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?
Still, why bother about it? It is too late anyhow.
SEPTEMBER 13
Yesterday part of my diary was destroyed. P, in a fit of temper, grabbed a sizeable chunk and tore it to bits. I did not bother to stop her. Why should I? The world went to pieces: should I care what happens to my diary?
P cannot understand me—or rather, the change in me since that couple from Level 3 went up. She says she could put up with me when I was gloomy, depressed, mentally ill. “But,” to quote her, “in this saintly shape of yours I just can’t stand you.”
What seems to enrage her most is the fact that I do not retaliate by storming back at her. My meekness makes her more furious than ever, though it is not intended to. I just do not find in myself any anger against her—or against anybody else, for that matter.
This is neither saintly nor vicious. Something in me has changed, that is all. I do not undergo the mental ups and downs which troubled me before; my mood is on one level. I have no need of company and entertainment. Nor even the speculation I used to indulge in. My thoughts often ramble through the world that is gone, though, and I think a good deal about humanity—the humanity that disappeared during those few hours of button-pushing.
I think about all these things calmly, in a detached way, yet sympathetically. I feel no pangs of conscience or remorse, though. I do not know why.
P does not understand this mood of mine. I suppose she cannot classify it according to the psychology she has learnt. She was waiting patiently in the hope that it would change, I think, until yesterday’s incident, which made her lose her temper. It happened during her visit to my room. (Such visits have been allowed since hostilities ended.) She must have thought that tearing my diary would be some kind of shock to me, for when I failed to react she shouted: “Oh, if that didn’t shake you, nothing will!” Then she spun on her heel and left the room without giving me another glance.
The last entry in the diary to survive P’s assault was the one for July 2. More than two months have elapsed since then. I am not going to rewrite what I wrote during that time. Not much happened, anyway, and my inner changes—well, I doubt if they would interest my prospective readers (if I have any).
Perhaps one thing should be mentioned, though it was already clear back in June. The living world has shrunk, shrunk incredibly, into a few holes. But these holes—Levels 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, with an estimated 622,500 people—go on living. I do not know what precisely is the situation in the enemy’s country, the number of levels and people surviving there; but probably the population of the whole world is now somewhere between one and two millions. Incredibly small, but also extremely dense, if one remembers the limited space available underground.
Still, it is amazing how people can adjust themselves to the new conditions. Now, three months after A-Day (‘A’ for Atomic War), life seems to be smoothly regulated even on the civilian levels.
How flexible human beings are! And yet how rigid!
SEPTEMBER 14
P announced this morning that she wanted to divorce me and marry X-107. He had often been present when she visited me in my room, and that is how they had got to know each other.
I agreed and wished her better luck with her new mate. She had tears in her eyes.
X-107 was rather uneasy about it, but I told him I did not mind at all, and this seemed to reassure him.
The formalities were arranged for this afternoon without any difficulty. P and I were divorced in the marriage-cum-laundry room, where five minutes later she was married to X-107. I was told to leave the ‘m’ from my identity badge in the room. X-107 probably got it.
I think this development was inevitable and for the best. Perhaps a man of so-called ‘saintly’ disposition should not be married.
The general loudspeaker announced today that the PBX Operations Room was to be transformed into a maternity ward. Several births are expected, but not before January or February next year, so there is plenty of time and no real need to announce the conversion of the room so early.
Perhaps the news was given now with the intention of cheering people up. They even tried to suggest that the transformation is symbolicaclass="underline" from operations room, the centre of push-button war, into maternity ward, the place where new life starts.
“And you shall beat your push-buttons into perambulators,” occurred to me.
Rather late in the day, though!
I rarely go to the lounge now. There is nobody I want to talk to. People I meet there, my fellow-internees on Level 7, think differently, feel differently. I might have found a good companion in X-117. But he is gone. Not by blast or fire or radioactivity. By his own hand and a leather belt.
But I commune with myself. I almost converse with the artist and his wife who chose to die their radioactive death.
There are people living all round me, but I do not live with them. For me the dead are alive. The living are dead.