Mrs Han, who was sitting next to them, listened to their conversation and looked at the astronomer with intense curiosity. Yranne shrugged his shoulders angrily, but the calm and confidence of his friend ended up silencing him. What is more there was no point in protesting any more. The jury’s decision had just been announced and it had been concluded that the regulation had been respected. There was no possibility of appeal. Even the President himself could not intervene. The game continued.
6.
The denouement was approaching and it promised to be a triumph for the biologists’ camp. They penetrated the enclaves occupied by their opponents without encountering any resistance. Too distraught to be able to defend themselves, the survivors were slaughtered on the spot. The Beta players then set about throwing all the bodies into the sea, both dead and wounded in a haphazard way for the sake of greater security, so as to avoid any uncertainty concerning their victory. The criterion for this was indeed that no Alpha should remain alive on the soil of Normandy. This last operation was not as interesting as the earlier sequences. Also, many of the television viewers, regarding the spectacle as finished, were getting ready to desert the screen, taking with them sufficient thrilling images to enable them to banish their melancholy for a very long time.
The noise of an engine made them change their minds and they looked up. As soon as it became visible in the great amphitheatre, O’Kearn winked at Fawell, who responded by smiling at him. An airplane soon appeared on the screen, the Alpha team’s last one. It had been kept in reserve in case it was needed in England, far from the great battles, and it was now flying towards the Normandy beaches. The Beta players looked at each other in amazement. According to all their intelligence, the Alphas had no more equipment at their disposal and what is more they were resigned to defeat, too disheartened to attempt any aggression. The airplane was also not bearing the physicists’ colours, as the rules required. Many thought that it must be an aircraft bringing the referees to confirm the victory of the Beta team by awarding them the prize.
They were mistaken. As masters of the atom and masters of energy, the physicists could not accept such a humiliating defeat and they were keeping a final trump card, a powerful one, up their sleeve, even if using it meant slightly bending the rules of the game. O’Kearn was aware of all this, and suspecting some sort of trick on the part of his rival Sir Alex Keene, had put all his scientific knowledge in the service of his clan and collaborated in secret on the manufacture of a bomb, just one, but one which would be sufficient to reverse the situation completely yet again.
All the Betas were annihilated, as well as the dying Alphas. Unfortunately, the television viewers were deprived of the final holocaust scen
e and it was even feared for a moment that the last image would not be the dazzling flash after the bomb was dropped, for all the screens would go off after it.
Indeed the physicists, who, like O’Kearn, thought that science should be independent of mankind, and not having the biologists’ concern for human life, had omitted to make any provision for the protection of television crews. Cameramen, referees and the directors of the games were utterly annihilated, as were the players themselves, in less than a second.
But not everybody. One was left, a very young cameraman, who was well away from the point of impact and had the presence of mind, just before the explosion, to plunge into an abandoned underground shelter with his equipment. He was not killed immediately, and was able to come out again a moment afterwards. Then, burnt, blind, half suffocated, and bombarded by a whirlwind of lethal particles, he was still conscientious enough to use his equipment to capture the last images and intuitively turned his camera towards the sea, the only subject that was still worth filming.
Thanks to him the television viewers were not deprived of the end of the spectacle. Thanks to him, screens all over the world lit up again and the last sight broadcast over the airwaves provided a fitting end to an unforgettable spectacle.
‘Look!’ yelled O’Kearn, clasping Fawell’s shoulder. ‘Look, we’ve won!’
It was a very small rubber boat, occupied by a single person, who was wearing himself out rowing and making his way towards the shore. It soon became clear he was the head of the Alphas. He was the only one to survive the carnage, along with the cameraman. On the battleship which served him as command post and which was passing quite far from the coast, he had already been able to survive the cholera bacteria. He had also been spared the effects of dropping the bomb and its lethal radiation, but as a consequence of the turmoil caused by the cataclysm on land, sea and in the air, an enormous ground swell accompanied by a raging wind had suddenly swept his vessel towards the shore, where it had run aground and been broken up. He lost no time. Heaving himself onto the only available boat, a kind of very small dinghy, which had survived the storm, he used his remaining strength to reach land in Normandy, despite the stinking atmosphere that covered it.
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)