Casal Tilepadeion

I know what's in your mind
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-84-9743-857-5
Verlag: Milenio Publicaciones
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 74, 183 Seiten

Reihe: Narrativa

The explosion was extremely violent. I saw a flash and was blown off my feet. All around me, it was raining stones and sand, a cloud of dust and smoke. Immediately after the explosion, total silence. I was knocked out; I'm not sure how long I lay there on the ground. When I sat up, my left arm was hurting. I felt something wet on my face and touched it: my hand came away covered in blood. I rested my back against the wall beside me and tried to calm down. While I was recovering, a van braked a few metres from me. Two men got out and came running towards me. They spoke to me, but I couldn't hear them. I had gone deaf; all I heard was a buzzing noise. They helped me up and into the van and we headed to the offices. I saw that the side wall of the pumping station had been destroyed. A fire was spreading over the dry grass towards the stream.

Joaquim Casal is professor of chemical engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona) and a researcher at the Centre for Technological Risk Studies (CERTEC). He has published several works of fiction, including Entropia minvant (Ictineu Prize 2012) and volumes of short stories such as L'esperit de fum i altres relats (2012) and Una recerca en dos temps, which received a Special Mention in the UPC Science Fiction Award 2010. Tilepadeion. Sé què penses (Tilepadeion. I know what's in your mind), winner of the Manuel de Pedrolo Award for Works of Science Fiction presented by the City of Mataró in 2014, speculates on two technological achievements: the thermobaric bomb and the enigmatic Tilepadeion, which would mean the end of equal weapon strength and privacy of thought. The paths of the intellectually restless scientist Adam Barnes and the equally restless international spy Shedarak cross in a journey that takes them from San Francisco to Akademgorodok, Edinburgh to Barcelona, in an unrelenting game of cat and mouse to find out what is being concealed, and to conceal what is known.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Casal, Joaquim

Weitere Mitwirkende

Banham, Lucille

Leseproben

2.
LAIA

My name is Adam Barnes. I’m twenty-nine years old and I’m from Santa Barbara, California. The son of a Californian father and a mother of Spanish ancestry. At home, from an early age, I’d heard stories about Santander, the Picos de Europa and Spain. My grandmother spoke Spanish and I half learnt the language from her.

I studied chemical engineering at the University of California, Irvine. At the end of my degree, I worked for three years in industry. First in an oil refinery in Texas, but the work was very routine and after a year I was bored of it. Then another opportunity arose in an engineering company specialised in fire protection systems. It was an international company and I worked all over the place for them: Texas, California, Alaska, but also Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Indonesia, and some oil platforms in the North Sea.

Although I found this field quite interesting, after a while the work again became a little too routine for my liking: even though no two systems were the same, they were all similar. Initially, I was excited by the travelling, but I soon discovered that travelling for pleasure and travelling for work are two different things: for work there was no time, I went from meeting to meeting and refinery to refinery, hotel to hotel and airport to airport. The airports were the worst: the security checks, the hours spent waiting, the queues.

So, when Bill, a friend who’d studied with me at university and now worked at the University of California, Berkeley, told me his department had announced a call for applications for a doctoral grant, I jumped at the chance. I was interviewed by Professor Anderson from the department of combustion that had organised the call. He liked my curriculum and I was interested in the research project that’d just been started by the team I’d join. So, I went to Berkeley to do a PhD.

My thesis was on smouldering combustion, an exciting topic that’s vital in soil decontamination and certain types of fires. I learnt a lot about combustion and about fires and fuels in general. In fact, the research was related to the fire studies that I had done in my work as an engineer, which made things a lot easier.

Berkeley is a wonderful university, with a very pleasant campus and plenty of activities. And the atmosphere in the department was congenial. We were a talented team: young people, who wanted to work hard and have fun. The director was Professor Anderson, a highly intelligent man. It was a pleasure to work with him. We often had long conversations, sometimes about life, at other times about combustion and fire and the problems that arose in my thesis. Back then, I had no idea how useful this knowledge would be to me in the future.

And then, of course, there was San Francisco. I loved San Francisco: the streets, the trams, the Chinese quarter, the wharfs, and the people and atmosphere in general. I went there frequently, particularly on weekends. I also went on trips to other parts of California with people from the department; we had a wonderful time. The three years and a bit it took to prepare my thesis were an amazing time that I remember fondly.

