Desperate Games by Pierre Boulle Read Free Book Online Page A

billions and billions of billions of numbers, one of these numbers, that is to say a particular number, has of necessity to come out, and the drawing of this particular number thus has,
a priori
, a quality which is as miraculous as the human brain. There was no intellectual disadvantage for them in admitting this to be the result of chance, which they did, a chance so extraordinary that it was impossible for it to be reproduced in the universe.
    The physicists, who were convinced materialists in the sense in which this term is usually taken, would no longer accept the idea of there being a ‘supernatural’ power controlling evolution. Fawell quite simply criticised the reasoning of the ancient mathematical biologists for considering atoms to be like marbles and the human body to be like a sack of marbles. Indeed it should be possible to apply calculations of probability to them, illustrated if required by examples of monkeys using typewriters. But all their reflections and experiments on infinitesimally small particles had gradually convinced them that material bodies were in no way like sacks of inert marbles. For them matter was something completely different… They often talked of ‘holy matter’, another expression borrowed from Father Teilhard, passages of whose writings they knew by heart. This matter had by its own nature given birth to spirit, and probably on many planets other than Earth.
    Scholars of biology and of physics thus had quite a lot of differences. This led to discussions only rarely, for they scarcely met each other, but they were expressed in sarcastic comments made from afar, in quite a paradoxical way: the same terminology was used by both groups, but with different meanings, to stigmatise the misguided philosophical ways of the opposing clan. ‘Anthropocentrists’ was for example the contemptuous expression used by O’Kearn for the
Nobel
physiologists. He meant by this that they considered Man to be a unique miracle created by chance and reduced all science to observations made by him. ‘Anthropocentrists’ was also the term applied to the neo-materialist physicists by the biologists, who signified thus their scorn at the desire to establish a qualitative relationship between the human brain and the cosmos. However, in the stormy debates which brought them together sometimes, this expression was not uttered, for it was considered by both parties to be the supreme insult, both crude and defamatory, which would require redress.
    But there remained the ideal of
knowledge
as a common central concern for all the scientific minds of that period. For the physicists it became a veritable religion; and for the biologists it was a sort of ethic, a gratuitous act, about which they had a confused feeling of imperious necessity, to enable them to escape the despair of nothingness. Both of these groups felt that this total knowledge could only be attained by the combined efforts of the whole of humanity. It is clear how different the world they dreamed of was from Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.
     
    Fawell allowed himself some time for reflection before making a start on the second part of his programme, organising the ideas that had obsessed him for part of the night. His conclusion caused him some bitter disappointment, but reason had imposed this upon him as had his realistic view of the current state of the world. Admittedly he had been bothered by the desire to establish a coherent plan for research immediately, especially concerning his own special field, that of infinitesimally small matter about which so little was known still, and to set humanity to work immediately to realise it. But he had to acknowledge that humanity was not ready for such an enterprise. It was necessary to prepare it for this, and the nine years allocated to the first government would be barely sufficient. After putting material concerns in order, it was essential to plan for a long period of spiritual development, or