Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.” “But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time. “ Soma may make you lose a few years in time,” the doctor went on. “But in another we’re actually lengthening it.” The young man stared, uncomprehending. “But aren’t you shortening her life by giving her so much?” Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most conveniently out of the way), John raised objections. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. “One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed.
“Which will finish her off in a month or two,” the doctor confided to Bernard. She took as much as twenty grammes a day. Shaw at first demurred then let her have what she wanted. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you’d done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. So the best people were quite determined not to see Linda. Fat having lost her youth with bad teeth, and a blotched complexion, and that figure (Ford!)-you simply couldn’t look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively sick. Finally-and this was by far the strongest reason for people’s not wanting to see poor Linda-there was her appearance.
Moreover, she wasn’t a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else: so couldn’t have really quaint ideas. To say one was a mother-that was past a joke: it was an obscenity. AFTER the scene in the Fertilizing Room, all upper-caste London was wild to see this delicious creature who had fallen on his knees before the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning-or rather the ex-Director, for the poor man had resigned immediately afterwards and never set foot inside the Centre again-had flopped down and called him (the joke was almost too good to be true!) “my father.” Linda, on the contrary, cut no ice nobody had the smallest desire to see Linda.
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