Level 7

MARCH 25

Today I asked X-107 the question which has been worrying me all the time since my arrival on Level 7. The question of why we had to lose our freedom. I already knew some of the answers—they had been implied or stated in that initial announcement of our fate which I had listened to on my bunk four days ago—but I still wanted to talk the thing over.

“Why,” I asked X-107, “were we condemned to life imprisonment down here? Couldn’t we do our work on the surface of the earth? Hidden away in the middle of a desert, or something? Why here, so deep, so completely cut off?”

“Now you’re talking like a child,” he replied. “PBX Command had to be secured—secured absolutely—against surprise attack, an attack which might have hit us in your secluded desert hide-out just as fatally as in the centre of a metropolitan area. If it had, our country would have been knocked out without being able to fire back a single shot. Down here on Level 7 we’re safe from surprises like that. Even if the enemy destroys our country in a surprise attack, we—you and I—can retaliate and destroy his country.”

“Still,” I tried to argue, “even if PBX Command had to be located on Level 7, there was surely no need to imprison us here! Why can’t we be relieved by other crews and go on leave every now and then?”

“That would be very dangerous,” X-107 answered. “If you were able to get out, you might come back with a destructive weapon, or a destructive idea, which could put PBX Command out of action. Contact with the outside world could mean contact with spies, with enemies, with pacifists. The government would be foolish to take such a risk.”

“So we had to be imprisoned for life in order to safeguard our country’s powers of retaliation?”

“Exactly,” he replied. “And to ensure its survival too: even if a surprise attack annihilates the population up above, down here we will go on living—after taking vengeance, of course.”

I asked: “But what happens if there is no war?”

“Well,” came the unperturbed answer of my room-mate, “our job is to be ready at all times to pull the trigger—to push the button. If no command to do so comes, we shall have served our country just the same; for if our enemy refrains from attacking us, it will only be because he knows how well prepared and unassailable we are down here on Level 7. So, on Level 7 we have to stay.”

I could find no flaw in his argument. Our imprisonment on Level 7 is a necessity.