The children started, screamed their faces were distorted with terror. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.

The Director waited until all were happily busy. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. “It might almost have been done on purpose.” From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. “Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.” They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.

Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out-a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.

In silence the nurses obeyed his command. The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor.

Sparknotes brave new world chapter 17