OCTOBER 6
The two AE officers who helped AE-307m repair the reactor have died too.
Moreover, I saw somebody vomiting today at lunch. Quite a few others left the dining-room hurriedly during the meal.
Has it started?
OCTOBER 7
It has finally reached us. We shall not get away with it.
Sickness and death are all around. Some people die with hardly a struggle. Others only vomit to start with, and manage to keep going. Slight nausea is all I have felt so far.
And the funny part about it is that it is the reactor—our own atomic reactor—which is killing us. The source of life down here, our man-made sun, now sends its death-dealing rays through Level 7.
Before long we shall all be gone. This is the beginning of the end.
OCTOBER 8
This morning the loudspeaker gave some official information about the source of trouble.
Something went wrong with the reactor. If it had happened on the surface the reactor could have been stopped, isolated and repaired at leisure. If necessary, people could have been moved to a safe distance. But here on Level 7 there was no choice. The reactor had to be repaired where it was, and quickly, even with the danger of lethal radiation. Without light, the plants would have stopped supplying oxygen; and we would soon have died.
So the AE officers risked their lives and partly succeeded: the energy supply will continue. Unfortunately, so will the lethal radiation. The reactor will go on working simultaneously as a source of life and a source of death.
Precisely how and why, I do not know. And I do not care. There are some ‘technical reasons’. That is enough explanation for me. It seems to be enough for others too.
OCTOBER 9
This death is quick. We must be getting powerful doses of those rays or particles—whatever is killing us.
People are dying all round like flies. Yesterday some attempt was still being made to remove the corpses, but today nobody seems to be bothering, and the bodies lie where they fall. Perhaps there is no one from the medical department left to take them away, or nobody strong enough. Most people do not come out of their rooms even for meals. I only went out for lunch today, and the sight of half a dozen corpses in the dining-room very nearly stopped me eating. Quite two thirds of the meals on the moving band were left untouched.
Although I do not feel as bad as the others, I know it cannot last. Death is in me.
X-107m has just come into the room. He looks very pale, and has flopped down on his bed.
He has just told me that P died about half an hour ago. He was with her at the end, and he says she mentioned me. He is not sure whether she was conscious or delirious.
“She was a fine woman,” he says.
OCTOBER 10
Level 7 is emptying fast. I went out for lunch again just now, and the place looked like a battle-field. Corpses scattered around everywhere. But not a wound to be seen.
The loudspeaker has been silent today. Presumably nobody is left to operate it any more.
X-107m died just a few minutes ago. He is lying in his bed. He will have to stay there, for there is nobody to take him away and I have not the strength to do it.
He was not talkative during his delirium. But sometime late this afternoon he called me over and pointed to his jacket. When I carried it across to him he groped in a pocket for a piece of paper, which he gave me, just managing to say: “Into the diary.”
On the sheet of paper I found what appears to be some sort of poetry, though it is very irregular and has no rhymes. I shall copy it into my diary now, since he asked me to, not that anybody will ever read it. Or the diary.
This is what he wrote:
When I was a boy I used to watch my sister build a house of cards.
One on another balanced in delicate equilibrium
(Quiet now, don’t knock the table)
Until there the house stood, tall and fine.
But I was mischievous,
I liked to blow the house down,
To watch the cards slip, the house crumble and fall.
To destroy what had been built was my pleasure.
Just one puff, and all that labour of careful construction—
Nothing!
When I grew up I found that houses were not made of cards.
Plaster, concrete, wood, steel.
I could blow my lungs out
And not shift those in a thousand thousand years.
But something could.
Progress had seen to it. Puff!—
And the plaster, the concrete, the wood and the steel
Blown by the bomb’s breath
Tumble like cards.
In this game atoms are trumps.
And it’s easy, so easy.
Just push the button with your finger, lightly,
And down go the office blocks, down go the factories,
Houses, churches, all monuments of man’s endeavour,
Down like a pack of cards!
I never suspected X-107m of writing strange stuff like that. What did he want to say? Just to explain the psychology of his push-button career? Or to indict himself? Did he feel any remorse? He didn’t show it ever.
Who knows? I almost added “Who cares?” But
