Level 7

by Mordecai Roshwald

  Perhaps the explanation is simply that I had reached the lowest point of my depression, the point where one either starts to recover or else goes completely to pieces. In my case it was recovery: I started back up from a sort of mental Level 7, and now my (still strictly mental) sky is clearing.

  That reminds me: yesterday somebody explained to me how our supply of fresh air works, and that may have helped to blow the stench out of my thoughts.

  I met this man, AS-127 (‘AS’ for Air Supply), in the lounge yesterday evening. As soon as I learnt that it was his job to provide the fresh air down here I button-holed him and got him to tell me all about it. I do not know why it seemed so important at that moment, unless I had at the back of my mind the notion that his explanation might clear my head of its imaginary bad air.

  He made the whole business sound deceptively simple—though I suppose the basic principle is simple enough really. The problem which faced the scientists was this: how to provide a supply of clean air which was not drawn from the surface of the earth. To pump air down from above would have been easy, but most dangerous: it would have meant using filters to clean the air of radioactivity—unreliable things even if a bomb did not drop close enough to damage them by blast or heat.

  Happily, they found a way to make us independent of air from above by imitating nature on a small scale. During the day plants on the earth turn the carbon dioxide exhaled by human beings and other creatures back into oxygen. The scientists have arranged for this to happen down here too.

  “It was that part,” said AS-127, “the application of the principle, which was so difficult. Think of the conditions which plants normally experience: seasons, day and night, sunshine, rain, soil rich in the chemicals they need for growth—all of which simply don’t exist on Level 7. So the scientists had to grow them in water with the necessary ingredients added and the temperature carefully controlled, and—most important—to provide them with artificial sunlight. Extremely complicated, but they managed it. They also found a way of growing a large number of plants in very limited space.”

  “But I’ve never seen a plant down here,” I said, which made AS-127 laugh.

  “I’m not surprised,” he replied. “You don’t suppose we grow them all round the place, do you? They’re much too precious. All the plants are concentrated in one special place, and as carefully tended as the eternal flame of an old temple. Nobody may go in there except myself and the other AS officers; but you share the benefit of it through the ventilation pipes.”

  I could not blame him for sounding rather self-satisfied. As one of the priests in charge of the sacred air-supplying plants he had something to be proud of. His work was of vital importance all the time, and I must admit I felt a twinge of envy. He did not have to sit waiting, day after day, for the order which would justify his existence. But I also felt curiously reassured by what he had told me. I think it was because the system seemed, for all its technical complications, so close to nature. It is good to know that the air we breathe is not stored in jars or cleaned with chemicals.

  Another thing has a soothing effect on me: music. I discovered this last night. I had turned on one of the two continuous programmes before from time to time, but only in an attack of nervous fidgets, and usually I switched if off after a few moments. Last night, however, X-107 spent a long time listening to the classical tape, under the impression that I was asleep. I lay awake with my eyes closed, letting the sound flow around me, and by and by I drifted into a state of utter tranquility in which all my senses except hearing died away and I was aware of nothing but the music. This morning I listened to the music again, to see if the experience would repeat itself, and, sure enough, it did.

  Perhaps the effect is like that of a narcotic. But the drug is not a dangerous one, like dreaming about going up to the surface. Music is a sedative without after-effects—as far as I can tell at the moment, anyway. I shall try to make good use of it from now on, whenever it is needed.

  One more good thing about this drug is that it does not run short. The addict can take a dose whenever he feels like it by simply switching on the everlasting programme. It does seem to be lasting for ever, too. People who have been listening persistently since the first day say that so far not a single tune has been repeated. I wonder how long those tapes are.

  APRIL 3

  This is really funny. Yesterday I wondered how long the music tapes were. Today, at dinner, a rumour was going round that the tapes of the first day were being repeated.

  Some music fans swore they heard Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ on March 21, and yesterday they heard it again. Listeners to the programme of light music were saying the same thing, though I forget what tunes they said had come round for the second time.

  So the music tapes are twelve days long. This is pretty long, one must admit, but still it is disappointing. At dinner everybody seemed a little saddened by the discovery, not only the music fans. It made me sad too. I wonder why.

  I have never been a great music-lover. There are a couple of dozen classical pieces I enjoy listening to, certainly; but I have never had much interest in new stuff—either really new music, or just new to me. What I had heard of the selection on the tape was quite to my taste, and as far as I was concerned the amount of music on a twelve-day tape was plenty.

  And yet the discovery that the tape was only twelve days long did give me a sharp pang of regret. And it would not have made any difference if the time had been longer: if the tape had run for a month, or a year, and then somebody had told me that it had just started at the beginning again, it would have given me the same sensation. It was the fact that the tape was limited that saddened me.

  I wanted something, just something, on Level 7 to be unlimited. I suppose it is only human to crave things which are not limited as humans are. Perhaps this is one reason why people—up there—enjoy breathing fresh air: there is such an inexhaustible lot of it. For the same reason they like looking out over the ocean, which they know goes on beyond the visible horizon; or travelling across the water to places they have never seen before; or standing where they are and looking up at the night sky.

