Level 7

by Mordecai Roshwald

P seemed quite worried about my stomach trouble when we met again yesterday. This was perfectly natural in a newly-wedded woman, and it prompted me to ask her why she had not visited me in the hospital. She said she had been told no visitors were allowed. Apparently the rule is quite inflexible.

  I wonder why this should be. I suppose it is considered better to hide sick people away, not only for reasons of hygiene, but to preserve the morale of their healthy friends. It is always depressing to visit a person in the hospital, and if you do not see for yourself how ill a patient is you are more likely to assume that no news (or the vague information which doctors begrudgingly allow you) is good news.

  Incidentally P had a touch of indigestion herself, as might have been expected, but it was not enough to stop her working.

  I find her more pleasant now. In conversation her tongue is not so sharp. Indeed she talks less altogether.

  Our time of privacy is 16.15 to 17.00 hours each day—4.15 to 5.00 in the afternoon. We are lucky in this respect: some people get it at 4.15 a.m. On second thoughts, I suppose it would not make much difference. The working hours of many of the crew—myself included—are scheduled on a 24-hour basis, and down here ‘day’ and ‘night’ mean very little. Regular private meetings with P will enliven my daily routine, which is all to the good, not to mention the other benefits which marriage should bring with it—even on Level 7.

  The desire to discuss mythologies with R-747 has not returned. As a matter of fact, I have hardly spoken to her since I came out of the hospital. Yesterday and today I spent my time in the lounge chatting with P. And P actually tried to draw R-747 into the conversation. A strange metamorphosis in our relationship.

  MAY 13

  Today I have had an interesting talk with X-107 about marriage on Level 7.

  I was humming a tune, I think, and my obvious good spirits must have started a train of thought in my roommate’s head. “It seems to work all right even on Level 7,” he remarked.

  This rather cryptic statement got no reply and clearly needed elucidation. “The institution of marriage, I mean,” he went on. “You know, I had the gravest misgivings about it. It seemed to me that it should have been abolished altogether.”

  “Why so?” I asked. “What about the future of the human race? You wouldn’t like to see Level 7 die out in a generation, would you?”

  “Of course not,” X-107 said. “But monogamous marriage isn’t the only way of preserving the species. Free love would have done it just as well. What’s more, it would have been more convenient: there wouldn’t have been the problem of scheduling hours of privacy to fit in with working hours. Nobody pretends that marriage down here is anything more than a means of providing a future generation—there are no private households, no family life—so why preserve the old formalities?”

  I agreed that the arrangement was very conservative, but pointed out (as X-107 always used to do) that there must be a good reason for it. Perhaps it was to prevent jealousy, I suggested. That was a sentiment which could be terribly disruptive in the rather claustrophobic atmosphere of Level 7.

  X-107 thought about that for a moment or two, and then asked me whether I would feel jealous about my mate. I said no, I would not; but other people might. X-107 said he thought most other people on Level 7 would not either. “You’re probably quite the opposite of an exception,” he said. “I’d be surprised if an absence of jealous tendencies wasn’t one of the main things they looked for in the people they selected for this place.

  “Still,” he went on, “monogamous marriage seems to work all right down here, and so far they’ve had no difficulty in finding times when couples can be together in private, so I suppose things are best as they are. If free enterprise were the rule, there might be too much competition in the field; people would spend too much time thinking about it, and their work would suffer.”

  “Besides,” I added, “free enterprise and equality aren’t often found together. And equality is the basis of democracy, and democracy’s finest flower is Level 7.”

  I did not mean that very seriously, but X-107 nodded his head in solemn agreement. Level 7 retained its position as the best of all possible levels.

  MAY 14

  P seems to be almost in love with me. I wonder if she would feel jealous about me. I told her about my discussion with X-107 and she said she had credited him with more sense. I tried to defend him, and in the end she agreed to give him the benefit of the doubt. She ended by saying that he himself should get married. Then he would talk less nonsense.

  Marriages go on taking place at a steady rate. One sees more and more people at meal-times with the ‘m’ attached to their badges, and every day there are fresh announcements over the loudspeaker: engineers, doctors, nurses, food-supply officers, wastage officers, air-supply men, atomic energy officers, loudspeaker officers, psychologists, quite a number of reserve officers and many others have paired up. X-117’s room-mate, X-137, has married too. That leaves only two bachelors out of the four of us.

  The ‘Know Thy Level’ talks finished today. In the summing up of the series great stress was laid on the significance of our position on Level 7, the deepest and safest place of all.

  The reason for that privileged position is the function of Level 7. At the centre of everything is PBX Command, which is the offensive branch of our military power. “Attack,” the speaker explained, “is the best form of defence.” That is the reason why Level 7 is so deep in the earth: it can hit the enemy and devastate his country while all the time remaining out of his reach.

  What he said made me think afresh about my personal position on Level 7. It really is a pretty significant one. I push the buttons, and most of the others are down here to supply the necessities of life for me: to provide me with air, food, energy and so on, and to look after my physical and mental health.

