Level 7

SEPTEMBER 20

They seem to be doomed—all of them. All three levels, 3, 4 and 5.

In some shelters the sickness has entered its final stages, in others it is not so far advanced. But according to our medical experts it is only a matter of time: the severity and universality of the symptoms make it quite clear that the civilian levels do not have long to live.

And they know it. But they cannot do anything about it. They wait for their caves to turn into mass graves.

All this has happened so quickly. It is strange that the water supplies of all the different shelters became poisoned at roughly the same time. Within the short space of three days the sickness had spread throughout the three levels.

How this happened is hard to explain. Perhaps all the shelters were built in geologically similar areas, in places where the ground was fairly soft. To dig deep shelters through rock would have been very difficult. It could have been done given plenty of time, but time was short. And perhaps it was not polluted rain water that penetrated and poisoned the water supplies of the shelters, but some capillary water in the ground.

Be that as it may, it happened. It happened quickly and on all three civilian levels.

Levels 6 and 7 seem to be safe. The experts say so. The shelters are deep enough for the filtering process to do its work. Even so, their water supplies are regularly checked for possible radioactivity. If this had been done on the higher levels, they might have been able to take precautions in time, though the job of distilling enough water for everybody without the proper equipment, would have been almost impossible. People would probably have died from thirst. One of the broadcasts received today said that on Level 4 some people had given up hope of getting enough clean water and were quenching their thirst with the freely flowing supply of poison.

I dare say they have given up trying to purify the water now. It is too late to do any good. And probably there is nobody left to work their makeshift distilleries.