I had no time to reflect on what had happened. X-107 entered the room and quietly took X-117’s place at the other table. X-137 came in behind him—apparently to replace me if necessary.
The loudspeaker sounded again (by now the time was 11.20): “Push Button A4, push Button B4, push Button C4!”
This time it went without a hitch.
At 11.21 hours today the 9th of June, I was through with my daily duty. As a matter of fact, I was through with my life’s work. I had done my job. My function as PBX Officer was completely fulfilled.
The loudspeaker said: “You are free, gentlemen. You may go to your quarters or, if you prefer, stay to watch the results of A4, B4 and C4.”
X-107 and X-137 remained behind to see what happened. I came back here to my room and lay down.
JUNE 10
So the war is over. It started yesterday at 09.12 hours, as far as our offensive action was concerned, and it ended when our last missiles exploded in enemy territory at 12.10 hours.
The whole war lasted two hours and fifty-eight minutes—the shortest war in history. And the most devastating one. For both these reasons it is very easy to write its history: no complicated and lengthy campaigns, no battlefields to remember—the globe was one battlefield.
I could summarise this war, the greatest in human history, in a few words: “Yesterday, in a little under three hours, life on vast patches of the earth was annihilated.” But I had better be more historically minded and write down a few details about how it happened. These details were announced on the general loudspeaker system first thing this morning, and have been repeated several times since. Everybody knows them now almost by heart. I shall reproduce them true to their spirit, even if the wording differs a little from the original.
Yesterday, at 09.07 hours, twelve H-bombs fell in a remote part of our country. Ten of them exploded in sparsely inhabited areas, but two hit big centres of population. The attack came suddenly, and by the time PBY Command detected the missiles they were already striking their targets. No interception of these rockets was possible, but their arrival served as the best possible warning and PBY Command’s later achievements were spectacular.
The PBX Command too was alive to what was going on. The treacherous attack had to be met with a counter-attack, and so the command “Push Button A1” was given. The command was limited, quite conscientiously, to just the one button. We did not want to start a total war as long as we were not sure that the enemy intended to annihilate us completely. Button A1 released only two thousand rockets, with warheads of one to five megatons. They were directed solely at military and industrial installations in the nearest enemy zone.
At the same time, in case the enemy should retaliate, the alarm was sounded throughout the country and people hurried underground. This was done in a fairly orderly manner, except for some trouble over the Level 1 shelters. Many people without the proper identification tried to get into them, and this led to rioting. It is likely that many people who should not have gone below did so, while some who were entitled to a place were left outside. The shelters became overcrowded, and in the struggle for space many women, children and old people were crushed to death. These scenes went on for as long as the areas concerned were not hit; and the longer they were spared the bombs, the worse the fighting became. In some places it was over in forty minutes or so, but here and there it lasted up to two hours, with bloody battles which became even more ferocious as distant explosions were heard. Entrances to shelters were blocked by people fighting in the most primitive and cruel way with the nearest weapons that came to hand—kitchen knives, clubs made from broken-up furniture, and bare fists if they could not find anything better. All this was reported over the radio by self-sacrificing commentators, who even in this emergency did not forget their duty to report the news. They died microphones in hand.
At 09.15 hours, three minutes after our first operational move, our leaders received a radio message from the enemy which announced that twelve intercontinental missiles with H-bomb warheads had escaped their electronic controls and might explode in our country. The message asked us not to retaliate, as this was not an intentional act of hostility but only a technical accident.
We replied that we should have been warned earlier so that we could intercept the missiles as successfully as possible.
The enemy answered that it had taken them some time to realise what had happened, and even longer to get in touch with us.
This sounded very suspicious. We had to be on guard, of course, against a treacherous attempt by the enemy to test our vulnerability by sending a sample of twelve rockets with the excuse that they had ‘escaped’ their controls. So we did not give any details about the explosions in our country (though the enemy must have got the general picture on whatever corresponds over there to our PBX viewing screen); nor did we tell the enemy about the two thousand rockets which were already on their way and would shortly be touching ground and exploding in his Zone A. We just went on arguing about the enemy’s twelve bombs until 09.32 hours, when our rockets started arriving. As results have shown, the enemy was taken quite as much by surprise as we had been. The difference was that he had surprised us with twelve bombs; we surprised him with two thousand.
Then we waited. We hoped the enemy would interpret this limited counter-attack on a limited area as a warning—a warning in action, to be sure, not in words.
Unfortunately his viciousness was beyond reasoning with. For, on being hit by our rockets, he immediately released a huge quantity of his own, thousands of multi-megaton missiles, against our country and our allies. These started exploding at 09.50 in the areas nearest to his rocket bases, and gradually reached deeper and deeper into our territory.
Meanwhile we did not sit doing nothing, of course. PBY Command was ready for the attack this time, and automatically controlled interceptors destroyed hundreds of enemy missiles even before they reached this country, mostly over allied territories. But many more hundreds—thousands, to be exact—exploded at their predestined targets.
