The world’s game
JACOBO IZQUIERDO
Copyright © 2019 JACOBO IZQUIERDO CIFUENTES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
To all the people who fight against cancer day after day.
In memory of my uncle, Manuel Izquierdo Monfort.
To my friends and family:
Águeda, Claudia, Sergio, Juan Pablo, Verónica, Nieves, Manuel and Vanessa.
A thousand thanks…
Prologue
“I’m very close to win the most important case of my career,” Ted said looking at his wife with great joy.
“Ted…” Natalie muttered. “I’ve told you a thousand times that when you’re with me and with our little son, you have to get disconnected from work.”
“But,” after a brief pause to mince his words, he continued: “everything I do is for you two. If I can make that old curmudgeon retire, that post will be mine. Do you know what that means? Do you?”
“Of course I do.” his wife said with sadness. “No more holidays, and the worst of all, you’ll have less time to spend with us. I’m sorry, but I can’t cheer up.”
“I promise…”
“I’m sick of your promises!” Natalie shouted, drastically interrupting her husband’s words. “Days go by and every time we see you less. I don’t want to raise our son by myself,” she thought for an instant, “as it happened to your mother.”
“But darling, I do it for you two. Sometimes I think I think you’re envious of all the goals I’ve achieved.”
“Envious? Envious of what? Of spending the whole day working? Of waking up in the middle of the night shouting «OBJECTION?»” Natalie vociferated as she struck out.
Just before Ted could answer, her three-month-old son woke up because of his mother’s screams and started to cry. Aloof from this detail, the controversy lasted for some minutes until Natalie realized about it and asked her husband to make silence.
“We’ve woken up the baby,” she whispered.
“Have you noticed that? He’s stopped crying when we made silence,” he mumbled.
The woman turned around and caressed her son, who was sitting on the minivan’s backseat.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. Mum and dad won’t get angry again,” she said caressing his cheek. The baby replied with a thin smile.
Natalie sat up in her seat and when she looked at the front, she saw something that startled her. As fast as she could, she shouted at the top of her lungs with her face fully transformed by the fear:
“WATCH OUT!”
Chapter 1
Any given day on planet Mida…
“Here again?” Asked the man in charge of the mine, the eldest of all those who worked in that den.
“It seems that he hasn’t had enough,” another miner added.
The rest of the mines started to laugh. Palac, who was in one of the chambers surrounded by several of the miners, took one of the rocks form the ground and lifted it.
“Get back!” He shouted. “I like to see how you mine plistor. Its violet-shaded color fascinates me. I think my presence shouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable,” he replied as he peeped out to watch the fluid surface from the entrails of Rijan Mountain.
At observing his behavior, laughs increased since their suits could resist the impact of objects heavier than three thousand kilos without tearing, and the rock he was holding wasn’t heavier than a hundred.
“Drop that stone and go away right now,” begged the foreman. “You’re making a fool of yourself. For you this is a game, for us it’s an eternal duty. A condemnation that, in my case, will last for two thousand years. Your father decided that we were the men in charge of working in this place. Meanwhile, the other midarians live life with no duties at all.”
“Get away from here, grandfathered!” Another miner whose suit was more blackened than the others’ shouted.
Palac’s pseudonym for the inhabitants of Mida was «grandfathered» because he was the son of Cabolun, leader of the planet. The majority of the inhabitants completely loathed him.
“I just wanted to help. It wasn’t my intention to cause such a big explosion.”
“This place is too narrow and any mistake can be dreadful. I wouldn’t like having to communicate such accident to your father,” said the man in charge as he took his position again. He was holding one of the hoses that extracted the precious material to conduct it to the tank interior.
“I just wanted to apologize. I didn’t know it was so explosive, I…”
“You know how important the plistor is for our existence, so you’d better not come back here,” the foreman said. “Your youth makes you commit mistakes. You can’t control the weight of the suit yet and that makes you terribly clumsy.”
Without saying anything else, the midarian youth got out of the mine located in the south of the planet. On his way back to the civilization —so to speak, because the mountain range on which the mountain was settled was at quite a few hundreds of kilometers away Nalactia, the only city on the planet—, Palac was sad and angry for such an uncomfortable situation. He was frustrated because of the hate that everybody felt for him due to his privileged situation. More than once, he had been heard saying: «I wish I weren’t the leader’s son.» But that was something he didn’t really mean. He admired his father and liked imagining the day in which he would be named his successor.
After walking for an undetermined lapse of time and beholding the steep and arid image the landscape left behind him, he got to one of the thousands of the transportation cabins scattered along the planet. He hesitated for a moment about what destination to choose. Finally, he decided on one of the cabins located in Coltawet, that area in the west. There, wetroc combats have been celebrated for thousands of years. A moment before pressing the command on the screen, he heard a raucous noise. The cabin started to tremble and Palac decided to go outside. «Beiler’s spacecraft,» he thought undaunted.
