Level 7

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 admit 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.