Level 7

MAY 19

Today X-107 and I discussed the advantages which the two military levels have over Level 5. He seems to derive some satisfaction from the fact that, judging by our lower level, we are rated as more important than our country’s élite.

“Of course,” he said, “this doesn’t mean we’d have been above all those politicians and ex-generals and so on if all of us had stayed on the surface. But our military function makes it necessary for us to be given the most privileged position down here. The final victory—which means their welfare as well as ours—depends on us.”

What X-107 had said made me think of the position of the captain on a big liner. Though some of his passengers may be eminent scientists or important statesmen, men of far more consequence, it is the captain who usually has the best-situated cabin. Of course, the importance of Level 7, or even Level 6, relative to Level 5 is far greater than that of a captain to his passengers.

“I imagine,” I said, “that the people of Level 5—who include our policy-makers, after all—would have put themselves on Levels 6 and 7 and us on Level 5 if there had been enough room for them down here. But they must have decided that getting a large number of themselves sheltered on a fairly deep level was better than having too few of them on Levels 6 and 7.”

X-107 thought not. He said that whatever size the various levels had been, we should still have been allocated space on the deepest one because of our job.

Well, for one reason or another, the armed forces now find themselves in the safest place in the world, not in the front lines. Quite a change from the days when a soldier had to advance into a machine-gun volley and a pilot was forever expecting something to blast him out of the sky. Today we, the soldiers of our country, are shielded by an earth crust 3,000 or 4,400 feet thick. No warrior’s armour-plating ever compared with that.

For once let the civilians tremble while the soldiers feel secure.