  Of course, everybody down here is necessary. Without their services we push-button officers could not do a thing. And X-117’s illness has proved the importance of people like P, who provide nothing in the material sense but stand by in case anything goes wrong with our minds. Still, the knowledge that Level 7 centres round the push-button function, that it houses the Push-Button X Command, in fact, gives me a feeling of importance.

  There must still be the Command itself, naturally, whatever it may be. I have never noticed anybody wearing a badge with ‘C’ on it, nor have any ‘C’ marriages been announced. I wonder who and how many the commanders are.

  At the end of today’s talk the speaker announced a new series which is to start tomorrow: ‘Know Other Levels’. This may prove more interesting, for the ‘Know Thy Level’ series mostly confirmed and explained things we knew about already from daily experience, while the new talks may introduce us to worlds unknown.

  MAY 15

  The ‘Know Other Levels’ series has begun with the next level up and will work towards the surface. Today we were told about Level 6.

  Level 6 is for Push-Button Y Command. Our PBX buttons are for attack. The PBY buttons control the defensive branch of the country’s military power. Although PBY Command is in a sense less significant than ours—its actions cannot be so decisive—it requires a larger personnel and far more complicated machinery.

  The task of PBY Command is to intercept enemy rockets and destroy them before they reach their destinations. And since an attack may come as a surprise, it has to be on the watch all the time. So it collects, classifies and remembers innumerable details of aerial activity. There are huge electronic computers whose task it is to collate two kinds of information: flight schedules, which are sent to Level 6 from aircraft and rocket bases up and down the country; and details of actual flights obtained from radar reports. If all is as it should be, there are no actual flights which cannot be collated with the schedules already received. But if radar reports a flight which has not been scheduled, a computer singles it out at once as suspect. It feeds the necessary information into a second computer, which takes over the tracking of the u
nscheduled flying object and, on the basis of further radar data, accurately calculates its speed, altitude and direction of flight.

  If and when—and this need take no more than a few minutes—the suspect object is identified as an enemy missile, PBY Command takes its first positive action. One of our opposite numbers pushes the button which commands the area over which the enemy object is flying, and so releases ground-to-air interceptors. (There is no double control or additional supervision up there.) The interceptors, which are fitted with small atomic warheads, are radio-controlled by the tracking computer. The button-pusher only indicates the area of action, he does not aim the interceptors. But he can see whether they are successful, because he has a viewing screen, rather like ours, which shows him what is happening.

  I find all this very interesting, because it is so much more complicated than the workings of PBX Command. Our intercontinental rockets are all aimed in advance at their immobile strategic targets. All we have to do is press the buttons which send them on their predetermined way. But PBY Command first has to keep an eye on the countless flights which are going on all over the country, and then, when it has singled out a flight that should not be going on, must aim at a small, very rapidly moving target.

  Of course, it is the computers and other machines which do most of the work, but this does not mean that the staff of Level 6 can be as small as ours. There is so much more machinery to be looked after that they need a personnel of 2,000—four times the number on Level 7. And in spite of this, the speaker said today, many of the auxiliary services are worse manned than down here, and the crew do not enjoy quite the same degree of comfort, though their level is intended to be as self-sufficient as ours. The fact that Level 6 is only 3,000 feet underground, too, is because of the physical difficulty of constructing a deeper level big enough to house everything.

  I do not know whether it was to make us feel privileged and contented, or what, but the speaker kept saying, both by implication and by direct assertion, that Level 7 was more important than Level 6 as well as more comfortable. We were told—and I see no reason to doubt it—that the country relied far more on PBX Command, its offensive arm, than on the defensive PBY Command. This is because it is very doubtful whether the defence system could work quickly enough to deal with intercontinental missiles approaching us at the speed of thousands of miles an hour. Added to this, we do not know what gadgets the enemy’s missiles may be fitted with—to deflect or destroy any interceptors which manage to come near them. “Our own offensive missiles are equipped with devices against enemy interceptors,” we were told.

  The chances that we shall be able to destroy the majority of the attacking missiles outside our territory are very small. But even if we are incredibly lucky, and only ten per cent of the enemy rockets reach out country, we shall still be badly devastated. And even if many rockets out of this ten per cent do not hit their predetermined targets, the radioactive fall-out (for the atomic bombs will explode even if intercepted) may make the country uninhabitable for some time.

  For how long? I wondered. The loudspeaker did not say.

  MAY 16

  The talk about Level 6 and the PBY Command has aroused a lot of interest on our own level.

  People’s feelings seem to be ambivalent. On the one hand, we feel superior. Firstly, because we are inferior—deeper in the earth. Secondly, because our country relies mainly on the offensive branch. Thirdly, because we are a smaller group.

  On the other hand, though, we have to admit that the operations of Level 6 are more intricate and require greater skill. The PBY officers probably have higher technical qualifications, and in that sense they must be superior. So argues X-107, and he is probably right.