  To us on Level 7—I think this was everybody’s sensation today—the seemingly unending stream of music held the last surviving suggestion of boundlessness, of infinity. Everything else was calculated and cut down to suit our needs. Space was limited, and the smallness of the rooms emphasized the limitations of our existence. The meals were the very opposite of infinite in their variety. The company was limited. Even the atomic energy supply was limited: enough for a thousand years it might be, but still we knew it had a limit.

  Only the tape seemed to have no ending. It was the sea and the sky. It was the green jungle waiting for our exploring feet. Though our common sense told us this was ridiculous, it was immortality.

  It was the tape of life—real life, not cave-existence. It added some colour to our grey days, and shone into the gloom of our despair as if a sunbeam from up there had broken all the rules and strayed down into Level 7. But it appears that the tape is only twelve days long.

  APRIL 4

  No doubt about it now: both music tapes are twelve days long. They are repeating themselves, and if we feel inclined we can start to make exact schedules of what we shall be hearing in twelve days, a fortnight, a month, or ten years. All we have to do is to mark each day on a calendar what tune is played at what hour, and then mark the same tune at the same time twelve days ahead and twenty-four days ahead and thirty-six days and so on as long as the calendar lasts. What a horrible idea.

  Nobody has started to make schedules yet, as far as I know. But people have been talking about the tapes a great deal for the last twenty-four hours. Even X-107 has been a bit depressed by this business. He does not say so, but I can sense it. He seems to have lost his enthusiasm for the music, and if I switch on the tape he asks me if I would mind turning it off. The music must have meant more to him than to me.

  Even so, I cannot get him to adm
it that he resents the limited supply of music. To him Level 7 is still the best of all possible worlds. When I suggested that they could at least have arranged for a tape that would run for a man’s lifetime, so that he might never know when it came to an end and started again, X-107 retorted that this was absurd.

  “Level 7,” he said, “is limited, very limited, in space. You can see that for yourself. There’s no room for luxuries. Think of the difficulty of providing the basic necessities for five hundred people to live down here for half a millennium: enough food, supplies and energy to make us a completely self-sufficient community over four thousand feet underground—when until recently sub-continents found it hard enough to be self-sufficient on the surface of the globe. To achieve all this is nothing less than a miracle of human ingenuity and scientific progress.”

  “You make me feel grateful,” I remarked sarcastically, “that we have recorded music at all.”

  “And so you should,” replied X-107. “They made room down here for a lounge. You don’t expect a concert hall as well, do you?”

  “All right, but what about books?” I said. “Sometimes I wish I had something to read besides my own diary. I suppose you’ll say I should be grateful for the paper I write on.”

  “Would you rather starve in a library?”

  At that I gave up the argument. It was clear that X-107 would never be convinced by my point of view, because he would never allow himself to be convinced: it was necessary for him to believe in the inevitability of the arrangements on Level 7, because only in that way could he console himself for their disadvantages.

  So because there is limited space on Level 7 there is no room for a very long music-tape; and if there is no room for a long tape there is no room for the idea of infinity. Better forget it.

  APRIL 5

  While I had a shower today I was thinking of the problem of space on Level 7, and it struck me how odd it was that the planners should think it necessary to give X-107 and me a bathroom to ourselves. Surely all four PBX officers could have shared one bathroom. If it came to that, ten men could use the same bathroom without getting in each other’s way much.

  Half an hour later I met P-867 in the lounge again, and as usual she cornered me and started talking. By an odd coincidence—or maybe it was because I looked fresh and smelled of soap—she complained that she could not take a shower today. I asked her why not, and she explained that they had only one shower per fifty women. Each of them could take a shower once in two and a half days at a fixed hour, and missing one’s hour meant going without for another two and a half days. And she had missed her turn last time. Even the toilet, she mentioned incidentally, had to be shared by twenty women.

  This was very strange, I said, and pointed out to her (not without feeling rather superior) that we PBX officers had one bathroom between two. I was more surprised than ever at the degree of comfort we enjoyed.

  Not so P-867, who had a ready explanation for it all. “The type of man selected for PBX operations,” she said, “would have a compulsion to clean himself frequently. For men like you and your fellow-officers, to be deprived of the comfort of a well-equipped and ever-available bathroom would not be just an inconvenience, but a serious disturbance. You might develop neurotic symptoms and goodness knows what else! So it’s perfectly reasonable the way it is.”

  It occurred to me that I did like to wash my hands often, though I had never thought of it in terms of psychological compulsion. It seemed simply a hygienic habit. Still, her explanation made me feel rather uneasy—as her remarks usually did—and to hide my confusion I said something about the principle of equality and about chivalry towards women. On both these grounds one could argue that P-867 and the others were entitled to as much comfort as we PBX officers enjoyed.

