Level 7

I saw his body dangling there, the unshaven face and the glazed half-mad eyes.

I saw him for a split second only, for I turned my head away quickly and walked back into my room, closing the door behind me. Again I had that chilly feeling, and I shivered as I had done when I saw the black screen.

The other two must have pushed the red button, for a minute later I heard footsteps outside the door and the murmur of voices. Then X-107 came back and quietly lay down on his bed. Another two minutes passed, and then the private loudspeaker sounded. We were instructed not to tell anybody what we had seen.

An hour later the general loudspeaker system announced that Push-Button Officer X-117 had died in the night. The speaker said something about ‘loyal service’ and the ‘strain’ which had been placed on his constitution by the ‘vital task’ he had performed during the recent offensive.

I suppose they are quite right to conceal the fact that this was suicide. Why depress people?

But why did he hang himself? I have been asking myself the question all day long. What was the trouble with him? He was rather a pleasant fellow before he became mentally unbalanced. I feel rather sorry for him.

When I saw P today it was all I could do to prevent myself telling her the true facts, particularly when she expressed her puzzlement at what the loudspeaker had said. While she had had X-117 under observation, she said, he had never given any sign of physical weakness.

I kept a check on my tongue, however, and we just discussed X-117 in a general way. She said I should not allow my fellow button-pusher’s death to depress me. It was the best thing that could have happened to him, she said, because he was quite the wrong person for life on Level 7. He must have been chosen by mistake.

While she was talking I heard again the words X-117 used yesterday, his last day alive. He had not accepted the inevitable. He had rebelled against it. He had not become adjusted to reality as it was. He was different. He was certainly not the right man for Level 7.

It is odd that I should feel sorrier for X-117 than for those thousands of millions killed in the war. I believe that if I had been told to push a button which would execute X-117, I could not have done it. Though without thinking twice about it I pushed the buttons which executed millions!

Executed? Am I a hangman? X-117 said we were hangmen. In a way, we were. Perhaps he was right and not P.

No, I still do not believe I could be a hangman. I do not enjoy contact with people who are going to die soon. I have no liking for the sight of life disappearing, bodies hanging. Like his.

But to push a button, to operate a ‘typewriter’—that is a very different thing. It is smooth, clean, mechanical.

That is where X-117 went wrong. For him it was the same thing. He could even talk about strangling P and me with his bare hands!

Maybe this inability to distinguish between killing with the bare hands and pushing a button was the source of his mental trouble.

JUNE 20

There is some alarming news from Level 2. A few days ago they broadcast that everyone was suffering from some sort of disease. The symptoms were nausea and vomiting, and severe diarrhoea. The fact the everybody had caught it at the same time seemed suspicious, but the symptoms must have disappeared because the matter was not mentioned again, the broadcasts reverting to their customary abuse of the government.

Today, though, they say the symptoms have come back and are even more distressing. People are emaciated and feverish. And similar reports are coming over the radio from the neutral countries. There too, the sickness appears to be general. In the middle of one broadcast the speaker himself broke off in mid-sentence, and we could hear him vomiting quite clearly. It was awful. Somebody else had to take over.

Radio reports from Level 2 started to come in again while I was writing that. I will try to jot down what the man says.

People are dying. “Like flies” (his very words!). He is shouting: “It’s your bloody radioactivity! You’ve poisoned us too!”

They are going over to a big hall, or something, in one of the shelters. Now I can distinctly hear groaning and vomiting. Nobody is saying anything—too weak, perhaps.

Broadcaster again. “Hundreds of people… lying on floor… no help at all… nobody capable of helping… some are vomiting… diarrhoea… horrible stench.”

He has stopped to cough and blow his nose.

He goes on: “Some seem to be dead already… many unconscious… perhaps dead too, nobody to check… makes no difference… everyone will die sooner or later… matter of hours… some perhaps a day or two… no difference…”

I missed something there, his voice suddenly grew very weak. He has turned away from the microphone to be sick or something. I can hear groans again, louder.

He says: “I can’t go on.”

That’s all.

No, he is trying to say something else. He has to speak very slowly.