Level 7

my companions and I had to vanish as inconspicuously as possible, as if the earth had opened and swallowed us up. Which is precisely what happened.

The car in which I was being driven was a closed military model of unremarkable appearance, the type of car which might have been used by anybody from a lieutenant to a general. I was sitting by myself in the rear seat, feeling most comfortable. I clearly remember this sensation of comfort, because it occurred to me that this was the way a major should feel. I realise now how silly I was to let the business of my new rank fill my mind at that moment. But, reclining on the soft seat, I felt like Napoleon after Austerlitz.

After day-dreaming pleasantly for an hour or so I began to look more closely at one feature of the car which was unusual: a partition which divided the front and rear of the car into separate compartments. I remembered seeing old films in which taxi-drivers were often separated from their patrons by glass windows. But the partition in my car was made of some opaque plastic stuff. I could not even see the driver, let alone talk to him. I had no way of communicating with him, which was a pity, because I would have liked to ask him the reason for the partition. Presumably that is exactly why the screen was there: to stop me asking questions. Well, one gets used to that in military life. I sat back again and, for lack of anything better to do, gazed out of the car window in an effort to establish where we were going.

I did not learn much. We seemed to have left the signposted public roads, and were travelling across barren territory which I had never seen before.

At about 11.00 a.m. the car entered a tunnel. I just had time to notice how well the entrance had been camouflaged —the countryside was rocky, and two huge natural boulders formed an arch which quite hid the mouth of the tunnel—before we were inside and travelling down a steep but smooth and well-lit incline. The tunnel was wide enough for two cars to pass, but no vehicles were coming the opposite way. (I assume they must have used a special exit tunnel. In case of emergency, either of them could be used for two-way traffic.) My car had slowed down now, presumably because of other cars ahead of us which I could not see from my seat. Then it stopped, moved on and stopped again several times, as in a traffic jam. Suddenly—it did seem sudden, though I had been anticipating the moment—the car stopped again and the door was quickly opened by someone outside. This was it. I stepped out.

The car had drawn up very close to an entrance in the wall of the tunnel. There was only one way for me to go—through that entrance. A notice on the wall of the short passage in which I found myself read: ‘Don’t Stop! Keep Moving!’ I passed through another door and entered a lift.

It was a fairly big one, about twelve feet square. Some people were in it already, and others were following me in. When it was quite full the door closed and down we went. As far as I could judge by the initial acceleration, the lift was travelling pretty fast—1,000 feet or more per minute. And as it took us about three minutes to reach our destination, I guessed we must be at least 3,000 feet underground. As I learned later, it was even more than that: our dungeons were located 4,400 feet below the crust of the earth.

We stepped out into a well-illuminated corridor, some seven feet wide by seven feet high and twenty or thirty yards long. It was quite bare except for painted signs on the walls telling whoever was in it to proceed— hardly necessary, as the lift-door had closed firmly behind us. At the far end of the corridor was a revolving door through which we passed one by one. I remember glancing behind me after I had gone through and noticing that one half of the door was blocked on the inside. And the door only revolved one way. But the full significance of this did not strike me at the time.

The passage in which we now found ourselves led to a moving staircase—only one such staircase, and moving down. A minute or so later I was standing in a long narrow room which stretched about fifty yards on either hand. It was set at right angles to the escalator we had just come down. The escalator exit door was in the centre of one side of the room, and to its left and right were other doors spaced along the length of the wall. Each door bore an inscription of some sort, but I was more interested in examining the long table which ran the length of the other long wall, opposite the doors. It was supported by brackets from the wall, and at each extremity it appeared to run into a hole in the end wall of the room.

Before I had had time to examine it closely a woman’s voice, very calm and clear, began repeating over a loudspeaker: “Everybody proceed to the table and be seated on the bench. Move along the room and do not block the entrance. Do not stop at the centre; move along the table. Thank you.”

Soon the bench was filled to capacity, and no more people were coming in from the staircase. I could not count how many were seated at the table, but I guessed the number must be somewhere between 150 and 200 (I found out later that meals were in fact served to 177 to 178 persons at a time). Then the voice on the loudspeaker was heard again: “Attention, please! Lunch will be served presently.”

Whereupon, as if at an agreed signal, everybody started talking. Though my neighbours were perfect strangers to me, they addressed me and I addressed them at almost the same moment.

“Well, that was a ride!”

“So this is the bowels of the earth!”

“We must be very deep down.”

“Thirty-five hundred feet, I’d say.”

“More than that!”

“And quite quickly done.”

“I wonder what we’ll get for lunch.”

“I feel rather hungry after all that.”

“So do I.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Such were the things we said: not profound things or purposeful things, but somehow important to the people seated at the table. It was only after this spontaneous talk had erupted all along the line that it occurred to me that not a word had been uttered all the way down in the lift, along the corridors, on the escalator and finally in this dining-room. Apparently we had all been so preoccupied with the experience of going down that we had hardly noticed each other’s existence. The intensity of our brooding was revealed only after the familiar idea of lunch had jerked us out of ourselves and set our tongues free.

Now the loudspeaker addressed us again: “Attention, please! Your lunches will be served to you on the moving band of the table. Wait till the band stops. Then start eating. Eat everything you are given. You will need it. Don’t forget the pills: they are important for your diet. Don’t wonder or hesitate about the food. It was scientifically prepared to meet the needs of men and women in this new environment. Thank you.” Click.

Even before the loudspeaker had finished, the band had started to move, and I saw what the voice meant. I had not noticed before that the table was covered with a wide strip of some plastic substance which ran the whole of its length and into the slots in the end walls. As the band moved it bore dishes of food towards us from one of the holes. It moved smoothly and quite quickly, and slowed down steadily to a halt as the first dish reached the far end of the room. Now the long table was covered with identical, equally-spaced plates which—as I found when I tried—were attached to the band and could not be removed. Beside each place, on a magnetised metal disc, stood a metal cup which was further secured by a spiral wire to the plastic band. A medium-sized spoon was fastened to the band by a similar wire. In this way the cup and the spoon could be used but not taken away, on exactly the same principle as the pencils provided for customers in some offices. The magnetic ‘saucer’ stopped the cup sliding about when the band was in motion and also, I guessed, held it firm when the endless band passed upside-down through a washing machine which cleaned table, crockery and cutlery all together. I found out later that my guess had been right, and that the whole process, including doling out the food, was fully automatic.

The food—well, that was rather disappointing. If we hardly found time to say so, it was because we were so busy talking about the other astonishing arrangements. There was very little to eat on the plate, and it had hardly any taste; but somehow it managed to satisfy our hunger. It consisted of a small piece of reddish stuff (some sort of synthetic multipurpose food) which was eaten with the spoon, and three pills. The pills one washed down with the half-pint or so of yellow liquid contained in the cup.

I do not know why I am going into such detail about all this. Probably because my first impressions of the underground arrangements were particularly sharp. It quite often happens that on momentous occasions we pay most careful attention to the least significant facts. This first meal has been preserved in my mind as a memorable event, a sacrament initiating me into this holy of holes—or rather, into this hole of holes.

As soon as we had eaten our meal—which did not take long—and the band had carried our plates and cups