The Value of Dread

Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald © 1959

*** SPOILERS ***

My experience with this short pseudo-diary could be symbolized as a cloud-shrouded mountain. You stand at the bottom, staring up, not knowing how high or how difficult the ascent may be. Two or three passers-by mention that it’s well-worth the climb, but say nothing more, give no detail. Okay. But still, something holds you back. After much deliberation, and because your quest is never-ending, you put it on your list of "things to get to," and you get going to other things.

Now, after all other distractions have been exhausted, the mountain confronts you. There is nothing left but to take that first step. You take a deep breath, wondering not will this book change me somehow, but rather, will this be a giant waste of time.

You begin the climb.

It’s tough, no lie. Several times you weigh the pros and cons of quitting, of seeking out another mountain. Often you stop, but, jaw set, you never turn back and descend. While constantly evaluating, you keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep moving forward and upward. Before long, you’re in the midst of cloud and fog, dense gray mist, but every now and then you catch a glimpse of something terrible and terrifying above the clouds. Overwhelmed by curiosity, you find in yourself a new-found strength.

Finally, you reach the uppermost cliffs of the mountain, and your mouth drops open and a shiver, a true shiver, runs up and down and back and forth along your spine.

The value of dread. That’s what Level 7 has to teach.

As I noted earlier, it’s written in the form of a diary over a six-and-a-half month period, by an officer who gets recruited, coerced when you consider the details, into becoming an operative in Level 7. This is a bunker built four thousand feet below the earth’s surface, holding five hundred men and women, and is responsible for our reprisal to a nuclear attack by our enemy.

The author of the diary is a push-button officer, who simply sits at a console six hours a day (there are four such officers in Level 7) and awaits the command to push the button.

Roshwald attempts to universalize the experience of this man by removing all extraneous detail, such as the officer’s nationality, the enemy’s nationality, and all proper place names. The military, in its somewhat dubious wisdom, even removes the birth names of the denizens of this level, giving each a code for his occupation and a number. The author of the diary is known to us only as X-127.

X-127 fills the early part of his journal explaining the routine of Level 7, which quickly grows tedious, and then the attempts by unseen masters to create a more utopian society underground. Because, once you go down to Level 7, to avoid compromise that could result in the deaths of millions, you don’t come back up to the surface.

Then one day, X-127 is ordered to push the button.

It is over in three hours. The surface has been annihilated in a nuclear war. Our hero remains oddly unaffected (as do most – all occupants of Level 7 have been psychologically screened and very few have relatives surfaceside). His partner, however, X-107, hangs himself.

Now: dread. There are other levels, the more larger the more closer to the surface and thus occupied with whoever the government deems as lesser in importance. Level 7 can communicate with these levels, as well as surviving enemy levels.

Once such level decides to send a husband-and-wife volunteer team to the surface to describe and experience the carnage. And describe they do. Death by radiation sickness, while not violent, is truly a horrifying way to die. After a few days, the team is no longer strong enough to transmit reports, and then we realize: silence equals death.

Daily life, mundane and pointless, continues on Level 7.

Then, one by one, the other levels fall silent.

The lethal radiation on the surface is seeping downward, dripping into waterways, overcoming air filtration systems and poisoning food supplies. The levels closest to the surface, panicking, broadcast their death spasms as they fall silent, one by one. Some, such as the enemy’s levels and Level 6, fall silent without any explanation whatsoever.

But Level 7 should be safe, no? The designers saw to it that it would. They have a 10,000 year supply of food and water somehow; they’re almost cocooned off from the entire world. Besides, babies are beginning to be born. Life is returning to normal, at least in a superficial way. The author occupies himself with writing jokes and crafting a new mythology to teach the children.

Then, a person in Level 7 succombs to radiation poisoning. And the problem with radiation poisoning seems to be its tendency to spread exponentially.

A day or so later, half the level is experiencing sickness. The first fatalities occur when it is realized that it is not the surface radiation that is killing the level. No, it is true that Level 7 is safe from outside radiation. This problem is much worse.

It’s the level’s own nuclear reactor, its only source of power, that is leaking. Somehow, some random stab of fate, something went wrong. Men risk their lives to repair it, without success. A few agonizing hours later, most are too weak to even think of a solution. Most die where they fall.

The author is able to get into his bunk, where he scrawls his final entry, his final, heart-rending entry, and dies as the last person alive on the planet earth.

Dread. That sickening feeling, perhaps too much like radiation poisoning, that conviction that something nasty is coming for you, relentless and unstoppable. Roshwald here is a master of dread. If any author wished his words to be etched in the reader’s memory, dread, a perverted aphrodisiac, is a very potent tool.

Level 7 is the most dreadful book I’ve ever read. And that is the terrible and terrifying vision I saw at the top of the mountain. It is one you won’t easily forget.