  We also feel both a liking and an enmity for Level 6. They are a branch of the military forces, entrusted, like ourselves, with the country’s safety—so we feel friendly towards them. But they are also a different branch of those forces—so there is a feeling of competition.

  Of course, all these feelings are really just speculations as to possible feelings. Actual feelings are rather difficult to have when one knows so little about their object. For the crew of Level 6 are 1,400 feet above our heads, and there is no communication between us.

  Or is there none? It seems to me there must be. If the enemy attacked, it would be PBY Command which would know about it first. They must have some way of telling us.

  This is an exciting idea: contact with outside. Or rather, with a more outside inside. But there is no point in guessing about that kind of thing when you have no information to go on. Perhaps today’s talk will say something about it.

  The talk was about Level 6 again, but communications were not mentioned. What we did learn was that they are not yet kept below ground all the time. They spend a fortnight down, and then they are replaced and spend a fortnight at a camp near the entrance to the underground before coming down again.

  This means that there must be at least 4,000 men and women trained for PBY Command, because there have to be as many people spending their two weeks above as there are manning the level.

  But it also means that the people on Level 6 can see daylight and….

  No, better not think about that. Anyway, the system has its snags. As X-107 pointed out to me, when war starts the people on Level 6 at that moment will stay there, and the other 2,000 will have to find refuge on a higher, less secure level, or even stay on the surface.

  The thought of that should make us feel superior again, I suppose, though the idea of spending two weeks down and two weeks up is most attractive. As far as I could gather from the talk, the Level 6 crew live more or less as surface creatures who come down at regular intervals to work as one might go off on a business trip. It has not been necessary for their social life below ground—marriage, for instance—to be organised as ours is, though presumably that will come if and when Level 6 is sealed off.

  X-107 has suggested that the life of the Level 6 crew is arranged in this way not simply for convenience: according to him, the half-up, half-down life is as necessary to them as it is out of the question for us. “We’re the most important military branch because our action is offensive,” he said, “and offensive action isn’t directly concerned with what’s going on in our country, so it isn’t necessary for us to keep in touch with the surface. More than that, contact of any kind with the world up there might upset us in our work by making us sentimental about the crust of the earth, which it may be our duty to lay waste. PBY Command, on the other hand, has the task of protecting the surface from attack, and the more the crew of Level 6 can see of the earth, the keener they’ll be to do their job well. Also there’s not so much point in sealing them off for security, because—as the talk said—it’s doubtful whether their operations will be very effective anyhow.”

  This argument seemed sound enough to me. There really are considerable differences between the two commands, even though the talks have tried to stress the links between Level 6 and ourselves. Today the speaker emphasised the fact that Levels 6 and 7 are the military nerve-centres of our country, and that all the other levels are for civilians only. In the functional sense, broadly speaking, we are one unit.

  This is the reason why the two levels were organised along such similar lines, we were told. And though Level 6 is 1,400 feet nearer the surface—for purely technical reasons—it is in the same area. In fact, it is directly above our heads, which makes us close together in the physical sense. (I think there must be some very close communication between the two levels. Otherwise why locate them in the same area?) Moreover, there is only one Level 6, as there is one Level 7. Other levels, the speaker told us, do not have this characteristic: they are dispersed in several units, the number of which varies from level to level in a way which will be explained to us in a later talk.

  This sounds interesting. I look forward to hearing what happens on the other five levels.

  MAY 17

  P does not understand why I am so interested in th
e ‘Know Other Levels’ talks. She seems to find them rather boring. I get the impression that even psychology has lost some of its fascination for her. Her main interest now is myself—as her husband.

  Perhaps I should not be surprised at this—it is the way women often behave. They can concentrate all their life around the life of somebody else, around one special person. As long as P has me, or thinks she has me, she does not mind anything else, is not interested in other levels, feels quite happy on Level 7.

  I wonder how she would react if the loudspeaker suddenly announced that we were all to go back up to the surface. Would it make a great difference to her?

  If P’s interest in psychological problems has waned, mine has grown. Maybe her influence has brought this about: perhaps she has transferred her professional interests to me and so somehow got them out of her own system. It may well be so, for we are together a great deal. Not only does she never miss—or allow me to miss—the daily meetings which we, as a married couple, are entitled to; but she also monopolises all my time in the lounge (not that I particularly want to talk to R-747 these days) and often finds ways of seeing me on other occasions.

  If I am not busy and she happens to be free too, she takes me into her psychology department, where we can talk. There we are, all by ourselves in a little room containing a very narrow couch with a chair behind it, used for psycho-analytical sessions. P makes me lie down and takes the seat behind me. She can watch me, while I look at the wall opposite me (which I do not mind). Just as if I were a patient. Except that she does all the talking and I only listen.

  Sometimes I do not even listen. I just muse. I have become so used to her chatter that it does not disturb my own train of thought.