Level 7

X-107m has just come into the room. He looks very pale, and has flopped down on his bed.

He has just told me that P died about half an hour ago. He was with her at the end, and he says she mentioned me. He is not sure whether she was conscious or delirious.

“She was a fine woman,” he says.

OCTOBER 10

Level 7 is emptying fast. I went out for lunch again just now, and the place looked like a battle-field. Corpses scattered around everywhere. But not a wound to be seen.

The loudspeaker has been silent today. Presumably nobody is left to operate it any more.

X-107m died just a few minutes ago. He is lying in his bed. He will have to stay there, for there is nobody to take him away and I have not the strength to do it.

He was not talkative during his delirium. But sometime late this afternoon he called me over and pointed to his jacket. When I carried it across to him he groped in a pocket for a piece of paper, which he gave me, just managing to say: “Into the diary.”

On the sheet of paper I found what appears to be some sort of poetry, though it is very irregular and has no rhymes. I shall copy it into my diary now, since he asked me to, not that anybody will ever read it. Or the diary.

This is what he wrote:

When I was a boy I used to watch my sister build a house of cards.

One on another balanced in delicate equilibrium

(Quiet now, don’t knock the table)

Until there the house stood, tall and fine.

But I was mischievous,

I liked to blow the house down,

To watch the cards slip, the house crumble and fall.

To destroy what had been built was my pleasure.

Just one puff, and all that labour of careful construction—

Nothing!

When I grew up I found that houses were not made of cards.

Plaster, concrete, wood, steel.

I could blow my lungs out

And not shift those in a thousand thousand years.

But something could.

Progress had seen to it. Puff!—

And the plaster, the concrete, the wood and the steel

Blown by the bomb’s breath

Tumble like cards.

In this game atoms are trumps.

And it’s easy, so easy.

Just push the button with your finger, lightly,

And down go the office blocks, down go the factories,

Houses, churches, all monuments of man’s endeavour,

Down like a pack of cards!

I never suspected X-107m of writing strange stuff like that. What did he want to say? Just to explain the psychology of his push-button career? Or to indict himself? Did he feel any remorse? He didn’t show it ever.

Who knows? I almost added “Who cares?” But I care! He was a fine fellow, and a good comrade too.

OCTOBER 11

I have grown terribly thin and weak. I managed to crawl as far as the dining-room at lunch time today, but by the time I had got there the sight and smell of the dead bodies (some have been lying around for three days now) quite took away my feeble appetite. I rested for a few minutes, hoping I should meet someone there to talk to. But nobody came. Nobody!

I did not see a living person today. For all I know I may now be the last man alive on earth. And I shall be the last to die. A distinction in the midst of extinction!

It is strangely ironical that we, PBX Command, should be killed by a gadget making a peaceful use of atomic energy. It does not seem fair. Divine justice, I always thought, was eye for eye, tooth for tooth. It should be bomb for bomb. Instead we are being killed by a piece of faulty machinery. Not really a warrior’s death.

Perhaps God intends it as a sort of joke. “You killed with bombs,” He says. “You will be killed by peaceful radiation.”

Or maybe He is a Christian God, and Christian charity inspires his acts: “You killed with atomic missiles,” He says, “but I shall help you over to the other side with a reactor.”

What am I talking about? God? Reactor? I feel hot, hot and cold. I think I had better get into bed, if I can still climb up to that top bunk. I cannot move X-107.

OCTOBER 12

I feel I am dying. I am glad I brought my diary up here when I got into bed last night. I am so very weak. I hardly feel a thing, except pains. Must rest for a while.