Well then, is life down here being—or is it not-being? Is not Level 7 a sort of Hades or Sheol where being is dimmed to half-being, at the best? I can breathe, but is this fresh air? I can walk, but I cannot go for a walk. As for sunshine—I had better forget it. I feel that I feel, but I don’t really—not in the spontaneous way I used to up there.
Am I condemned to half-be for the rest of my life? To half-be a major, to be sure. But I would rather revert to private and be. I would prefer to be an absolute nobody than to half-be what I am.
It is very odd that I had to be brought down into the depths of the earth in order to discover the meaning of half a line of Shakespeare. There must have been a philosopher, a Hamlet lurking in me all the time, and I never suspected it. I did not once ponder about the meaning of being, as long as I was. Now, when my life can hardly qualify as being, I begin to understand….
Understand what? The meaning of being? Nonsense, nobody knows the meaning of that. But now at least I understand the meaninglessness of being somebody. And I realise the significance of being, without knowing what being is. My soul—what is left of it—cries: “To be, to be!”
But the loudspeaker sounds: “Attention please, attention.”
MARCH 22
Today I did my first spell of duty in the PB Operations Room. I shall have to be on duty for a total of six hours daily, as there are four of us and the room must be attended all round the clock. Nobody could call it hard work, certainly. It gets a bit boring, but you can have music there if you feel like listening. We have it in our rooms as well. Just push the right button, and out the music comes. There are only two programmes—one of light music and one of rather heavier stuff—but they seem inexhaustible. No tune has been played twice yet. It must all be recorded, of course—there is no room for live entertainers down here.
Still, I was about to describe the Operations Room. It is quite small really, though it is huge compared with our bed-living-room. There are only a few instruments in it, all of them familiar to me from my training.
On the wall is a big convex screen, a sort of flattened half-globe of the other side of the world, on which are mapped out the countries of our potential enemy and his satellites. It is lit in such a way that every part of it can be seen clearly by a person on duty in the room. On it are marked the enemy’s points of strategic importance—strategic, not tactical. If push-button war is declared we shall not waste our time attacking points of temporary or local importance. Our blows will go straight to the heart and sinews of enemy territory. No tactical operations could be conducted from Level 7, anyway, and I cannot see any point in having them in a future war at all, unless it takes the ridiculously anachronistic form of limited hostilities.
The screen-map is divided into three zones, separated by thin lines. These zones have been determined by then-distance from our rocket bases. The nearest one is called Zone A, the next one B, and the farthest one C.
There are two chairs in the room, equidistant from the screen and facing it at a convenient angle, one from the right and the other from the left. In front of each chair is a little table, and on each table stands what might be mistaken for a little typewriter or an adding-machine. In fact this gadget is the nucleus of the room and the sole reason for my being down here on Level 7.
On the gadget are three rows of four buttons. The front row, nearest the operator, covers enemy Zone A; the middle row Zone B; and the third row Zone C, the most distant. Each set of buttons controls a different type of destructive weapon—all of them long-range atomic rockets, of course. Buttons 1 control batteries of rockets with warheads the equivalent of one to five megaton bombs, which explodeon touching the ground. This is an efficient means of destroying heavy and concentrated installations, military or industrial. The rocket-bombs controlled by the second set of buttons are much more powerful—ten to fifty megatons—and are designed to explode in the air, causing widespread destruction over big cities and heavily populated areas. Rockets of similar power, but constructed in such a way as to penetrate deep underground before exploding, are released by Buttons 3. The effect of these would be rather like that of an earthquake as far as destruction on the surface goes, and they would severely damage underground installations. Also they would produce a fair amount of lethal radiation, but this is more specially the task of the rockets controlled by the fourth set of buttons. These are ‘rigged’ atomic bombs; that is to say, bombs which are cased in a shell made of a potentially highly radioactive element. The bursting of the bombs would pulverise these shells into a fine, pervasive and strongly radioactive dust. This kind of weapon, which destroys life not only by heat, blast and shock, but by radiation, is in a way the most deadly of all. Its effects may last for a long time.
Each of the twelve buttons would release several thousands of otherwise electronically controlled and guided missiles, every one of them aimed at a pre-determined target. They would hit the enemy within anything from fifteen minutes to an hour from when the button was pushed.
All this may sound rather complicated, but it is really very simple. My ‘typewriter’ looks like this:
As a matter of fact, it is not all that important to know exactly what the buttons do, because the orders would be quite explicit: ‘Push Button A1,’ or ‘Push Button B3’, or ‘Push Button C2’. It is not certain whether Buttons 4 would actually be used. Some people have said they might prove dangerous even to the country using them.
All kinds of orders come through the loudspeaker; but to indicate that a push-button order is on the way there is in addition a visual warning system. First, a yellow lamp above the screen would light up to alert us. Then, a red lamp, if the yellow one was not a false alarm; and as soon as the red light came on we could expect our orders.
As a precaution against any officer who might push a button by accident, or because he had taken leave of his senses, or for any other reason, the system will only work if two people push the same button at the same time. This is the reason for the second chair, table and identical control box in the Operations Room. The two controls are far enough apart to stop one man pushing both the buttons at once. In case of emergency a second officer will be summoned into the room, and the two men will together execute the orders which come from the loud-speaker, sanctioned by the red light.
The two officers will be able to watch the results of their actions. As I said, the enemy targets are marked on the screen. If Button A1, say, is pressed, off go the one-to-five megaton rocket-bombs to Zone A in the enemy’s territory. Their release will be signalled by the appearance of red points in the little circles on the map which show the appropriate Zone A targets. When the rockets actually hit their targets the red marks will expand to cover the areas destroyed. If they should fail to reach the targets—because of interception by the enemy, or some accident—then the red points will disappear again.
Buttons 2, 3 and 4 produce similar effects, in blue, yellow and black respectively.
Obviously the idea is to use the less destructive rockets first, and to resort to those causing widespread damage and death later on if the more limited weapons prove ineffective. However, my colleagues and I do not decide when to push the button, or which one to push. Our job is just to keep watch and, if and when the time comes, to do what the loudspeaker tells us. Our potential productive work is limited to the pushing of twelve buttons, twelve keys in a peculiar sort of typewriter. When we have done this our country’s arsenal of offensive weapons will have been exhausted; but the other half of the world will have been completely destroyed.