Level 7

“Oh, you poor fool!” he retorted. “How dare you even think about yourself after the crime you’ve committed? Your feelings! As if they matter. You’ve murdered millions of people—blasted, burned, poisoned hundreds of millions! Do you know what that means? And now you talk about how you feel! You monster!”

I thought he was going to hit me, but he did not. Somehow I did not mind his antagonistic attitude. I dare say that if one is not sociable, one neither loves nor hates. And perhaps the psychological treatment has left me with even fewer emotions than I had before.

But what he said reminded me of the chilly feeling I had had when I saw the black screen in the Operations Room. The feeling had passed and had not recurred, even when I heard the details of the destruction, but I remembered it clearly. And I had not been back to that room since. So perhaps X-117’s reaction made some sense, even though I could not share it.

I was preoccupied with these thoughts when X-117 started shouting and wailing again: “Why? Why did I do it? Why did I push those buttons and kill them all? So many!…”

P motioned to me that we should go now. X-117 saw her sign and turned on her, shouting: “So you’ve had enough of this visit, you psychologist, you soul-killer! You managed to cure me of my conscience so that I’d be able to kill humanity. And you did the same to your husband. He might have had some conscience before! Now I’ve done my duty, you don’t need me any more. Soul-killer!” He stood up and waved his arms at us. “Get out of this room! Both of you! Go on, get out—before I strangle you! Not kill you with a button, no! With my bare hands!…”

We left before he finished his ravings.

JUNE 19

X-117 was found dead this morning.

His room-mate had woken to find X-117 missing from his bed. But his uniform was still there, so X-137m had got up and opened the door to see where he had gone. He found him just down the corridor, hanging by a belt from a pipe which runs across the top of the Operations Room doorway. X-107 and I were woken up by X-137m’s tapping on our door.

I saw his body dangling there, the unshaven face and the glazed half-mad eyes.

I saw him for a split second only, for I turned my head away quickly and walked back into my room, closing the door behind me. Again I had that chilly feeling, and I shivered as I had done when I saw the black screen.

The other two must have pushed the red button, for a minute later I heard footsteps outside the door and the murmur of voices. Then X-107 came back and quietly lay down on his bed. Another two minutes passed, and then the private loudspeaker sounded. We were instructed not to tell anybody what we had seen.

An hour later the general loudspeaker system announced that Push-Button Officer X-117 had died in the night. The speaker said something about ‘loyal service’ and the ‘strain’ which had been placed on his constitution by the ‘vital task’ he had performed during the recent offensive.

I suppose they are quite right to conceal the fact that this was suicide. Why depress people?

But why did he hang himself? I have been asking myself the question all day long. What was the trouble with him? He was rather a pleasant fellow before he became mentally unbalanced. I feel rather sorry for him.

When I saw P today it was all I could do to prevent myself telling her the true facts, particularly when she expressed her puzzlement at what the loudspeaker had said. While she had had X-117 under observation, she said, he had never given any sign of physical weakness.

I kept a check on my tongue, however, and we just discussed X-117 in a general way. She said I should not allow my fellow button-pusher’s death to depress me. It was the best thing that could have happened to him, she said, because he was quite the wrong person for life on Level 7. He must have been chosen by mistake.

While she was talking I heard again the words X-117 used yesterday, his last day alive. He had not accepted the inevitable. He had rebelled against it. He had not become adjusted to reality as it was. He was different. He was certainly not the right man for Level 7.

It is odd that I should feel sorrier for X-117 than for those thousands of millions killed in the war. I believe that if I had been told to push a button which would execute X-117, I could not have done it. Though without thinking twice about it I pushed the buttons which executed millions!

Executed? Am I a hangman? X-117 said we were hangmen. In a way, we were. Perhaps he was right and not P.

No, I still do not believe I could be a hangman. I do not enjoy contact with people who are going to die soon. I have no liking for the sight of life disappearing, bodies hanging. Like his.

But to push a button, to operate a ‘typewriter’—that is a very different thing. It is smooth, clean, mechanical.

That is where X-117 went wrong. For him it was the same thing. He could even talk about strangling P and me with his bare hands!