Level 7

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 unscheduled 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.