Desperate Games (9 page)

‘Depressing, I’m sure.’

‘How does one go about making gold!’ Fawell yelled out. ‘Do you get it? Since, in the final analysis, all bodies are composed of the same materials, I must possess a simple recipe they could use, which would only require a retort and a stove, probably so that they could transmute pebbles from the beach or the stones that clutter up their gardens into gold!’

Once again the psychologist tried to respond and to find some encouraging arguments:

‘That shows nevertheless that they had understood something about the unity of matter. In this case as well, perhaps the stage of superstition is necessary. I think that –’

She was interrupted by a telephone ringing. It was Yranne calling the President from Beijing. Fawell listened for some time without interrupting. He made no comment when the other had finished.

‘Fine,’ he said simply. ‘We’ll discuss all that at a council meeting.’

But when he turned towards Betty, his face had become even more hollow. He remained silent for a considerable length of time.

‘May I know how my former compatriots are behaving?’ the Chinese woman asked finally.

‘He dealt with statistics and probabilities,’ Fawell said slowly, ‘highlighting the role these notions play in both everyday life and in the Universe.’

‘And?’

‘In this case too, after the class, just one question was asked. Can you guess what it was?’

‘By looking at your expression and trying as best I can, I could at least guess the nature of it,’ Betty replied calmly.

Fawell struck the table in a sudden burst of rage.

‘They asked him… they begged him on their knees to provide them with an infallible winning formula for roulette!’

Several inspections carried out all over the world did not provide any more encouraging results, so that the education of humanity became a serious matter of worry and anxiety for the government of Earth. Soon it was to have other concerns, relating, paradoxically, to those people who appeared to want to get involved along the right lines, who appreciated the progress made by science for its true value, and who, realising that they had been freed from rough menial tasks, used this freedom for their own benefit and their leisure time to educate their mind. They were taking the very same path that the world administration was trying to open up. It was among these people that the symptoms of a strange illness were detected one day.

The first person affected by it whom they could put under observation to study the illness was Nicolas Zarratoff, Fawell’s own son-in-law, who was now an experienced cosmonaut and had rejoiced at the scientific revolution and appreciated its effects. But before his case, two fatal accidents alerted the authorities. The two victims were also space pilots, and the conditions were identical and inexplicable. The first accident happened to a man named Jim Barley, when he was piloting his private plane while on leave. An apparently absurd conversation had taken place between him and the control tower of the airport where he was to land. Unfortunately this conversation had not been recorded and it seemed to be so incoherent that many suspected a memory lapse on the part of the employee who had reported it. According to him, Barley had announced that he was incapable of carrying out the landing manoeuvres by himself, although his controls were working well and the visibility was perfect. The employee was incapable of specifying the reason, as the pilot’s feverish attempts at explanation were incomprehensible. The matter ended in tragedy. The aircraft suddenly seemed to go completely out of control and crashed on
the ground. Barley’s dead body was found among the shapeless debris and the inquest yielded nothing.

The WAO (World Astronautic Organisation) concluded that he must have suffered from a sudden illness, and nothing would have come of the affair if a second accident of the same nature had not occurred a few days later to another cosmonaut, while he was also piloting a tourist plane. Like Barley, he had started to make incoherent comments and died in similar circumstances. The nature of the illness which had attacked these unfortunate men baffled the WAO doctors, and none of the psychologists who were consulted could come to a satisfactory diagnosis. These two successive accidents had seemed sufficiently unusual for a confidential report on them to be sent to the government.

Nicolas Zarratoff felt happy to be alive that morning, with the prospect of three months’ holiday which had just been granted to him. He had certainly earned it and he and Ruth were finally going to go on the long honeymoon journey which they had been planning for a long time. They had constantly had to put it off since their marriage due to the urgency of the missions which were entrusted to him.

On coming out of his office where he had just received the good news, Nicolas jumped into his car and dashed off to his bungalow, without any thought of speed limits. He found Ruth cutting flowers in the garden and embraced her passionately.

‘I’ve got it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Three months.’

‘Darling, three months! I thought that –’

‘Three whole months. The two due after the mission and one extra month because –’

‘Because?’

When Ruth looked at him there was suddenly anxiety in her eyes. It seemed to her that there was a dark shadow over her husband’s brow. The cloud quickly disappeared and he replied with a cheerfulness which was perhaps a little forced, ‘It’s the
WAO medical examination which has given me this gift. It was very nice of them.’

‘Darling, are you ill?’

‘I have never felt so good. But after doing the whole range of analyses and tests they think… I didn’t understand exactly what it was, and neither do they, I think… in short, they think they have detected some element which could mean there’s a vague trace of mental imbalance… So you can see how precise they are! Finally they all came to the agreement that an extra month of leave could only be good for my health. And there you are!’

‘You’re not worried?’

‘Worried!’

He burst out laughing, lifted her up in his arms and twirled her round.

‘Don’t you see that it’s just a pretext to reward me, after my work over the last few years! The quack who read the report to me shrugged his shoulders and laughed. Who knows whether your president of a father didn’t give secret orders to the WAO so that we could at last have a long honeymoon? Worried! I tell you again that I have never been in such a good mood, never have I been so happy. When are we leaving?’

‘The day after tomorrow, if you want to. I need at least forty-eight hours to get our luggage ready… We’ve known the route for a long time.’

‘Excellent! I’ll just pop down to the airfield, to get the old
Icarus
ready.’

That was his nickname for his private airplane. He was a former test pilot and the companies he had worked for in the past had made him a gift of it when he gave up this job to undertake interplanetary flights. Every time he was staying on Earth he used it to make quick excursions with Ruth. The airplane was also kept ready for a long journey around the world.

