Level 7

JUNE 12

The Operations Room has become a sort of museum. Or a sanctuary, if you like. Where once Security forbade any but my brother button-pushers and me to tread, anybody may now wander around.

I visited the place again today, for the first time since our operations. People keep drifting in to look around the room and play with the ‘keys’ of the ‘typewriters’. Some of them asked me some pretty silly questions.

“Was pushing the buttons a very difficult thing to do?” enquired one woman. I laughed and told her that it was the simplest job imaginable. A child could have done it. An imbecile. A trained monkey!

My answer to the woman’s enquiry provoked a question in my own mind: Why did I have such a long and intensive training? Was it really necessary? Or was it really training? What skill had I acquired? Enough to push the buttons! And I had learnt all sorts of technical things seemingly unrelated to this imbecile function. My guess was that the training staff introduced them to make me feel that I had an intricate and important job to do, and to camouflage the simplicity of my basic task. This sort of ‘training’ must have been the crafty invention of my wife’s colleagues—psychologists. They studied monkeys to learn about men, and then turned men into monkeys.

While I was brooding over this, someone called my attention to the screen. I wonder why I did not look at it as soon as I entered the room.

It was in its usual place, where I had seen it every day since coming down here. But when I left it at 11.21 hours on June 9, the enemy’s territory was covered with rather nicely-coloured spots and circles. Now it was completely black.

A4, B4 and C4 had done a thorough job. They had added over-all radioactive poisoning to the blast and heat damage. Not an acre of ground belonging to the enemy or anybody on his side had escaped. Not a single coloured spot, let alone white, was left.

It gave me a curious chilly feeling. Not so much the destruction, as the completeness of it. This may have been quite irrational; but the unrelieved black made me turn and leave the Operations Room hurriedly, determined not to go back there again.

I wonder how our map looks, down there in the enemy’s ex-X Operations Room. Are there still some coloured places on it—red, blue, yellow—even some white parts? Or is it all black?”