Level 7

Can people who helped to destroy become creative? What kind of humanity can the men and women who were once PBX Command give birth to? PBY Command was purely defensive. But we are the hangmen of mankind, as X-117 so aptly called us. And are we to form the élite which will perpetuate the human race?

What will it be like, this race? Our children will never see sunshine. They will never get inspiration from beautiful things, as those two doves did. If human beings who had known life under the sky could degenerate into creatures crawling about underground, what hope have people who never saw day and night, who never smelled a flower?

X-107 suggested, when I told him what I had been thinking, that our children and our children’s children may be taken to see plants growing in the air-supply department.

“Well, that may be so, but….”

SEPTEMBER 18

In one of the shelters on Level 5 there is rioting. Our leaders, statesmen and politicians, are there sharing the lot of the others. But some people want to take personal vengeance on them. They say the leaders are to blame for the disaster.

They have done it. One of them is speaking at this moment over the Level 5 radio, which has been taken over by the rebels. The leaders have been executed, he says. They were hanged. They would have died anyway, but the rebels wanted to make a distinction, he says—“to kill the criminals in a way appropriate for criminals.”

The executioner was a retired general. A famous commander of an armoured division. He is going to make a speech. I will try to write down what he says.

“Friends, citizens on all surviving Levels! Especially you comrades-in-arms on Levels 6 and 7. I have just hanged the arch-war-criminals, the so-called political leaders of our country. They were leaders, indeed: they led us to complete destruction.

“The trouble with them, friends, was that they did not trust us old, experienced and—I may add without false modesty—brave soldiers. In my day I led our country to victory on many occasions, with good fighting men to command and good weapons to give them. In we went, destroying, killing, conquering. Some of us were wounded; some of us were killed; but the others survived to reap with their country the fruits of victory. Even the politicians got some glory for themselves out of it.

“But they did not trust those well-tried methods. Good guns and tanks, and good men too—those were not enough for them. They wanted rockets, robots, electronics and all those other outlandish devices.

“Now we, my friends, we are paying for it. But I hope it will comfort you to know that they did not get away with it. They were not allowed to die their fine electronic—or whatever the damned thing is called—their fine electronic death. They were hanged, with a rope, in the good old-fashioned way. I did it. And I may say I enjoyed doing it.

“Long live our Army. Long live our country. Long live…”

That is as far as he got, for he started vomiting violently.

SEPTEMBER 19

The news from Level 5 is confused and confusing. They seem to be playing politics right to the end. No wonder, I suppose, with so many politicians there, along with the top level of the élite—the cream of the cream.

But no more speeches from the retired general. He does not feel well enough. His place as ‘head of the government’ (whatever that may mean now) has been taken by a retired Air Force commander.

He made a speech this morning, one very much like the general’s. He spoke warmly of wars fought by pilots in conventional aircraft. “As long as there were pilots flying the planes,” he said, “it made no essential difference whether the planes were screw-propelled or jets, whether they flew at 200 m.p.h. or at supersonic speeds. But the moment those guided missiles appeared—especially those devilish ground-to-ground intercontinental rockets—civilisation was doomed. No more glory for men, no more brave combats in the air, no more bombing of cities and installations by men who knew what they were about. But dehumanised war, automatic war, and its inevitable result: the end of civilisation.”

This speaker was as eloquent as his predecessor, but he had to stop even before he arrived at ‘Long live the Air Force’—stopped by an attack of nausea, we were told.

Oddly enough, until now I have never devoted much thought to the problem of war. Though war was my business, and though I underwent many tests and extensive training, or what appeared to be training, before I qualified as a pushbutton officer, I never thought beyond those buttons.

Was it the same with the soldier who drove a tank or pulled the trigger of a rifle? And what about the men who swung swords against an enemy they could actually grapple with?

I do not think I could be a swordsman. I could not kill with a club or a bayonet or a knife, let alone with my bare hands. But pushing a button—that was a different matter.