Desperate Games

The rest of his words were lost in the tumult in the amphitheatre caused by this incomprehensible massacre, but the scholar was looking fixedly at his colleague Sir Alex Keene, who was still smiling contentedly. Mrs Betty Han screwed up her beautiful eyes and was thinking things over in silence.

The affliction was spreading. It appeared on the vessels which were now anchored near the beaches and the landing craft which were moving away from them, loaded with men and equipment, indiscriminately attacking the second class players crammed onto the decks and their leaders wearing stars, the sailors busy handling winches and the mechanics in the engine rooms.

It was in fact sudden death: after a few spasms, the victims stayed motionless, their limbs stiff, their eyes wide open, in an unmistakeable posture. This death also attacked the sky, where one after another Alpha aircraft fell as their pilots were also overcome.

The noise of the game gradually died down. The gaps in Alpha’s ranks meant that they could no longer man their equipment and soon the guns were silent all over the battlefields. This was strange because the Beta camp seemed to be immune to the mysterious affliction. None of their players had been affected by it. On the contrary, cameras revealed them to be in great shape, even laughing and joking, their morale suddenly raised extremely high. It seemed that they had been given the order to cease firing.

Complete silence now reigned over the Alpha side, in the empty sky, on the sea dotted with boats tossed around by the whim of the sea, and on the land, where the survivors looked stupefied at the ground strewn with twisted corpses. Silence had also descended in front of all the television screens. The world trembled as it waited patiently for explanations. One of the games directors announce that an enquiry was underway and that they had decided to suspend the spectacle until the outcome was known.

5.

The intermission lasted almost two hours. Interruptions of this kind were in fact permitted if the competition went on for a long time, to allow the viewers to relax and discuss the first results. The players had to stay in position without attempting to gain any advantage while they waited for the game to resume. Some of them respected the regulation, but the Alphas could not stop themselves falling on the ground and dying in horrible convulsions. The affliction did not recognise any truce. To make the television viewers wait, the cameramen took close-up images of the victims, who all had the same appearance: contorted limbs, wrinkled and flabby skin, hollow cheeks, blue lips, sunken eyes under discoloured brows.

It did not take the enquiry long to confirm the suspicion that these symptoms had aroused. And moreover the Betas did not try to conceal the truth and their leader himself appeared on the screens to make an announcement which dispelled all ambiguity.

Pleased finally to find a chance to make use of their expertise, the doctors, physiologists, bacteriologists, all those in fact who could be grouped under the banner of biology, had

conducted experiments in great secret on the cholera bacterium and had managed to develop it to such a degree of virulence that it had devastating effects.

‘It’s a disgraceful trick!’ Fawell exclaimed, brandishing a fist at the person on screen, as if he could hear him. ‘It’s unfair to use such a weapon, it’s an invention which did not exist in the period of the landings, and is therefore completely forbidden by the rules of the game.’

It was Sir Alex Keene, the famous bacteriology expert, who undertook to reply to him. He did so with exquisite politeness and a contemptuous smile.

‘Our wise and honourable president,’ he said, ‘is certainly to be excused, as a physicist, for being ignorant of the fact that vibrio cholera (which I shall translate for him as the comma-shaped cholera bacillus) has existed since a period well before the landings. I take the liberty of reminding him, if he has forgotten it, or of informing him, if he does not know it, that Thucydides has left us a description of an epidemic which ravaged Athens in the fifth century before Jesus Christ, an epidemic which we biologists can attribute with certainty to the appearance of this bacterium. And closer to our time, in the seventh century, India became a victim of this scourge, about which we can have no doubt after reading the pages which Susrata devoted to this event. Well, the rules of the game, and you cannot ignore them, Mr President, specify that the players have the right to perfect material which existed during the period concerned. This is exactly what we have done. We –’

‘We!’ O’Kearn thundered, ‘We! You have betrayed yourself.’

‘By “we” I mean, my dear colleague, as you well know, the valorous champions of the Beta team and the eminent experts who were duly allocated to them. It was they, who, as I was trying to tell you, have simply perfected this vibrio, using processes which have not called upon any subsequent fundamental discovery. Patience and a process of selection were sufficient for our scholars. I kept myself informed about their work, but I did not interfere in any way. It’s therefore all perfectly in order.’

But Fawell and all the physicists were convinced of the contrary. The President was opening his mouth to protest when O’Kearn tapped him on the shoulder in a familiar way, and made a sign to him to be quiet. The great Nobel himself seemed to have been appeased.

‘But it’s him, I tell you,’ Fawell protested. ‘You can see right through him. It’s exactly what he used to do research on.’

‘I’m well aware of it,’ said O’Kearn.

‘But we’ll have to cancel the game, and conduct a serious enquiry. The physicists have won. The referees cannot accept…’

‘Calm down. That won’t help things. We’ll never be able to prove it.’

‘Well then?’

‘Well, just be quiet and listen to me. For a long time I’ve been suspecting that he was cooking up some kind of move of this nature…’

He continued to speak in a low voice. Gradually the physicist’s indignation subsided, giving way to a succession of confused feelings, revealed one after the other in his facial expressions. When the Nobel stopped talking, the President of the World seemed to be in the grip of a strange perplexity. He opened his mouth as though to speak but in the end kept quiet.

‘Anyway, we can’t do anything about it,’ O’Kearn concluded. ‘All we can do is wait.’

They took their seats again in front of the screen, on which the Beta leader was just finishing his explanations. He was describing in detail and rather smugly, how, from the start of the game, a few shells loaded with bacteria had been sufficient to infect the territory of the beaches and a large area of the sea. It took three days for the infection to break out and then it took effect with lightning speed, as they had been able to tell from the experimental demonstration.

He then reassured everyone by adding that there was no fear of their seeing the epidemic spread throughout the world. The danger zone was strictly controlled. Moreover the biologists had perfected a vaccine that provided complete immunity and they possessed considerable stocks of it. Their scientists were fully employed in producing it. The proof of this was that all the Betas, who had been injected with the vaccine before the competition, were in perfectly good health. He finished by commenting that all the referees, cameramen and television crews were also unharmed, because the Beta doctors had managed to find some pretext to vaccinate them as well. All this was done for humanitarian reasons and so as not to spoil the outcome for the spectators, who would now be able to be present.

Now it was Yranne’s turn to protest angrily. He had been showing growing signs of restlessness since the Alphas’ failure first became evident. He had obviously not taken this bacteriological innovation into account. His probability calculation was fundamentally flawed and he found himself about to lose the enormous bets he had placed. This time it was Zarratoff who set about calming his wrath. Sitting next to him the astronomer had not shown any signs of resentment and seemed to retain absolute confidence in the outcome of the game.

‘Don’t speak,’ he said, ‘just look and listen. I’m sure the Alphas will be victorious in the end.’

‘How can you say that, when they’re dying every minute, even during the intermission? The team is out of action.’

‘I tell you again that for me it’s an absolute certainty.’