Level 7

of my fellow button-pusher I was curious to know just what had happened to him. I was also wondering how serious his illness was, because while he is away I am on duty for eight instead of six hours each day.

P-867 saw that she had aroused my interest, and started supplying information at once.

The trouble with X-117, she maintained, was that he was a bad choice for Level 7. He really should not have been here at all. One of the essential conditions of selection for work down here, irrespective of what form the work would take, was that the candidate should have no strong personal attachment to anybody remaining on earth. For that reason the selectors excluded not only married persons, but also anybody who was at all close to parents, children or friends of either sex. “It’s one more way of making sure that people down here are psychologically self-sufficient,” she said.

My own recollections bear out what she said. I remember being asked at great length, during one of the interviews prior to my selection for PBX training, what family and friends I had, and what were my feelings toward them. At the time I assumed that the questions were aimed at seeing whether I was safe from the security angle. Fortunately (though I would have said unfortunately if I had known what the questions really meant) I had no strong family ties and no intimate friendships.

P-867 told me that she too was a self-sufficient person—what some laymen would call a lonely person—and so she too was considered suitable for Level 7. According to her, however, the selectors did not depend entirely on direct information about social relationship. The facts supplied by the person being interviewed were supplemented by indirect psychological evidence. The candidate told the selectors about his past and present relationships. But by various questions which were included in the long psychological tests (concerning the purpose of which the candidate knew nothing) the interviewers also found out about his propensity to form relationships in the future. The training would have been wasted if they had chosen a person who happened to be unattached but was basically sociable, for he might have formed some close attachment while he was a trainee and so made himself quite unsuitable for transference to Level 7.

In spite of the care taken over these tests, they seem to have slipped up over X-117. According to P-867, the man is not psychologically self-sufficient. True, he severed all contact with his parents as a boy and became independent at the age of fifteen—there was some long-standing family discord which made him leave home as soon as he could. In every other respect too he seemed just the man for Level 7. But now he is showing symptoms of an attachment for his mother!

“In terms of psychology this is quite a simple case,” P-867 assured me. “A neurotic regression to childhood brought on by the stress of new conditions. But,” she added, “the psychologist who tested him up there should never have made such a terrible mistake. It was his job to weed out people like that and to find types immune to such neurotic tendencies. We just can’t afford to have sociable people on Level 7.” (Smirk and giggle.)

The time was up and I was happy to leave the lounge. I felt sorry for X-117, but at the same time I envied him. There he was, suffering, perhaps going off his head—but on account of an emotional attachment to his mother, to another human being. I might miss the sunshine and spend hours brooding about that, but I never lost sleep over a person up there. I suddenly realised how much poorer I was than my fellow-officer in his misery. I, along with P-867 and probably everybody else on Level 7, was psychologically self- sufficient. My well-being depended hardly at all on the presence of anyone else. Most likely I was incapable of love; and so was everyone else here, except for X-117. And therefore I was just the person to live here.

Now I feel sorry for myself. I am sitting here alone at the desk and probably do not need—not much, at least—any company. But I wish I did. Why can I not care more for other people?—people up there or people down here, it does not matter which. It is as if my soul were deformed, or part of it has been amputated.

I suppose it is just as well I was made the way I am. If we all felt the way X-117 feels, this place would by now be one great lunatic asylum, all patients and no attendants.

Level 7 could not possibly fulfil its function, it could not exist. It is obviously best as it is.

But I wish I could pity X-117 more than I do.

APRIL 11

Am I capable, or am I not capable, of pitying other people? Am I, or am I not able to develop a genuine friendship, to love somebody, to care for another person with all my heart?

This business has been plaguing me since yesterday. I do not want to be a monster, and a man without emotions is a monster. What is the difference between me and an electronic brain? It can calculate far better, work more efficiently; it makes no mistakes. It cannot get fond of anybody. Neither can I.

But I can pity myself and torment myself, and an electronic gadget cannot do that. There’s the difference.

Level 7. The unsocial society. Community of self-pitying gadgets, hive of monsters.

Are we really monsters, or merely miserable creatures who deserve pity? There I go—self-pity again! But I did say ‘are we’, which may be evidence of sociability in me after all.

How deep does it go? Oh, I wish I could stop fretting about it. If I were a real machine I should be much happier.

A happy gadget! I had better stop writing for today and listen to some music, if all I can produce is such absolute nonsense. Perhaps I am heading for a nervous breakdown myself.

Something for the psychologists to think about: Can a man become neurotic through worrying about his inability to be neurotic?

APRIL 13

I am not finding the ‘Know Thy Level’ talks as interesting as I thought I would. Today they tried to explain the system of personal identification on Level 7. Everybody’s ‘name’ ends with the digit 7, because we live on Level 7. The letters at the beginning refer to functions, which everybody knew anyway; and the other two figures have some more complicated explanation which I did not try to understand. No doubt there is a system behind it, as with everything else down here.

When the talk was over X-107 tried to discuss with me the reason for calling each other by letters and numbers instead of personal or family names—a practice which we 48 were persuaded to adopt back at the training camp, so it comes quite naturally on Level 7. The reason behind it, he thought, was that the old names would have nostalgic associations with life on the surface and so would make it harder for us to get adjusted to our new existence.

It may well be so, but I was not interested in discussing it. What did interest me was X-107’s efforts to make me talk in spite of my evident lack of enthusiasm, because he realised I was upset about something; as he had done on previous occasions. Which must mean that he felt some concern about me. And if he is not entirely unsociable, then perhaps my own case is not so hopeless either.

My speculations engaged me so, I hardly listened to what he was saying. Suppose we were not entirely unsociable, I thought, only less sociable than most people—people up there. Suppose the difference were of this sort—one of degree, not of kind—well, the implications would be enormous. I might at least be capable of liking somebody.

As the saying goes: ‘If the fire doesn’t boil the kettle, it may stop it freezing.’ Perhaps X-117 is not the only sociable fish to slip through the psychologists’ net.

APRIL 14