Level 7

MAY 13

Today I have had an interesting talk with X-107 about marriage on Level 7.

I was humming a tune, I think, and my obvious good spirits must have started a train of thought in my roommate’s head. “It seems to work all right even on Level 7,” he remarked.

This rather cryptic statement got no reply and clearly needed elucidation. “The institution of marriage, I mean,” he went on. “You know, I had the gravest misgivings about it. It seemed to me that it should have been abolished altogether.”

“Why so?” I asked. “What about the future of the human race? You wouldn’t like to see Level 7 die out in a generation, would you?”

“Of course not,” X-107 said. “But monogamous marriage isn’t the only way of preserving the species. Free love would have done it just as well. What’s more, it would have been more convenient: there wouldn’t have been the problem of scheduling hours of privacy to fit in with working hours. Nobody pretends that marriage down here is anything more than a means of providing a future generation—there are no private households, no family life—so why preserve the old formalities?”

I agreed that the arrangement was very conservative, but pointed out (as X-107 always used to do) that there must be a good reason for it. Perhaps it was to prevent jealousy, I suggested. That was a sentiment which could be terribly disruptive in the rather claustrophobic atmosphere of Level 7.

X-107 thought about that for a moment or two, and then asked me whether I would feel jealous about my mate. I said no, I would not; but other people might. X-107 said he thought most other people on Level 7 would not either. “You’re probably quite the opposite of an exception,” he said. “I’d be surprised if an absence of jealous tendencies wasn’t one of the main things they looked for in the people they selected for this place.

“Still,” he went on, “monogamous marriage seems to work all right down here, and so far they’ve had no difficulty in finding times when couples can be together in private, so I suppose things are best as they are. If free enterprise were the rule, there might be too much competition in the field; people would spend too much time thinking about it, and their work would suffer.”

“Besides,” I added, “free enterprise and equality aren’t often found together. And equality is the basis of democracy, and democracy’s finest flower is Level 7.”

I did not mean that very seriously, but X-107 nodded his head in solemn agreement. Level 7 retained its position as the best of all possible levels.