Naturally, as the enemy’s attack spread, our offensive branch retaliated powerfully. Thousands of missiles were fired into the remotest corners of the enemy’s country and those of his satellites, spreading death and annihilation.
One other critical moment occurred when, at 11.15 hours, our gadgets discovered that the enemy had started using rigged bombs—the highly radioactive ones. This was the most barbaric thing to do, but we had long ago realised to what atrocious extremes the enemy was likely to go. We were ready for this too, and we hit back.
We hit hard. Thousands of our missiles fitted with H-bombs in highly radioactive shells were sent to hit the enemy and his satellites wherever they might have survived. This happened at 11.20 and was our last act of war.
The last of our bombs exploded at 12.10 hours. The enemy’s last bomb had hit us at 11.45. Presumably he had run out of missiles, or had all his launching sites destroyed, even before our rigged bombs arrived to have the last word in the argument.
Needless to say, we are the victors.
JUNE 11
There is radio contact between ourselves and the enemy—between the two undergrounds, that is. Though the bombs have had their decisive say in the main argument, a kind of quarrelling post-mortem is being carried on by the spoken word. And all today the general loudspeaker system has been relaying these verbal exchanges.
This morning the enemy accused us of starting this disastrous war. He maintained that the twelve rockets which hit us in the first place were just an accident, the outcome of a technical failure, and that to retaliate with two thousand bombs was a war crime of the worst sort.
We answered that, if he had no intention of making war on us, he should not have answered our first bombing with a much more violent attack of his own. He should have refrained from action.
The enemy replied that the launching of two thousand H-bombs was not an action he could very well ignore. And retaliation, in order to be effec
tive, always had to be more powerful than the act which provoked it.
The argument went on in this fashion for some time, each side trying to shift the blame on the shoulders of the other.
“It is your leaders,” shouted the enemy’s spokesman, “who will be condemned by future generations and by history for giving that order to launch two thousand rockets in response to a mere technical mishap.”
Our reply to this accusation startled me. The speaker retorted: “Our leaders did not give the order! It was given automatically when your twelve H-bombs exploded in our country!”
He went on to explain that for safety’s sake we had not relied entirely on our leaders, who, being human, were subject to human weakness and fallibility and could be sick, meet with accidents and what not. Certainly they could have given an order to attack, but in fact they did not issue such an order. It was done by a mysterious gadget called an ‘atomphone’.
This was an intricate and ingenious device which was said to be sensitive to atomic explosions occurring within a limited range: it would react to an explosion in our country, but not one in enemy territory. Though the atomphone utilised the principle of the seismograph, its function depended also on its sensitivity to acoustic waves, electro-magnetic radiation and some other properties. Thus it would not react to a mere earthquake. Moreover, it could classify the strength of the explosion. Once the atomphone had registered an atomic explosion, it would automatically issue the order for retaliation of the appropriate strength.
The twelve exploding H-bombs made this gadget set in motion the minimum retaliatory attack. Thus the first two thousand rockets were released.
This certainly was interesting news. Our politicians must have been still on the way to their shelters on Level 5 when the actual command was taken over by the atomphone. And this device issued the order heard by X-117 and myself, “Push Button A1,” which was probably tape-recorded.
The enemy’s reply to this news was surprisingly similar. Their leaders too did not actually give any instructions to strike back. As with us, any attack automatically set off a counter-attack of greater strength.
So the picture of what really happened starts to become clear. In all probability the war did start by accident. The retaliation was automatic. So was the retaliation to the retaliation, and so on. (The only exceptions, on our side, were the command to push Buttons C2 and C3, given locally on Level 7 because the C1 bombing was not quite effective, and the repeated command to push A4, B4 and C4, which had to be given locally because of X-117’s breakdown. And this explains why the voice giving the orders changed twice.) As each retaliatory measure was automatically more powerful than the attack which caused it, it was inevitable that the war should develop with increasing violence until the arsenal of one side was completely exhausted. As it happened, the two sides were of roughly equal strength and at the end neither side had anything left to fire.
Thus the progress of the war resembled the chain reaction going on inside the atomic bomb itself! On the other hand, it followed the pattern of most of the wars in history. One difference, and a big one, was that it was a war of weapons which fought by themselves, not of human beings armed with weapons.
I wonder why they needed to have PBX Command. The atomphones could have released the rockets directly, instead of ordering human beings to do it. What was the point of using us?
I suppose our leaders might have decided to attack on their own initiative, and then they would have needed us to carry out their orders. Or it might have happened that, in retaliation for a provocative attack, they would decide to use all our power at once. Such a decision could not have been made automatically. (Just think! If all the buttons had been pushed together, the war would have been over in about an hour.)
As it turned out, this was nearly as automatic a war as could be imagined. PBX Command was the only human link in the battle of gadgets. For that reason, as X-107 once correctly reasoned, we had to be housed in a safe place inside the earth.
