Library Attack by Old Men
The Library Attack by Old Men is the event in which Alex, recently released from the Ludovico treatment and wandering the city in despair, enters the Public Biblio seeking a painless method of suicide, only to be recognized by the crystallography professor he and his droogs had assaulted two years earlier. The old man's cry of recognition ignites a spontaneous mob of elderly readers who surround and beat Alex, forcing him to beg for police intervention—a bitter inversion of his former role as aggressor and a stark demonstration of how his past violence returns to claim him now that he is physically unable to defend himself.
Recognition and Accusation
Alex enters the Public Biblio, a place he has not visited since he was about six years old, intending to consult a medical reference book for a painless way to end his life. He finds the reading room full of elderly men standing at newspaper stands or dozing at tables, and the atmosphere is stale with the smell of old age and poverty. After rejecting a medical book full of wound photographs that make him feel sick, he takes down a Bible, hoping for comfort as it had given him in prison, but finds only accounts of smiting and Jews cursing and tolchocking each other, which also makes him ill. A ragged old man opposite asks what is wrong, and Alex confesses he wants to snuff it. A nearby reader shushes him without looking up from a magazine full of geometrical drawings—and that sound triggers recognition. This reader is the crystallography professor from the opening of the novel. He looks up and declares loudly that he never forgets a shape, identifying Alex as the young swine who ruined the rare books on crystallography, beat him, kicked him, stripped him, tore out his false teeth, and laughed at his blood and moans. Alex protests that it was over two years ago and that he has been punished and cured, pointing to his picture in the papers, but the old man is not mollified.
The Mob Attack
The crystallography professor's accusation spreads through the reading room. An ex-soldier type declares that Alex's sort should be exterminated like noisome pests. The professor urges the others not to let him go, calling him a murderous young pig. Two or three doddering old men, about ninety years old apiece, grab Alex with their trembly hands, and the smell of old age and disease makes him sick. The professor begins dealing weak tolchocks to his face. Other old men hobble from the newspaper stands to join in, crying out to kill him, stamp on him, murder him, kick his teeth in. Alex realizes what is happening: it is old age having a go at youth. Some of them speak as if the assault had happened only yesterday, which for them, he understands, it had. A sea of runny, dirty old men presses in with feeble hands and horny claws, the professor in front dealing tolchock after tolchock. Alex dares not fight back, because the thought of violence triggers the sickness and pain conditioned into him by the Ludovico Technique, though the violence happening around him makes the sickness threaten to emerge anyway.
Alex Calls for the Police
An attendant, a youngish man, arrives and orders them to stop, threatening to phone the police. Alex, who never thought he would do so in his life, cries out for the attendant to do exactly that, to protect him from these old madmen. The attendant goes off to telephone. The old men continue their assault, panting heavily, and Alex lets himself be held, patient, with his eyes closed, feeling the feeble blows on his face. Then a particularly painful blow to his nose makes him decide to hell with it; he opens his eyes, struggles free, and runs crying to the hallway outside the reading room. The starry avengers pursue him, panting like dying men, their animal claws trembling to reach him. He is tripped and falls to the floor, where he is kicked. Then voices of young men cry out for them to stop, and Alex knows the police have arrived. The arrival of the police ends the attack, but it immediately leads to Alex's next ordeal: the officers who respond are his former enemy Billyboy and his former droog Dim, now serving as police, who take him into the country and beat him savagely.
