All the television viewers understood his intention and suddenly stopped what they were doing, craning their necks and maintaining a solemn silence. In front of the screen in the great amphitheatre, the scholars and even the Nobels observed a truce in the violent quarrel which had arisen between them. Sir Alex Keene stopped shaking his fist under O’Kearn’s nose for a moment, and World President Fawell suddenly stopped too, his fist raised, forgetting to smash it down again on the face of one of his biology ministers, who had just pounced on him savagely calling him an anthropocentrist. It was the high point of the spectacle. The whole of humanity was paralysed by the same oppression, breathless at the sight of the sublime attempt by the dying leader of the Alpha team. Would he succeed?
He succeeded. The cameraman, who was dying himself, followed his every move right up to the last. He managed, unsteady on his legs and stumbling, to put first one foot, then two, on the sand of the continent. There, stiff but upright, and just before falling down dead, he raised both his arms parallel to each other towards the reeking sky, in a final world salute symbolising at the same time the eternal ascent of science in pursuit of progress, and the definitive, irrefutable victory of his clan. For victory it was necessary that at least one living Alpha was present on the shore after the annihilation of the enemy team. And this was indeed so. The entire world was witness to it, in the absence of the referees, who had been vapourised. The physicists’ side had triumphed, according to the rules of the game.
After this very emotional sequence, and as the Nobels were beginning to argue and hit each other again, Yranne kept his distance, feeling somewhat dazed in the company of Zarratoff, calm as ever, Mrs Betty Han and Fawell, who had managed to quell his feelings of aggression. The mathematician wiped his forehead with his hand.
‘My calculations were wrong,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m the first to admit it, but they led to the correct result. The history of science abounds in incidents of this kind and anyway, I won my bets.’
‘What I would like to know, Zarratoff,’ asked Betty, screwing up her eyes, and enveloping him in her penetrating gaze, ‘is how you could be so sure of the final Alpha victory when the rest of us were so anxious?’
‘It’s true,’ commented Fawell. ‘In my case, I remained hopeful because O’Kearn had let me in on the secret, but you could not be in the know about our last card, which was decisive.’
‘I didn’t know anything about it,’ said Zarratoff.
‘So?’ the three friends asked him insistently.
The astronomer smiled in an enigmatic way.
‘You really want to know?’ he said.
In response to their entreaties, he smiled again and drew from his pocket a piece of paper, which he unfolded in the same enigmatic way. He spread it out on a desk.
It was the sky map which Yranne had found him hunched over that day when he had gone to urge him to bet on Alpha, and by the side of which he had indulged in complicated calculations. It was possible to make out the sun and various planets joined together by lines which formed a diagram. It was now the scholars’ turn to lean over the document, as they listened to the astronomer’s explanations.
‘I consulted the skies,’ he said. ‘According to the date, and the location and orientation on that particular day of Mars and Mercury, there could be no doubt about it. The Alphas were guaranteed a victory by their horoscope.’
Notes
The below are Pierre Boulle’s original notes
1. Henri Fauconnier (Malaysia)
2. H.G. Wells (The Shape of Things to Come)
3. ‘Aesthetic life is conditioned by the times, science conditions the times’ H.G. Wells (The Shape of Things to Come)
4. Milton (Paradise Lost)
5. Georges Lemaître (Revue des questions scientifiques, November 1931)
Biographical notes
Pierre François Marie-Louis Boulle (1912–1994) was born in Avignon on 20 February 1912. After obtaining an engineering degree from the École supérieure d’électricité in Paris, he moved to Malaya and began working on British rubber plantations.
Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Boulle enlisted with the French army in Indochina. In 1941, he became a secret agent, working on behalf of the Free French mission in Singapore. Operating under the false identity of English citizen Peter John Rule, he aided the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina. He was captured by Vichy France loyalists in 1943 and sentenced to hard labour for life, although he later escaped. Boulle was later made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance for his actions.
In 1949 Boulle returned to Paris and turned his hand to writing. He achieved his first major success with The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) which was a fictionalised account of prisoners of war who were forced to build a bridge in Thailand. The book quickly became a worldwide bestseller and its film adaptation won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1957. Today, Boulle is also remembered for his dystopian novel, Planet of the Apes (1963), which imagined a planet where humans were treated like animals by their intellectual superiors, apes. This book was also successfully adapted into an Oscar-winning film, followed by several other film adaptations and sequels, a television series and comic book series.
Boulle continued to write for the rest of his life, publishing works of non-fiction based on his wartime experiences in addition to numerous novels and short stories. He died in Paris at the age of eighty-one.
Dr David Carter has taught at St. Andrews and Southampton universities in the UK and has been Professor of Communicative English at Yonsei University, Seoul. He now works freelance as a writer, journalist and translator. He has published books on psychoanalysis, literature, literary theory, drama, film history and applied linguistics. For Hesperus he has translated Georges Simenon’s Three Crimes, Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine, Klaus Mann’s Alexander, and works by the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud. He has also written volumes in the Hesperus Brief Lives series on de Sade, Balzac and Freud. His most recent book, How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a tongue-in-cheek guide for would-be Nobel laureates.
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Copyright
Published by Hesperus Press Limited
28 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7RD
www.hesperuspress.com
Desperate Games first published in 1971 as Les jeux de l’espirit
© Estate of Pierre Boulle
English language translation © David Carter, 2014
First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2014
This ebook edition first published, 2014
Typeset by Sarah Newitt
Cover design by Roland Codd
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78094–371–8