Level 7

which have people listening, fascinated. Almost everybody. Even P has stopped making disparaging remarks. After one of this morning’s transmissions I do believe I saw an unusual shine in her eyes. As if they were wet.

JUNE 29

The couple are still broadcasting, though their voices are weaker today and they have to break off from time to time. But we listen. Everybody listens.

Another broadcast is due to start any moment now. I will try to jot down what they say as I did yesterday. It is easier now that they have to speak slower.

She: “No birds are singing in the world today, no flowers are blooming. There are no trees, there are no fields.” He: “Just debris.”

She: “Man is gone, and woman too. No children play around.”

He: “Just bare earth.”

She: “The world is like a ship abandoned by her crew. Like the moon, it is arid and dreary.” He: “Another planet.”

Another planet. They have got something there. In their delirium they may have hit on a truth. The earth has become like the dead moon—except for the caves. But who knows?—there may be caves like ours on the moon, with some crawling creatures living in them.

Just another planet. The earth was always that, anyway. But not just that: for there were other things on earth.

JUNE 30

The couple announced today that they would not broadcast any more. They are too weak. They ended like this:

He: “This is our last message, the last broadcast from the face of the earth. Nothing new to report. The world is empty. It still revolves. There is day and night, sun and moon and stars. But that is all.”

She “Farewell, men and women of the caves! Let us die in peace.”

That was this morning. Since then nothing has been heard from them. I wonder if they are delirious or unconscious. Perhaps they are gone already.

We shall not hear from them again. Let them die in peace.

I did not intend adding to what I had written earlier today. But although the time is already past 23.00 (I have reverted to normal hours for sleeping since my daily duty finished), I do not want to go to bed until I have recorded a strange feeling which has come over me since hearing that last broadcast. The feeling is new to me, yet not entirely strange: a feeling of tenderness for those two up there in the car. I wish I could have comforted them and helped them.

Something seems to have changed inside me. It stirred when I saw X-117 hanging, just outside in the corridor there; but on that occasion the sensation quickly passed. Perhaps my new feeling is connected with the sudden chill I felt then, and earlier, when I saw the black screen. But this is different: not a passing shiver, but a persistent warmth.

Is this compassion? Love? Sociability? Are other human beings able to arouse in me feelings like those? Was there a green spot hidden in my soul which they, the doves, have discovered?

It is a warm feeling—warm towards them. But it has enough warmth for humanity in general, for any living thing. It even reflects back to keep me warm inside.

Only now do I realise how cold I was inside. How dead. Now I can understand X- 117. He must have had a lot of that warm feeling. It could not have been taken from him, even by psychotherapy.

I do not have that much. But I have some, enough to keep me warm. And chilly too, in a curious way, when I think of that screen, or even of the buttons which blackened it.

One needs that warmth in order to feel chilly. And it is better to feel warm and cold than not to feel at all. That is what the treatment they gave me was supposed to do: deprive me of what little feeling I might have possessed.

But they failed. I love that pair of doves, dying out there on the bare planet. I love them.

If there can be such a pair of doves, the planet will live again. If I can love, then my soul is not like the dead shell of a planet. It can be revived.

Life and love are spreading. Give them a little space to take root, a beginning, and they will conquer the world!

JULY 1

What nonsense I wrote last night. “Life and love are spreading!”

Death and destruction, hate and indifference—these are spreading. It is not a pair of doves which has conquered the world; buttons have done that. They have killed everything. Even the doves.

That feeling inside me—what can it do? Unpush the pushed buttons? Unrelease the released rockets? Unbomb the bombed world? Undestroy the destroyed? Unkill the killed? Save a pair of doves?

It can do nothing. The buttons have been pushed. It is too late! Too late!

JULY 2

No more broadcasts from the couple up there. They are probably dead by now. People have stopped talking about them. They pass into oblivion.

But I still think about them. They are alive for me. They have pushed the hidden button in my soul. The lost, forgotten, decayed button. It was a hard thing to do, but they did it.

What a wonderful button it is. It makes me realise that I am not alone in the world. It makes me feel that there are other beings like myself. Better than myself, some of them: X-117 was better. And the people who stayed outside—most of them were probably better than me.

Why is it so difficult to push that button of humanity, and so easy to push the ones which launch deadly rockets? And why did nobody discover my good button earlier, before it was all too late?

Not that it would have affected the results. If I had refused to push the buttons, and X-117 had refused, X- 107 and X-137m would have done it. And if they had refused, anybody else could have done it—without even knowing what he was doing!

The same results could have been achieved without using the Operations Room at all. Our rockets could have been released automatically the moment the enemy rockets exploded, and vice versa. The retaliatory arrangement was almost automatic as it was. It could easily have been made completely automatic. It was an automatic error which started the war. From that point the chain reaction could have gone on with automatic perfection to destroy the world, without any of us button- pushers raising a finger to help it.

When all that has been said, at the bottom of this super-clever, super-stupid business there still remain some human beings in whose souls a button remains unpushed. As mine was, till now.

But what could be done about it? How could all those other buttons be pushed to release the humanity which everyone perhaps has somewhere inside him?