Level 7

As it turned out, this was nearly as automatic a war as could be imagined. PBX Command was the only human link in the battle of gadgets. For that reason, as X-107 once correctly reasoned, we had to be housed in a safe place inside the earth.

It looks as if all that talk yesterday about our ‘hope’ and the enemy’s ‘viciousness’ was just so much old-fashioned propaganda. The human decisions were made long in advance. Then the gadgets took over and ordered the operational moves when the actual situation corresponded with the hypothetical one in the minds of the planners.

Perhaps the whole thing would never have happened if those twelve enemy rockets had not escaped their controls. It was just an accident, a sort of joke played on us all by—well, I do not know whose joke it was. The gods? Fortune? The devil? It really does not matter. It is all over now. The gadgets have destroyed themselves, and the buttons in the PBX Operations Room can become playthings for children.

No doubt something has changed, though. Up there the scene must have changed completely. Who has survived? Which levels go on existing? How many people have become the victims of this war of gadgets? Has humanity been destroyed by its own ingenuity?

These questions do not sound quite real, for down here on Level 7 everything is just as it was, except that I have no more work to do. But still… it will be interesting to find out how much of our country is left.

JUNE 12

The Operations Room has become a sort of museum. Or a sanctuary, if you like. Where once Security forbade any but my brother button-pushers and me to tread, anybody may now wander around.

I visited the place again today, for the first time since our operations. People keep drifting in to look around the room and play with the ‘keys’ of the ‘typewriters’. Some of them asked me some pretty silly questions.

“Was pushing the buttons a very difficult thing to do?” enquired one woman. I laughed and told her that it was the simplest job imaginable. A child could have done it. An imbecile. A trained monkey!

My answer to the woman’s enquiry provoked a question in my own mind: Why did I have such a long and intensive training? Was it really necessary? Or was it really training? What skill had I acquired? Enough to push the buttons! And I had learnt all sorts of technical things seemingly unrelated to this imbecile function. My guess was that the training staff introduced them to make me feel that I had an intricate and important job to do, and to camouflage the simplicity of my basic task. This sort of ‘training’ must have been the crafty invention of my wife’s colleagues—psychologists. They studied monkeys to learn about men, and then turned men into monkeys.

While I was brooding over this, someone called my attention to the screen. I wonder why I did not look at it as soon as I entered the room.

It was in its usual place, where I had seen it every day since coming down here. But when I left it at 11.21 hours on June 9, the enemy’s territory was covered with rather nicely-coloured spots and circles. Now it was completely black.

A4, B4 and C4 had done a thorough job. They had added over-all radioactive poisoning to the blast and heat damage. Not an acre of ground belonging to the enemy or anybody on his side had escaped. Not a single coloured spot, let alone white, was left.

It gave me a curious chilly feeling. Not so much the destruction, as the completeness of it. This may have been quite irrational; but the unrelieved black made me turn and leave the Operations Room hurriedly, determined not to go back there again.

I wonder how our map looks, down there in the enemy’s ex-X Operations Room. Are there still some coloured places on it—red, blue, yellow—even some white parts? Or is it all black?”

JUNE 13

At last—some news about the destruction outside.

It appears to be total. As complete as that over territory held by the enemy, if one can go by the message they broadcast today: that their ‘Offensive Actions Operations Room’ screen showed our country, and those of our allies, lying in ruins.

As far as anybody can ascertain, no one is still living on the surface of our country. Not one radio message has been received. Of course, nobody is going to peep out and check the situation just at the moment. The radioactivity would be fatal.

Moreover, there is no radio contact with any shelter on Level 1, though each of these was equipped with a shortwave transmitter and receiver. We have called them, but not a squeak has been got out of them so far. They must all have been destroyed by the underground-bursting bombs—though some were probably hit by the ground-bursting and even the air-bursting ones as well.

But what difference does it make how they perished? They perished.