As he had predicted, there he was. The captain of the midarian army was peeping out behind one of the dampers of his colossal spacecraft: an enormous machine of titanic dimensions known as Spores315. Forming a perfect isosceles triangle, it was the biggest every built on the planet. It was a small city with a base of two kilometers and another two of height. Its interior was perfectly adapted to carry up to a hundred thousand soldiers and store a large amount of weapons. Used in the past as a craft of combat, nowadays is only a simply planetary mean of transport, capable of travelling at a speed similar to the one of light.
“What is the reason for such an unexpected apparition?” Palac asked fastening the glove on his right hand, a gesture that showed nervousness.
“Come with me!” Beiler ordered with determination in a deep voice.
In that precise moment, the youngest and the eldest inhabitant of Mida were together. A huge difference of age. The novice and inexperienced midarian was a thousand a five hundred years old. However, the captain of the army carried two hundred and fifty million years of experience on his back.
“Can you tell me something in advance?” He asked with a serious expression. Although he was too young, he could perceive worry.
“Not now, I have to inform your father in the first place,” he answered categorically.
“Come on,” Palac added walking towards the damper.
Beiler reduced drastically the craft speed so as to carry out the taking off maneuver without any problems. Several seconds later, the Spores315 landed in Nalactia city.
Chapter 2
It was the year 2047. In the city of Albuquerque (New Mexico), it lives Josef, a nine-year-old boy who loves Astronomy. His dream is to become an astronaut, as his grandpa was. Contrary to the other boys his age, who spend time playing virtual games, he s
pends it observing the galaxy to find new planets.
Mike is a retired astronaut of sixty-four years old. He is known worldwide for being the first man who stepped on Uranus. After decades of investigation in extremely secret programs, the U.S.A. government made of public domain the images of the interior of the military base known as Area 51, where dozens of crafts designed to travel to any planet of the Solar System were kept. The propulsion of spaceships has been considerably modified, which made it possible to achieve a speed unknown until this moment. Spacesuits have also been improved to resist all kind of weather conditions.
All this was possible thanks to the fact that, in 2017, a group of explorers found in the Mojave Desert (California), the biggest bag of petroleum in the world. Inside it, there was enough stock to supply the world population for two hundred years. This finding was the key to overcome the terrible U.S.A. economic situation. With thousands of millions of barrels being produced, the economy of the country lived its biggest rise in History. GDP increased fivefold and that made the government of the time decide to invest the ten per cent of the profits obtained from the petroleum in financing space projects. Scientists and investigators from around the world join the race to step on Mars on a specific deadline: the year 2020. A few months earlier, an expedition formed by two men and a woman, placed the American flag on Martian ground. The rest of the planets of the Solar System were stepped on one by one years later, but in none of them they found anything of what they were looking for. Some microorganisms of primitive composition found in samples of water from Venus were the only reward until the time.
August 7th. It is 9.14 pm. Mike and his grandson are finishing dinner while they watch TV. All the channels show the same image: the man reaching Neptune. It is an event that has the whole world expectant since Neptune is the last planet of the Solar System that had not been conquered yet. All hopes are laid in this last mission. If no sign of vegetable or animal life was found, the mission started on Mars would be a deception.
“Grandpa… do you think they will find life?” Josef asked biting a small piece of meat.
“Honestly, I don’t think so,” Mike answered in a hopeless tone. “We’ve spent billions of dollars in project Life and we haven’t found anything. I have to admit that the money used to finance this project hasn’t affected American society wellbeing since we’ve lived very well in the latest years. But I think that we could’ve invested that money in projects of major interest. In my opinion, this project wasn’t created to look for a sign of life. It was made with the sole purpose of winning the space race to China and Russia.”
“But you’ve been to Uranus,” Josef replied as he held a small toy craft in his hands. “Did you use to think like that then?”
“Finish your dinner and then you play,” Mike said as he took the craft away from him. “To be honest, yes. But the obsession of stepping on an unexplored planet was stronger than my ideals.”
Josef picked the last two pieces of meat in his dish with the fork and he swallowed them almost without chewing them. With the best manners, he took the dish and cutlery and placed them inside the sink. Once he had finished with that, we went back to the stool in which he was sitting. Despite the big dining room they had, they always had dinner in the kitchen island in the middle of the room.
“And which are those projects you would have carried out?” Josef asked, still with remains of food in his mouth, as he took the craft again.
“Mainly, after having stepped the four first planets to find nothing, I would’ve closed the project to invest that money in another thing, such as, for example, in trying to travel to other planets outside the Solar System, in improving our crafts to be able to reach even further, etc.” It seemed he had forgotten he was speaking with a nine-year-old boy. His answer would have been more suitable for one of the conferences he used to give at universities.
“Other planets outside the Solar System?” The boy asked rising the tone of his voice. “Do you mean those we search with the telescope before going to sleep?”
“Yes. According to the latest studies carried out by NASA, there are around five hundred thousand planets with climate characteristics very similar to the ones on the Earth and on which, therefore, it could exist life. To reach them, it would be necessary to improve considerably our crafts. They are still too slow to travel across the space. For you to have an idea…” he stopped for some seconds to remember, “…the trip to Uranus lasted three hundred and two days.”