He examined
Icarus
and found that she was in perfect condition. He gave some final instructions to the mechanics and went back to help his wife.

He was going to put his car away, when a trivial incident caused him to frown. Like the bungalow complex, the garage was equipped with the latest technical refinements intended to save its occupants any superfluous effort. Nicolas had carefully supervised the installation of various automatic gadgets, amusing himself by inventing and fixing up some of them himself. An electric eye controlled the metal shutter of the garage. As the car approached, it cut through a ray of light and the shutter went up. For a long time he had been in the habit of always moving the car forward at the same speed, having calculated the exact speed required some time ago. This had become second nature to him, so that the bonnet reached the entrance at the precise moment when the way was clear.

But this time the mechanism did not work. The shutter stayed down and Nicolas behaved strangely. He sat there, his eyes fixed on the entrance, his hands clenching the steering wheel, his tense foot maintaining the same pressure on the accelerator, and the car continuing to move forward at the same pace. His mind felt empty as he watched the obstacle approaching and he was paralysed with a sort of anxiety. The reflex action of letting the accelerator go did not occur. This state of torpor lasted three or four seconds and did not disappear until just as the bonnet was about to hit the shutter, when he felt suddenly free again and able to slam on the brake sharply.

He got out of the vehicle, and at first was disturbed by the strange turn which had come over him, and then he was racked by a violent feeling of irritation at the failure of the mechanism, a kind of rage out of all proportion to the trivial nature of the incident. He needed several minutes to calm down before he was able to operate the control by hand and park his car. Even now he did not seem to be sure of his movements and he had to make
several attempts to get it exactly into its usual place, which was next to Ruth’s car.

Having finally pulled himself together, he stayed still for a long time, and could not help thinking reluctantly about the confused conclusions of the medical report. Then he shrugged his shoulders and forced himself to think of nothing but the preparations for the journey, and his face was serene again when he joined his wife.

The WAO differed from its predecessor NASA, and similar associations included within it, not only in the tenfold increase in the size of its resources, but also in its choice of objectives, which were always selected according to rigorous scientific criteria. It was no longer a question nowadays of winning a race or a bet and of sending two or three men to spend a few hours on the moon to collect a small pile of pebbles. In this field, as in others, it was a matter of making real scientific progress. A rational exploration of space should allow teams of qualified scholars, provided with the necessary equipment, to settle on accessible celestial bodies and to conduct methodical research there.

As a corollary to this policy, the first results obtained concerning astronomical matters, even if they were of profound importance, were not spectacular. It had taken a long time to coordinate the enterprises of the former nations, which had been very different in their objectives and in the means they employed. A satellite base as large as a small town was now going round the Earth, thanks to which journeys to the moon had become routine operations. The moon was the only celestial body to have been conquered thus far and the aim was to develop it and establish permanent observatories and laboratories there. The satellite base would also serve as a point of departure for future flights to the planets. The exploration of Mars was planned for the near future. For the present a few
crews had only flown around it, reporting back with a mass of information to use for a future expedition.

Nicolas Zarratoff was in command of one of the most recent flights of this kind, which had stayed in space for several months. Ruth had urged him to accept this mission, which was one of the most important of his career, and for which he had been specially chosen. He deserved to be chosen, as much for his experience of space as for his ability to keep his cool and his quick-wittedness and excellent reflexes. In a period when automatic equipment was still subject to failure, he had managed to take control himself, as the first pioneers to the moon had done, and sort out a dangerous situation, which exceeded the capability of computers.

It is true that he had not had the chance to act in this way for a very long time, and that he would probably never have to do it again. Equipment failures had become more and more rare in the course of the last three years, so much so that they could nowadays be considered almost impossible miraculous events. The WAO had established the principle that an accident was unacceptable, given the status of the passengers, such as all the famous scholars, that vessels now carried. The reliability required of equipment did not just have to be more than ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent, as people were content to accept in the past, but over 99.999999… per cent with a sequence of nines taking up a whole line. For Nicolas Zarratoff and other former cosmonauts, these equipment failures were distant memories. As for the young ones, if one brought up the possibility of the onboard computer breaking down for example, they took it as a great joke and burst out laughing. Even less likely for them was the possibility of the enormous organisation being wrong, as it followed their flights on the Earth, watched everything, predicted everything and gave them orders at every turn.

During the last flight around Mars the equipment had functioned impeccably as usual and, as commander, Nicolas
had not encountered a single danger warning during the long months. The trajectory was directed and controlled every single moment by the computers. When an urgent decision had to be taken, of the order of a second or a fraction of a second, the onboard computers took care of it. They had greater sensitivity and quicker reflexes than any pilot, registering the data related to the problem, finding a solution and giving the order for the right reaction well before the human brain could start thinking about it. The heavy and powerful earthbound computers could not intervene in such cases, as communications between the vessel in the vicinity of Mars and the Earth required several minutes. They never got a look in, although with their soundness of judgment and incomparable effectiveness they would have been superior if it were not for the time delay required to solve the problems.

With time Nicolas had become accustomed to trusting them completely, with the result that he also spent long hours of leisure inside the spacecraft. He used it to study and perfect his scientific knowledge, taking advantage of the passengers on board, who were eminent scholars. These scholars willingly and with good grace became teachers and organised a series of classes for the benefit of the commander and some members of the crew, which also relieved the scholars themselves of the constant tension that used to be imposed on them by their responsibilities. During this period, the spacecraft, entrusted to the impeccable electronic brains, made its way to the precise point it was due to reach, without ever diverging more than an inch from its correct trajectory.