Level 7

The mere idea of getting out makes my heart beat faster. It even makes me forget the smell. One image expels the other one, just as though a fresh, earth-scented breeze from up there had really found its way down and blown away the persecuting stench.

That is all very pleasant, but thinking about that sort of thing will not do any good in the long run. The drug is too powerful. I might get to the stage where I could not prevent thoughts of escaping from entering my head. I might start to believe in the possibility of getting out, and go quite mad.

No, no fooling on Level 7. This is a serious place. No tricks, no jokes, no April fools. We are all wise down here, even on April 1.

Or are we? Perhaps we are April fools all round the year. We are deceiving each other. We are doing it all the time. X-107 is deceiving me and I am deceiving him. And the soft-voiced lady on the loudspeaker is deceiving both of us. We all pretend not to feel what we do feel—and know that we feel. We are doing it all the time.

We do not deceive just other people; we deceive ourselves. Each of us is making a perpetual April fool of himself, the biggest one imaginable. Each tells himself lies which he pretends to believe, though he knows they are lies.

Quite right: no April fools on Level 7. Level 7 is the place for all-the-year-round fools.

APRIL 2

Today I am in a better mood. I wonder why. I cannot find anything to explain it, but the fact remains that the depression I suffered yesterday and before that has lifted. I am not worried by that awful smell today. It has completely disappeared.

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.