kept,” he explained, “at blood heat whereas the male gametes,” and here he opened another door, “they have to be kept at thirty- five instead of thirty-seven. “These,” he waved his hand, “are the incubators.” And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. “I shall begin at the beginning,” said the D.H.C. And anyhow the question didn’t arise in this year of stability, A. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebo- ok. “To-morrow,” he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, “you’ll be settling down to serious work. Not philosophers but fretsawyersĪnd stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virture and happiness generalities are intellectually necessary evils. ![]() For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently- though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. “Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. “And this,” said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing Room.”īent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Di- rector of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely bre- athing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. 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. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. ![]() 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. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABI- LITY. A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |