Level 7

under the impression that I was asleep. I lay awake with my eyes closed, letting the sound flow around me, and by and by I drifted into a state of utter tranquility in which all my senses except hearing died away and I was aware of nothing but the music. This morning I listened to the music again, to see if the experience would repeat itself, and, sure enough, it did.

Perhaps the effect is like that of a narcotic. But the drug is not a dangerous one, like dreaming about going up to the surface. Music is a sedative without after-effects—as far as I can tell at the moment, anyway. I shall try to make good use of it from now on, whenever it is needed.

One more good thing about this drug is that it does not run short. The addict can take a dose whenever he feels like it by simply switching on the everlasting programme. It does seem to be lasting for ever, too. People who have been listening persistently since the first day say that so far not a single tune has been repeated. I wonder how long those tapes are.

APRIL 3

This is really funny. Yesterday I wondered how long the music tapes were. Today, at dinner, a rumour was going round that the tapes of the first day were being repeated.

Some music fans swore they heard Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ on March 21, and yesterday they heard it again. Listeners to the programme of light music were saying the same thing, though I forget what tunes they said had come round for the second time.

So the music tapes are twelve days long. This is pretty long, one must admit, but still it is disappointing. At dinner everybody seemed a little saddened by the discovery, not only the music fans. It made me sad too. I wonder why.

I have never been a great music-lover. There are a couple of dozen classical pieces I enjoy listening to, certainly; but I have never had much interest in new stuff—either really new music, or just new to me. What I had heard of the selection on the tape was quite to my taste, and as far as I was concerned the amount of music on a twelve-day tape was plenty.

And yet the discovery that the tape was only twelve days long did give me a sharp pang of regret. And it would not have made any difference if the time had been longer: if the tape had run for a month, or a year, and then somebody had told me that it had just started at the beginning again, it would have given me the same sensation. It was the fact that the tape was limited that saddened me.

I wanted something, just something, on Level 7 to be unlimited. I suppose it is only human to crave things which are not limited as humans are. Perhaps this is one reason why people—up there—enjoy breathing fresh air: there is such an inexhaustible lot of it. For the same reason they like looking out over the ocean, which they know goes on beyond the visible horizon; or travelling across the water to places they have never seen before; or standing where they are and looking up at the night sky.

To us on Level 7—I think this was everybody’s sensation today—the seemingly unending stream of music held the last surviving suggestion of boundlessness, of infinity. Everything else was calculated and cut down to suit our needs. Space was limited, and the smallness of the rooms emphasized the limitations of our existence. The meals were the very opposite of infinite in their variety. The company was limited. Even the atomic energy supply was limited: enough for a thousand years it might be, but still we knew it had a limit.

Only the tape seemed to have no ending. It was the sea and the sky. It was the green jungle waiting for our exploring feet. Though our common sense told us this was ridiculous, it was immortality.

It was the tape of life—real life, not cave-existence. It added some colour to our grey days, and shone into the gloom of our despair as if a sunbeam from up there had broken all the rules and strayed down into Level 7. But it appears that the tape is only twelve days long.

APRIL 4

No doubt about it now: both music tapes are twelve days long. They are repeating themselves, and if we feel inclined we can start to make exact schedules of what we shall be hearing in twelve days, a fortnight, a month, or ten years. All we have to do is to mark each day on a calendar what tune is played at what hour, and then mark the same tune at the same time twelve days ahead and twenty-four days ahead and thirty-six days and so on as long as the calendar lasts. What a horrible idea.

Nobody has started to make schedules yet, as far as I know. But people have been talking about the tapes a great deal for the last twenty-four hours. Even X-107 has been a bit depressed by this business. He does not say so, but I can sense it. He seems to have lost his enthusiasm for the music, and if I switch on the tape he asks me if I would mind turning it off. The music must have meant more to him than to me.

Even so, I cannot get him to admit that he resents the limited supply of music. To him Level 7 is still the best of all possible worlds. When I suggested that they could at least have arranged for a tape that would run for a man’s lifetime, so that he might never know when it came to an end and started again, X-107 retorted that this was absurd.

“Level 7,” he said, “is limited, very limited, in space. You can see that for yourself. There’s no room for luxuries. Think of the difficulty of providing the basic necessities for five hundred people to live down here for half a millennium: enough food, supplies and energy to make us a completely self-sufficient community over four thousand feet underground—when until recently sub-continents found it hard enough to be self-sufficient on the surface of the globe. To achieve all this is nothing less than a miracle of human ingenuity and scientific progress.”

“You make me feel grateful,” I remarked sarcastically, “that we have recorded music at all.”

“And so you should,” replied X-107. “They made room down here for a lounge. You don’t expect a concert hall as well, do you?”

“All right, but what about books?” I said. “Sometimes I wish I had something to read besides my own diary. I suppose you’ll say I should be grateful for the paper I write on.”

“Would you rather starve in a library?”

At that I gave up the argument. It was clear that X-107 would never be convinced by my point of view, because he would never allow himself to be convinced: it was necessary for him to believe in the inevitability of the arrangements on Level 7, because only in that way could he console himself for their disadvantages.

So because there is limited space on Level 7 there is no room for a very long music-tape; and if there is no room for a long tape there is no room for the idea of infinity. Better forget it.

APRIL 5

While I had a shower today I was thinking of the problem of space on Level 7, and it struck me how odd it was that the planners should think it necessary to give X-107 and me a bathroom to ourselves. Surely all four PBX officers could have shared one bathroom. If it came to that, ten men could use the same bathroom without getting in each other’s way much.

Half an hour later I met P-867 in the lounge again, and as usual she cornered me and started talking. By an odd coincidence—or maybe it was because I looked fresh and smelled of soap—she complained that she could not take a shower today. I asked her why not, and she explained that they had only one shower per fifty women. Each of them could take a shower once in two and a half days at a fixed hour, and missing one’s hour meant going without for another two and a half days. And she had missed her turn last time. Even the toilet, she mentioned incidentally, had to be shared by twenty women.

This was very strange, I said, and pointed out to her (not without feeling rather superior) that we PBX officers had one bathroom between two. I was more surprised than ever at the degree of comfort we