Attack in the library

In the Public Biblio, Alex is recognized and attacked by the elderly professor he and his droogs assaulted years earlier, triggering a mob of old men who beat him while he is unable to fight back due to his conditioning.

Recognition and Confrontation

After leaving the Korova Milkbar, Alex wanders into the Public Biblio, a place he has not visited since he was about six years old. The reading room is filled with elderly men standing at newspaper stands or dozing at tables, and the air is thick with the smell of old age and poverty. Alex takes down a medical book but finds it full of images of wounds and diseases that make him feel sick, so he replaces it and picks up a Bible, hoping for comfort as it had given him in prison. But the Bible's accounts of smiting and Jews cursing and fighting each other also make him feel ill. A ragged old man opposite asks what is wrong, and Alex confesses he wants to end his life. Another reader, absorbed in a magazine full of geometrical drawings, shushes them. When this second man looks up, recognition strikes both of them: he is the professor whose books on crystallography Alex and his droogs had destroyed years before, whose false teeth they had crushed, and whose clothes they had torn off. The professor cries out that he never forgets a shape, and that he has the young swine now.

The Mob Attack

The professor rises to his feet and shouts to all the elderly men in the reading room that they have the poisonous young swine who ruined rare books on crystallography that can never be obtained again. He describes how Alex and his friends beat him, kicked him, stripped him, tore out his teeth, and laughed at his blood and moans. Alex protests that it was over two years ago, that he has been punished and learned his lesson, and that his picture is in the papers. An ex-soldier type declares that such youths should be exterminated like noisome pests. As Alex tries to leave, the crystallography professor calls for the others to stop him, and two or three doddering old men grab him with their trembling hands. The smell of old age and disease from these near-dead men makes Alex sick. The professor begins dealing weak blows to Alex's face, and other elderly men hobble from the newspaper stands to join in, shouting for him to be killed, stamped on, and kicked. Alex realizes it is old age having a go at youth. He dares not fight back because his conditioning makes any violent impulse trigger nausea and pain, though the violence happening around him makes the sickness threaten to overwhelm him.

Police Intervention

An attendant arrives and orders the men to stop, but no one listens. He says he will phone the police, and Alex, never thinking he would do so, cries out for the police to protect him from the old madmen. The attendant goes to call. The old men continue to hold Alex and land feeble blows on his face. When a particularly painful blow strikes his nose, Alex struggles free and runs to the hallway outside the reading room, but the elderly avengers pursue him, panting like dying men. He is tripped and falls to the floor, where he is kicked. Then voices of young men shout for the attack to stop, and Alex knows the police have arrived.