1984 - Planet eBook

proles applied to rocket bombs. Winston promptly flunghimself on his face. The proles were nearly always rightwhen they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemedto possess some kind of instinct which told them severalseconds in advance when a rocket was coming, althoughthe rockets supposedly travelled faster than sound. Winstonclasped his forearms above his head. There was a roarthat seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of lightobjects pattered on to his back. When he stood up he foundthat he was covered with fragments of glass from the nearestwindow.He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group ofhouses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smokehung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in whicha crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was alittle pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, andin the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When hegot up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at thewrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completelywhitened as to resemble a plaster cast.He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoidthe crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Withinthree or four minutes he was out of the area which thebomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of thestreets was going on as though nothing had happened. Itwas nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which theproles frequented (’pubs’, they called them) were chokedwith customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlesslyopening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine,