Level 7

JUNE 26

This escapade has caused incredible excitement—on all levels, apparently. Everybody is following the radio reports from outside. People are going without sleep so as not to miss broadcasts. And even when the two outside are not reporting—resting or asleep—discussion still goes on down here.

There has never, since the day we came down, been such excitement on Level 7. Not even during the war—or so people say. (I was not able to judge what effect the war had: I was busy conducting it.)

People are intrigued to know even the smallest personal details about the pair. Who are they? How old are they? What were their occupations? Where are they from? Do they have relatives down below? And so on.

He is an artist, a landscape painter. His wife has no particular job.

“This helps to explain why they decided to go up,” some people say. “There’s not much landscape underground.”

“There’s not much left outside either,” others retort. Still, the man must have felt dreadful in a crowded, enclosed shelter.

There is another fact which may have something to do with their escapade. They had expected to meet their eighteen-year-old daughter in the shelter. She had been assigned to the same one as they. When the warning siren sounded she was away from home visiting a friend. They phoned her and she assured them she would come straight to the shelter. But they never found her there. There must have been an accident. Nobody will ever know what happened. Obviously mishaps like that are bound to occur in such large operations: millions of people rushing, panic-stricken, to their respective shelters—or to any shelter.

So now the parents are outside, not looking for their daughter, but preferring to shorten their lives and die where they were born, in the sunshine.

I have just listened to their latest report. She is driving now, while he does the talking.

They feel more or less all right again. This often happens with radiation sickness. After the initial shock, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, a few symptom-free days may follow. But the symptoms will come back.

They are driving on all the time. But there is not much to report. Every now and then they see the remains of a steel frame sticking out of the ground, sometimes twisted into a strange shape. One such piece seemed to catch the painter’s imagination. He found it beautiful and said it would be quite in place in a museum of modern art. He thought an appropriate title would be ‘The Martyred Steel’.

They are good reporters, both of them. They do not dramatise. Certainly they are not melodramatic. They do not shed tears, they just report facts. With a little artistic colouring added.

Only there is so little to report. Complete destruction is complete destruction. To try to describe how complete such complete destruction is, is to be reduced to playing with words—or with what was and is no more.

But these two are not playing. They are looking for something that may have been spared. And all they can find is a tortured steel frame.