  She said this was absolute nonsense. “That old prejudice, chivalry, is completely out of date in an atomic era,” she asserted, adding with a laugh: “Next thing, you’ll want to fight rockets on horseback and wearing armour.” And as for equality, this was a principle which had no place on Level 7. I was doing a different job from hers, and I had been selected for this job because I myself was different in my emotional setup. The facilities which I enjoyed were not a privilege, but were necessary if I was to do my job efficiently, and that was all there was to it.

  “But what about your job?” I asked. “Doesn’t your comfort make any difference?”

  “Not as much,” she answered. “Take this washing business: a psychologist would get rid of that compulsion in himself—if he ever had it—long before he finished his training. I find our overcrowded bathroom a nuisance, of course, but it wouldn’t make me neurotic even if I couldn’t wash for a month.” And she giggled.

  That remark struck me as most unpleasant, and for a moment I could not help feeling physically repelled by her. It occurred to me that if she were a perfect mistress of her science she would have been more wary of telling me about her disregard for hygiene—if she cared what I thought of her, as she seemed to.

  APRIL 6

  Earlier today the loudspeaker announced that a new programme will be inaugurated on Level 7: a series of live talks entitled ‘Know Thy Level’. The half-hour talks, to be given daily, will cover various aspects of life on Level 7.

  This announcement has aroused a fair amount of interest. People down here have begun to look around them and learn about their environment, if only in a despairing attempt to adjust themselves to something they instinctively dislike. The new talks will be instructive, besides relieving the monotony.

  People are especially curious about the fact that these will be live talks and not tape-recorded ones. There is such a lot of automation down here that one comes to assume that anything like a series of talks will have been canned long in advance, to be served up when and as often as required. That this is not the case is some consolation for the twelve-day limit of the music tapes, if one can judge by the fact that some of the people who took that business hardest have been discussing the new programme most enthusiastically. X-107 thinks the talks will be very interesting: “We’ve got to know the world we live in, haven’t we?” he remarked just now.

  I wonder if this programme may not have been specially arranged to counteract the disappointment felt over the music tapes. It is in their interest not to let us get too depressed.

  Perhaps not. It could equally as well be that the programme was planned from the start, but not put out until we had had time to get adjusted to the new conditions. In the first few days down here most people would have been brooding too much to pay any attention to a series of lectures; but now that the initial shock has passed the talks may consolidate whatever adjustment we have been able to make.

  It must be X-107’s influence which makes me puzzle about it like this. Through my discussions with him I seem to have acquired his habit of analysing every event and arrangement and weighing various arguments and alternatives. To begin with I took one side and X-107 took another, but these days it seems that I can do without him: I carry on the dialogues with myself, inventing arguments both for and against any given theory. I suppose this must mean that I am becoming more self-sufficient. A self-sufficient citizen of the self-sufficient world of Level 7.

  Anyway, we shall soon learn all about the arrangements on Level 7. We shall understand the instructions which at present we just blindly carry out. So far we have been given commands—dehydrated mental food; now we shall be given the reasons for the commands—a real juicy meal. At least, I hope so.

  The first programme is due any time now, and I shall have to break off writing this to listen to it. Here comes the announcement: the first talk in the new ‘Know Thy Level’ series, ‘Communications on Level 7’.

  The talk is over. It was delivered in a clear and lively manner—by a woman, but not one of those who usually make announcements through the loudspeaker. A rather deep contralto voice. I would like to hear her sing.

  The talk itself contained little that I did not know before.
It explained the elaborate communications system on Level 7.

  There was first the ‘general’ loudspeaker system whose announcements were heard everywhere—in working-rooms, in private rooms, in the lounge, in bathrooms and so on. Then there was the ‘functional’ system which transmitted instructions to a specific branch of the crew—the psychologists, say, or the PBX officers. Lastly there was the ‘private’ system which occasionally reacted to the problems of individual men and women. The three systems worked interdependently over the same set of speakers, and if it happened that two or more systems were competing for the use of the loudspeaker at the same time, the one which had priority would automatically cut out the others. In order of priority the functional system always came first, the general second and the private last.

  The crew had means of communicating with the command as well. One had only to press one of the special red buttons (evidently connected to microphones) and one’s voice would be received by the communications centre and there, as at a telephone exchange, be connected to the appropriate authority, according to the nature of the message. But this system was to be used only in cases of real emergency: sickness, malfunctioning of installations, and things like that. (The speaker made no mention of hidden microphones operating without the button, such as the one X-107 and I detected in our room the other day. Perhaps they are only installed in PBX officers’ rooms.)

  I had noticed the red buttons around before, of course, with their instructions: “In case of emergency press and speak.” But I have never used one so far. The only times I have felt like doing so were when I wanted to shout: “Let me out of here.”

  The talk was restricted to Level 7’s internal communications. There was no mention of contact between Level 7 and the outside world, though this must exist or we should never know when to push the buttons or anything else. Information on that topic would have been fascinating, because it would have been a link with all we had left behind up there. Which is probably why it was not included in the talk: they do not want anything to remind us of life on the surface; we must get adjusted to life 4,400 feet down. So, no talk of any world outside our world.