Level 7

JUNE 18

There is news about X-117. They have had trouble with him. After that collapse on duty, he somehow relapsed into his neurotic state and the psychologists have given up trying to cure him. Perhaps because his services are no longer needed.

He has developed a guilt complex. He thinks he is responsible for the destruction of the world. As if he could not have been replaced by anybody else! He actually was replaced. But there is no arguing with a neurotic.

Today P and I visited him in his room—out of politeness. He lives opposite me and we worked together, after all. And P treated him when he was ill the first time.

X-117 was lying on his bed, half dressed, unshaven, doing nothing. When we came in, he hardly seemed to notice it.

P asked him how he felt. For some reason this enraged him. He suddenly sat up in the bed and shouted at us: “Thank you! I feel fine! I feel wonderful! I’ve succeeded in killing hundreds of millions of people, so I feel on top of the world. I’m the greatest hangman in history! Why shouldn’t I feel well?”

Then he burst into tears. I had never seen anything like it before. He cried like a little boy whose plaything had been snatched away. He just sat there racked by loud sobs.

P tried to calm him. “You shouldn’t feel that way,” she said. “You just did your duty. Are you a soldier or aren’t you?”

X-117 answered, tears rolling down his face: “Duty? Can there be a duty to kill humanity? To be mankind’s hangman?”

“But you’re not responsible for the killing,” I told him. “Why call yourself a hangman? You just obeyed orders.”

“So does the hangman,” was his answer. “But at least he obeys an order given by a judge. I did what a robot told me to do!” At this he started laughing, as hysterically as he had wept before.

“But look,” said P, “my husband did just what you did—in fact he went on obeying orders after you had left. And he doesn’t feel the least bit guilty.”

“As a matter of fact,” I added, “I feel better now than I did before. Not that I enjoyed pushing those buttons particularly, but doing it made me feel rather important.”

“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.