“Now you’re talking like a child,” he replied. “PBX Command had to be secured—secured absolutely—against surprise attack, an attack which might have hit us in your secluded desert hide-out just as fatally as in the centre of a metropolitan area. If it had, our country would have been knocked out without being able to fire back a single shot. Down here on Level 7 we’re safe from surprises like that. Even if the enemy destroys our country in a surprise attack, we—you and I—can retaliate and destroy his country.”
“Still,” I tried to argue, “even if PBX Command had to be located on Level 7, there was surely no need to imprison us here! Why can’t we be relieved by other crews and go on leave every now and then?”
“That would be very dangerous,” X-107 answered. “If you were able to get out, you might come back with a destructive weapon, or a destructive idea, which could put PBX Command out of action. Contact with the outside world could mean contact with spies, with enemies, with pacifists. The government would be foolish to take such a risk.”
“So we had to be imprisoned for life in order to safeguard our country’s powers of retaliation?”
“Exactly,” he replied. “And to ensure its survival too: even if a surprise attack annihilates the population up above, down here we will go on living—after taking vengeance, of course.”
I asked: “But what happens if there is no war?”
“Well,” came the unperturbed answer of my room-mate, “our job is to be ready at all times to pull the trigger—to push the button. If no command to do so comes, we shall have served our country just the same; for if our enemy refrains from attacking us, it will only be because he knows how well prepared and unassailable we are down here on Level 7. So, on Level 7 we have to stay.”
I could find no flaw in his argument. Our imprisonment on Level 7 is a necessity.
MARCH 26
My closer contact with X-107 is a help to me. We talk to each other about various things and this, sometimes, makes me forget my situation. Another thing that helps is the lounge which has been opened for everybody on Level 7.
The announcement came over the loudspeaker—this is the only way announcements and orders are made known—yesterday at noon. As the lounge is very small, like most rooms here, and the demand is expected to be considerable, each person has been allotted certain hours when he may use it. I say ‘certain hours’, but that is misleading. Half an hour each day. That is my ration, anyway.
The room is small for a lounge—about fifteen feet by twenty. It asserts its identity, though, by having its name painted bold and clear on the door, one of the many doors in the long wall of the dining-room. When I walked in, there were already some ten or fifteen people there, none of whom I remembered seeing before.
Some of them were women. They all seemed quite nice and looked young, strong and healthy, though I found none of them specially attractive. I went up to one who was standing by herself at the time, and introduced myself. She was a nurse, N-527.
What I liked about her was her calmness. I do not know how she managed it, but she seemed even more calm and relaxed than X-107. Perhaps women are more self-sufficient than men (provided they have men) and less affected by environment. If so I envy them—for the first time in my life.
After a while another man approached us, introducing himself as E-647, ‘E’ standing for Electrical Engineer. He was behaving rather nervously, and soon had me on edge too. I decided to look for other company and leave him to the nurse. I had the impression he was grateful for that.
For a moment I stood alone. Then another woman came up to me, possibly a little older than the nurse, though not older twenty-five. I learnt that she was a psychologist, P-867. She was another calm person, but her calmness seemed of a different kind—a bit artificial, as if she were proud of the achievement—rather than the calmness of a naturally serene disposition. As we talked this got on my nerves.
The first thing she said was, how did I feel? I did not feel inclined to confide in a person I had only just met. I evaded the question: said I was very busy and had had no time to analyse my feelings. She brushed this aside and promptly suggested that I was either deliberately lying or else trying to escape from reality. In either case, she maintained, my attitude was not healthy: “Face reality and talk to other people about your feelings. That’s the best way to get adjusted.”
Trying to escape her professional zeal, which made me feel like a laboratory guinea-pig, I asked her about her own feelings. “Oh,” she said, “I feel fine.” And she went on to explain why she felt so well. The experience of living on Level 7 was most interesting from the psychological point of view. She would have loved to undertake a piece of psychological research into the response of Level 7’s crew to their new surroundings. (So I was a guinea-pig!) It would make a fascinating article if only she could publish the results of her research, which she obviously could not do on Level 7.
At that point I interrupted her: “So you too think in terms of ‘if’?” She did not understand. I explained that I had been thinking in terms of ‘if’: if I had not been chosen for Level 7, if it were possible to go back up on leave, if I had the disposition of a woman….
“You mustn’t think in those terms,” she protested. “That’s escapism. You must find here and now what you can find here and now.” It sounded like some kind of slogan. “Don’t look backwards and don’t think hypothetically. There’s a lot of meaning in our life here. You have a job to do, a country to defend. You have human company here—even female company.” And she suddenly giggled. “What more can a man want, tell me that?”
I answered, almost inaudibly: “Sunshine.”
She remained quiet for a long while and then vigorously shook her head: “No. Sunshine can’t in itself be a real need. I’ve studied quite a few psychological systems, and not one of them ever regarded the quest for sunshine as a basic motivation of human beings, or as a possible foundation for neurosis. Definitely not. There must be some other reason for your state of mind. Sunshine is just a symbol. What lies behind that is the real cause.”
At that moment the loudspeaker announced that our time in the lounge was up. As we parted outside the door she remarked: “You never know—one day you may need psychological treatment. I’ll be happy to help you.” At this she giggled again.
MARCH 27
I am trying to divert myself by learning what I can about the technical arrangements on Level 7. In their way they are pretty remarkable. This is a very small world, but it seems to be quite self-sufficient. Although it lies so deep underground it has its own supply of energy, food and all the other essential commodities needed by its crew. We might be on a ship, equipped for an endless voyage.
For one thing, we shall never run out of fuel. Everything here works by electricity from dynamos powered by an atomic reactor which can supply all the energy we want for a thousand years. There is nothing new in this principle, but when you think of all the gadgets which are using up electricity twenty-four hours a day down here you appreciate how impossible life would be without an atomic reactor.
The problem of storing nourishment must have been more complicated; but at dinner today somebody provided some interesting information about that. (People have started to be more talkative lately.) He said—and he appeared to know what he was talking about—that dehydrated food in enormous quantities is stored in a huge deep-freeze. At each meal the necessary amount is automatically taken out of the freeze, warmed, mixed with water and served on our plates. Being dehydrated, it takes up very little space. Even so, the storage of enough to feed 500 people for 500 years is no simple matter.