Maybe it helped that during that time I went out with two girls from the university. I was with Linda, who was studying economics, for almost a year. I really liked her, but after a while, I don’t really know why, our relationship began to cool and in the end we broke off. I was a bit upset by it, but then I met Betty, who was studying geography, and we had a very passionate relationship for a year. But then she finished her degree and had to go to New York. We decided we’d get over this obstacle, but distance and time ended out relationship. I buried myself in the thesis, and made a final effort to finish it.

It was a good thesis, though I say so myself. As a result of the research, five papers were published in international journals that raised my self-esteem to undreamed-of levels. The day I finished the doctorate, my parents, friends and colleagues from the department came. We celebrated. I’d become a doctor!

At the end of my PhD I couldn’t decide whether to stay on at the university – I’d been offered a place that would enable me to start an academic career – or go back into industry. I liked university life, and had discovered that research was fascinating. But teaching classes was not my thing. I didn’t know which path to take, but then I met Laia. And that changed everything.

I met her one Sunday at midday, while I was walking on Fisherman’s Warf. I saw a slim, attractive, dark-haired girl who seemed to be a quite lost in thought, just in front of the entrance to the Liberty boat. She was looking at the boat opening times. I went up to her.

“It’s closed right now, they’re having lunch,” I said to her.

She turned around and looked at me.

“Yes, I can see now. Thanks!”

And she made a move to leave. But, after seeing those black eyes and that pretty face, I didn’t want her to just leave like that.

“They open again in the afternoon.”

“OK, thanks.”

“Sorry, I was just wondering, where are you from?”

“I’m from Barcelona.”

I’d spent a few hours in Barcelona once on a stopover, there’d been a problem with the plane and I’d had to spend the night there.

“Barcelona! What a wonderful city! I loved it!”

“Oh, really?”

I noticed a little irony in her voice, and thought I should introduce myself.

“My name’s Adam Barnes. I’m Californian. But on my mother’s side I’m half Spanish.”

She gave me her hand.

“I’m Laia.”

The ice had broken. We walked along while we chatted. She explained she’d come with a grant for four months to take a literature course. “But mainly to improve my English,” she added. I insisted that she spoke very well. She looked at me again with that slightly ironic expression and said thanks. I remember I said I don’t know what in Spanish and she laughed; I guess my accent wasn’t all that good. It was lunchtime and I asked if she wanted to eat something in one of the restaurants on the wharf. She accepted.

It was a lovely lunch. After talking for a while, she asked me what I’d seen in Barcelona and what I’d liked best, and I confessed that I’d only been there for around eight hours and had hardly seen anything apart from the hotel and the airport. She laughed. I found her laugh extremely attractive. We talked a little about everything: Barcelona, California, Berkeley, which was where she was taking the course and where I lived, my family and my Spanish grandmother, my thesis, what she was going to do when she returned to Barcelona in three months.

After lunch I went with her around the war ship. Then, we walked along the wharfs for a while. Sitting on a bench facing the sea, I asked her if she liked California.

“Yes. Your country is very beautiful,” she said. And then, I don’t know why, I sang that verse of Woodie Guthrie’s song:

This land is your land, this land is my land,

from California to the New York islands,

from the Redwood forest to the Gulf stream waters

this land was made for you and me.

She was moved and asked me:

“Do you love your home?”

I told her I did. And then she said:

“I love my home too. It’s a small nation, smaller than California, but very beautiful: Catalonia.”

She said it in such a way, with such passion, that it touched me. So I asked her to talk about her home.

“Barcelona is a really beautiful city, famous for its architecture, especially its modernista buildings. And Catalonia is wonderful. It has a very wild coast, the Costa Brava, on the Mediterranean Sea. And mountains, the Pyrenees, which are not like your Rockies, but are also very high. The landscape is very green, though it’s drier in the south. We produce very good wines and have a lot of industry. We also have good universities and excellent sportspeople. And a football team that is known throughout the world, Barça; in recent years it’s won the Champions league, the main competition in Europe, on several occasions.”

She stopped talking and looked out to sea lost in her thoughts. Did she miss her home? While I watched her, I thought I’d like to get to know Catalonia.

After walking a little longer, we went back to the university together on the BART, the underground train that connects San Francisco and Berkeley. I accompanied her to her residence hall, chatting all the way. I decided I really liked her and must see her again. I found the way to do this...