Level 7 (Roshwald novel)
1st edition
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| Author | Mordecai Roshwald |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science Fiction |
| Publisher | McGraw Hill Book Company (McGraw-Hill) |
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Publication date
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1959 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 183 |
| ISBN | |
Level 7 is a 1959 science fiction novel by the American writer Mordecai Roshwald. It is told from the first person perspective (diary) of a modern soldier X-127 living in the underground military complex Level 7, where he and several hundred others expected to reside permanently. X-127 fulfills the role of 'push-button' offensive initiator of his nation's nuclear weapons capacity against an unspecified enemy. X-127 narrates life within a deep shelter before, during and after a nuclear war that wipes out the human species.
During his forced residence at a deep underground offensive-warfare complex, X-127 is ordered to push missile firing buttons to begin World War III (which lasts a total of 2 hours and 58 minutes). From that point, humanity's few civilian survivors are situated within a collection of underground shelter complexes on Levels 1 through 5 at various depths from the irradiated surface, while military personnel already occupy the deepest and safest Levels 6 and 7. It later emerges that the orders given have been wholly automatic due to a launch on warning strategy, and the war has taken place as a series of automated electronic responses to an initial accident.
X-127 and his fellow shelter inhabitants belatedly learn the criteria that had determined admission to the shelters: civilians were granted only an illusion of protection, while government officials and military personnel were granted significantly more security. Those who were assigned to launch the nuclear missiles, and their support staff, were selected for their ability to behave like machines, yet are counted upon to preserve the human spirit and rebuild the human race. X-127 and his colleagues attempt to carry on human life, but discover that institutions such as marriage and preparations for child-rearing have been hollowed out by conditions and attitudes in the antiseptic underground.
Toward the end of the novel, the inhabitants of surviving shelters within collaterally hit neutral nations, the former enemy nation and the unnamed protagonist nation gradually meet their deaths as radioactive surface contamination makes its way down past air filters and into water sources in the ground. As Level 7's safety falls into question, its inhabitants confront their growing isolation, overconfidence in technology, loneliness below a dead world, and the insanity of a society whose momentum toward annihilation exceeded its collective will to live. At last, the inhabitants of "Level 7" are wiped out after a malfunction in their nuclear power pile results in lethal contamination of their erstwhile sanctuary. They are apparently the last human beings on Earth to perish, and X-127 is the very last one at the story's conclusion. The extinction of humanity has taken four months from the time that the missiles were first fired.
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