It looks as if all that talk yesterday about our ‘hope’ and the enemy’s ‘viciousness’ was just so much old-fashioned propaganda. The human decisions were made long in advance. Then the gadgets took over and ordered the operational moves when the actual situation corresponded with the hypothetical one in the minds of the planners.
Perhaps the whole thing would never have happened if those twelve enemy rockets had not escaped their controls. It was just an accident, a sort of joke played on us all by—well, I do not know whose joke it was. The gods? Fortune? The devil? It really does not matter. It is all over now. The gadgets have destroyed themselves, and the buttons in the PBX Operations Room can become playthings for children.
No doubt something has changed, though. Up there the scene must have changed completely. Who has survived? Which levels go on existing? How many people have become the victims of this war of gadgets? Has humanity been destroyed by its own ingenuity?
These questions do not sound quite real, for down here on Level 7 everything is just as it was, except that I have no more work to do. But still… it will be interesting to find out how much of our country is left.
JUNE 12
The Operations Room has become a sort of museum. Or a sanctuary, if you like. Where once Security forbade any but my brother button-pushers and me to tread, anybody may now wander around.
I visited the place again today, for the first time since our operations. People keep drifting in to look around the room and play with the ‘keys’ of the ‘typewriters’. Some of them asked me some pretty silly questions.
“Was pushing the buttons a very difficult thing to do?” enquired one woman. I laughed and told her that it was the simplest job imaginable. A child could have done it. An imbecile. A trained monkey!
My answer to the woman’s enquiry provoked a question in my own mind: Why did I have such a long and intensive training? Was it really necessary? Or was it really training? What skill had I acquired? Enough to push the buttons! And I had learnt all sorts of technical things seemingly unrelated to this imbecile function. My guess was that the training staff introduced them to make me feel that I had an intricate and important job to do, and to camouflage the simplicity of my basic task. This sort of ‘training’ must have been the crafty invention of my wife’s colleagues—psychologists. They studied monkeys to learn about men, and then turned men into monkeys.
While I was brooding over this, someone called my attention to the screen. I wonder why I did not look at it as soon as I entered the room.
It was in its usual place, where I had seen it every day since coming down here. But when I left it at 11.21 hours on June 9, the enemy’s territory was covered with rather nicely-coloured spots and circles. Now it was completely black.
A4, B4 and C4 had done a thorough job. They had added over-all radioactive poisoning to the blast and heat damage. Not an acre of ground belonging to the enemy or anybody on his side had escaped. Not a single coloured spot, let alone white, was left.
It gave me a curious chilly feeling. Not so much the destruction, as the completeness of it. This may have been quite irrational; but the unrelieved black made me turn and leave the Operations Room hurriedly, determined not to go back there again.
I wonder how our map looks, down there in the enemy’s ex-X Operations Room. Are there still some coloured places on it—red, blue, yellow—even some white parts? Or is it all black?”
JUNE 13
At last—some news about the destruction outside.
It appears to be total. As complete as that over territory held by the enemy, if one can go by the message they broadcast today: that their ‘Offensive Actions Operations Room’ screen showed our country, and those of our allies, lying in ruins.
As far as anybody can ascertain, no one is still living on the surface of our country. Not one radio message has been received. Of course, nobody is going to peep out and check the situation just at the moment. The radioactivity would be fatal.
Moreover, the
re is no radio contact with any shelter on Level 1, though each of these was equipped with a shortwave transmitter and receiver. We have called them, but not a squeak has been got out of them so far. They must all have been destroyed by the underground-bursting bombs—though some were probably hit by the ground-bursting and even the air-bursting ones as well.
But what difference does it make how they perished? They perished.
It looks as if all our allies have suffered the same fate. Judging by the complete radio silence, they have been wiped out not only on the surface but even in their shelters; which is not all that surprising, since the shelters were of a rather primitive and inefficient sort. The Level 1 type.
This means that only a very small percentage of our population survived the war. And the same goes, of course, for our enemy. (His satellites were no luckier than our allies.)
The world is no longer over-populated. Hundreds of millions died in those three hours. Hundreds of millions in three hours!
There is full radio contact with Levels 6, 5, 4 and 3. The military levels and those of the civilian élite were deep enough to survive the terrible blast. The civilians—especially the VIPs—must be having a hard time, getting adjusted to the underground life they entered so suddenly, but they can count themselves fortunate to be alive at all.
The lot of Level 2 is perhaps the most interesting of all, because this level has proved to be just on the border of survival. Of the forty shelters, thirty-two were too near to underground explosions to survive. But eight shelters, with about 25,000 people in each, are intact. We have radio links with them.
I cannot think why, but they keep asking us for details about what is happening on the surface. Even after they have been given the correct answer (which boils down to ‘Nothing’), they go on asking such pointless questions as, for example, “Why weren’t better shelters built for more people?” As if anything can be done about it now!
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