“That’s almost a year,” the youth added naively.
“That’s it, Josef, almost a year.”
“All this fascinates me. But, honestly, I’d like much more to see how all that money, or good deal of it, is invested in helping developing countries so as to stop with world starvation.”
Mike laughed out loud at hearing his grandson’s words. “Sometimes I don’t know if you’re nine or forty years old. You speak with astonishing maturity. To tell the truth, I’d also like that anyone in the world would starve, but it’s necessary to invest money in these projects. The toothpaste tube, dehydrated food, wireless gadgets and the GPS are just examples of the very many things with which the space race has contributed to people’s wellbeing. Listen to me: you’ll never be able to eradicate world’s starvation, but maybe one day, when you’re an astronaut, you might arrive in some planet or meet beings different from us.”
The old man stood up with some difficulty and went to the sink to get a cloth with which to clean the remains of food were scattered on the surface of the kitchen island. Despite of belonging to the leisured classes, he had never hired a maid to do the household chores. According to his life philosophy, doing so would lead him to forget about his origins. During his childhood, he was very poor and that left a deep mark on his personality.
“Or maybe you’re bound to be the first colonizer to live outside the Solar System,” he continued after having finished cleaning. “My words may sound a bit bizarre now, but fifty years ago no one would have imagined that we would be able of forming a colony of three thousand people in Mars, another of two hundred inhabitants in Jupiter and another one in Venus of nearly two thousand and five hundred people, all of them self-sufficient, so they don’t depend on the Earth for surviving. Now your mission is to study and find the way to carry out those projects. My mission is to provide you with the necessary knowledge for you to achieve it. I’m too old and I don’t think I will see it…” he said with sorrow.
“Of course you’ll see it. You’re still young and together we’ll make it,” Josef said as he caressed his grandpa’s hand. “Life expectancy is of a hundred and twenty years, you’re in the Equator of your life.”
“No, Josef,” his grandpa added making gestures of negation. “I wish I was your age and knew everything I know now. But age is merciless. No matter how much the WHO says that life expectancy is of a hundred and twenty years, my life wasn’t easy when I was your age and that conditioned my metabolism forever,” he concluded showing his teeth. The great majority of the pieces were artificial.
“I’ll take care of you so you can reach that age,” he said with a smile.
“I know you’ll do it. I think the moment to tell you something has come,” he said with a mysterious voice.
“What do you mean?” The boy landed the craft on the kitchen island and gave all his attention to his grandpa.
“You’ll see…” the old man said caressing his chin with his hand, “I dedicated my whole life to carry out a specific investigation. An investigation I want you to know and continue when I’m gone.”
At hearing his grandpa’s words, Josef frowned and sharpened his ear not to miss any detail at all.
“Investigation?” He asked astonished. “Which investigation? Oh! I know what you mean, you mean searching planets with the telescope.” The boy started talking faster and faster to obtain as soon as he could that information that had aroused his interest that much. “I’m sure you want to find one which is inhabited.”
“No.” Mike’s face turned into a serious expression and he looked at his grandson with tenderness, as the latter didn’t stop making questions. “It’s more complicated than that, Josef.”
“Well, you know, tell me,” the boy said shaking his grandpa’s arm. “Come on, tell me, tell me.”
The young Astronomy apprentice’s interest made the old man smile.
“You’re as anxious as your father,” he muttered without stopping smiling. “Come with me. We’ll go to my studio and I’ll show you my old chest, where I keep everything I’ve collected throughout my whole life.”
“Let’s go, let’s go…” Josef shouted as he ran up the stairs two steps at a time.
His grandpa, in contrast, went up slowly and leisurely. He hadn’t fully recovered from the hip fracture occurred some years before while he was skiing in Canada. That had led to a chronic injury, which impeded him walking quickly. The fifteen steps that separated the downstairs area from the upstairs one, and that he had gone up without any problems at all for so many years were, now an authentic sacrifice for him.
The upper floor was distributed in four rooms, one for Mike, another one for Josef and two guest rooms, three complete bathrooms and a studio at the end of the hallway. The studio was his place of worship: a room of around forty square meters equipped with three bookshelves packed with books. A huge window let the light in the room during the day and allowed to study during the night. In front of the window there were two telescopes facing the sky. One of them was smaller and simpler. The other one was bigger and sophisticated. In the middle of the room it rested a large table full of commemorations and awards received during Mike’s space race. On one of them, the phrase FIRST MAN WHO STEPPED ON URANUS could be read. On the right corner, just below the window, there was that old and mysterious chest that had awoken Josef’s interest that much. Made with acacia wood and having details in in ironwork, it was a collector’s item. It had been handmade in the mid-twentieth century and later modified by a blacksmith who had incorporated a digital locking system to it. Mike had bought it at an auction some years before. «My investigation has to be safe, » he thought just before it was his.
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