It would be easier to bear all this if only I could get rid of that smell. I know it is pure imagination, because I have asked X-107 and several other people if they can smell anything, and none of them can. But still I meet it everywhere I go. I never knew one could imagine a smell so vividly. People talk about ‘seeing things’ and ‘hearing things’, but I have never come across anyone who suffered from hallucinations which made him ‘smell things’. Not until now. I would gladly cut off my nose to get rid of that stench!
MARCH 31
X-107 is doing his best to get me out of my depression. He uses a peculiar method: discussing various arrangements on Level 7 and trying to find a rational explanation and a justification for each. This intellectual game sometimes becomes absorbing. Every now and then, when I am concentrating on some such riddle, I forget about the smell.
After these discussions we usually arrive at the conclusion that arrangements on Level 7 have been made in the best of all possible ways. Any alternative arrangements which we think up turn out, on examination, to be less perfect. The logical conclusion would seem to be that Level 7 is the best of all possible levels, the best of all possible worlds.
Take, for example, a simple thing such as entering the PBX Operations Room. If there were nothing to stop anybody going in there, the risk of having a pair of madmen playing with the ‘typewriters’ would be serious. If, instead, we four PBX officers had special keys to the room, that too might cause trouble: somebody could steal a key, or—equally disastrous—an officer might lose it and so be prevented from entering the room quickly in case of an emergency.
To prevent all these complications, the door is opened for us when we approach it in the course of our duties, and closed to everybody else. It is quite simple: anybody walking up to the door appears on the screen of an anonymous watcher, who decides whether the person should enter the room or not and presses a button if he wants the door to open.
“But suppose,” I said to X-107 today, “we conspired to push buttons at the moment when one of us was relieving the other from duty and we were both in the room. We might push them because the suspense of waiting for an order was sending us both crazy. What then? Who could prevent the two of us starting a war all on our own?”
Before X-107 could answer, the sweet voice of the loudspeaker said: “Don’t worry about that! There is a supervisor on Level 7 who has to push his buttons, in his room, before PBX Operations Room is linked with the external rocket bases. So there is a safeguard against the possibility you mentioned, Officer X-127.”
“You see,” said X-107, “there’s your answer. It’s the best of all possible systems.”
“And apparently,” I added, “we are watched so closely that there is no chance of our going mad without the loudspeaker noticing it. Isn’t that so, Miss Loudspeaker?”
The loudspeaker remained silent, and X-107 and myself promptly set about deciding what this silence meant. How should one explain it? Did it mean that the lady was no longer listening to our talk? Or was she listening but not bothering to join in?
He thought she did not listen, and I that she did not care to answer. He pointed out that she very rarely reacted to anything we said, even when she was quite capable of supplying the answer to one of our questions; which must mean that she did not listen much. I argued that when she did answer it was in response to significant questions only; so she listened a lot, but said little. Neither could prove his case. Then I remembered that I had recorded in my diary a previous instance of an answer from the loudspeaker. It might prove evidence to decide the question one way or the other. For the first time my diary might serve some practical purpose; I do not know why, but this idea pleased me immensely.
I soon found the entry—the one for March 23. I had been wondering aloud why I had been chosen for training as a push-button officer. I started reading the passage out to X-107, and I had only gone a short way, as far as the phrase ‘push-button’, when it seemed to me that the loudspeaker gave a little click. I stopped reading and glanced up at X-107, who grinned and nodded and pointed up at the loudspeaker to show that he had heard the sound too.
We waited in silence, but the loudspeaker said nothing.
Suddenly X-107 called out: “Push-button.” There was the hardly audible click again. We waited a few moments to see if the loudspeaker would make any comment this time, and when it remained silent X-107 went on: “There you are! Behind that grille in the ceiling there must be a microphone as well as a loudspeaker. And the microphone is sensitive to a certain word—the one I said just now. The moment it’s mentioned, the microphone starts working and everything we say is transmitted to the good lady, who answers if she thinks it’s necessary and switches the microphone off again if she isn’t interested.”
“Do you think she’s interested in the fact that we know how her system works now?” I said, forced to admit that X-107’s hypothesis seemed correct. But I had to test it once more: “Push-button!”
No answering click was forthcoming, and I waited for X-107 to explain that one.
He chuckled. “Of course she’s interested,” he said. “She hasn’t switched the microphone off yet, and that’s why it didn’t click that time. It only clicks when it switches itself on.”
“All right,” I said, “you win. But if the microphone system was intended as some sort of security measure, to check that we weren’t planning to push a few buttons—well, it’s not much use now, is it? We can conspire away as much as we like as long as we don’t mention the key phrase.”
“Well,” X-107 replied, “the same was true before we knew how the system worked, and they must have known quite well that a device sensitive to only one phrase couldn’t possibly act as a guarantee against conspiracy. Personally, I don’t think their intention is to spy on us in that way at all, otherwise they’d have a much more fool-proof system. They simply chose a phrase which we’d use naturally in discussing our work down here, to enable them to give a piece of advice or answer a question now and then. It’s designed to help us, to see that we’re not worrying about our duties.”
The lady behind the system—if she was still listening—neither confirmed nor denied this, but I was convinced by X-107’s argument. Certainly we PBX officers are taken very good care of down here.
And yet, the best of all possible…. How can one speak of best things in this pit of misery? While X-107 and I were arguing about the microphone today I was almost happy. But now, even while I finish writing this entry, it is coming back, that stench.
APRIL 1
Yesterday evening, and then several times this morning, we had a general warning through the loudspeaker not to play any of the tricks customary on the First of April. Level 7 cannot afford the spreading of false rumours. No April fools on Level 7.
The warning was, of course, a very sensible one. The arrangements in the Operations Room are so fool-proof that no one could be misled into starting an actual war; but April fooling could have very dangerous results in other ways.
Suppose somebody spread the rumour that we were going back up to the surface. Not everybody would swallow it whole; but even if they only half-believed it, it would give rise to hopes which would die a very hard death. Getting reconciled to life down here is difficult enough even if one is convinced that the chances of escape are nil.