At my tender age of seventy-six, it occurred to me to write. Not because I’m an old man who gets bored, in fact, living in a big old house in the countryside, I would find hobbies from bricoleur at will.One day when I put some old books on new shelves, I came across a manual of radio technology (not only obsolete but I think also incomprehensible to those who deal with electronics today, except that he is also a fan of archaeology) that I had served, in the mists of time, to take the state examination to obtain the patent of a Marconist officer. Leafing through it with a bit of nostalgia, I confess, I began to think that the figure of the marconist not only has disappeared for many years but, today, few know what an officer marconista was doing on board a ship.At that moment I thought it might be useful to talk about it, not so much because that role has been part of my life for years, but above all because it has been an important figure on ships, so much so as to assign him the rank of officer. No ship in the world would have been allowed to sail without a radio operator on board. So I decided to describe and tell situations and events that happened at sea, seen with the eyes of the protagonist, a young Marconist officer who ventures by sea.Halfway through the story, I wondered if I had bored the reader with adventures that, although at first interesting, then become repetitive. Each storm is similar to the others. All the nights spent ashore in an exotic port look alike. The human relationships on board are always the same, governed by an indispensable hierarchy. So I decided to put some mystery in the story, referring to my interest in the history of the universe and to the astrophysics that have always fascinated me as a curious autodidact.During one of his trips to Brazil, the protagonist, receives via radio a communication in Morse in which a mysterious Russian, embarked on a Yugoslav motor ship moored in Rio Grande do Sul, asks him for a meeting, on his arrival in that port, expected after a few days. During the interview, which the young man had accepted out of curiosity, the Russian offers him a vague collaboration with a transnational organization with not very clear contours. He refuses but the Russian to convince him announces that the next destination of the Bayhorse, the ship on which the young officer was embarked, would be Jacksonville, Fl, USA. Since no one could know at that time, not even the shipowner who concluded the chartering contracts from trip to trip, at the moment does not believe him and thinks of a joke even if for inexplicable reasons. When a week later the master of the Bayhorse, as soon as the news of the next destination of the ship, from the shipowner, communicates it to all the officers and was the one indicated by the Russian, The young man changes his mind and wants to see his mysterious interlocutor to deepen what he had been told previously. During the second interview the Russian is not much more detailed in the explanation but he specifies that in the on-board pharmacy was placed an object that the young man should deliver on his arrival to a person in charge, who would also provide him with full details of future cooperation. Driven by his innate curiosity he accepts and, once in navigation, with difficulty he manages to find the mysterious object hidden in the on-board pharmacy. After the delivery on arrival, the person in charge of the withdrawal does not have time to dwell on explanations but informs him of another similar object to be delivered to the next port, this time in Bombay in India, where every aspect would have been clarified.During the meeting in India, he was asked to collaborate with this organization, La Fenice, which operates worldwide and has unlimited financial resources and technologies unthinkable in those years. He was chosen because he was deemed fit for the task they would assign him, based on some mental analysis to which he had been subjected without his knowledge. It accepts as it fully agrees with the objectives that the Phoenix showed it wanted to achieve in the long term. After some trips during which he has the opportunity to verify the extraordinary technologies that this organization has, he is asked to land from the Bayhorse and reach the underground base of the Phoenix, in a desert of the USA. In the base he discovers a world unknown to him and wonderful. The technologies at their disposal were so advanced that in the 1960s no one would have even guessed. What amazes him most is the system of transferring information from a computer archive directly into the human mind. He himself is subjected to gradual notional treatments that bring his knowledge to levels unthinkable before then. Gradually its position grows in importance in the organization, until it reaches the highest levels of management and is part of the Council, after receiving the final notional treatment. At that point it is clear to him many political, economic and social events that have occurred in the last fifty years that had been communicated to the masses adapted for political, economic or military purposes. The archives of the Phoenix had the true answers to all the mysteries of the time as its external agents, working in the shadows, tried discreetly to influence the various governments around the world. The ultimate aim was to achieve, for all the inhabitants of the planet, a coexistence and a shared well-being and to guarantee to all an individual freedom which, however, was prevented from becoming a prevarication for others. At that time it was still a utopia but, in the course of the next hundred years, the goal that the Phoenix had set itself at the beginning would be fully achieved. The protagonist at the age of seventy retires with his wife to a ranch in Arizona and his place will be taken by his son. Only his grandchildren will see the results of his work. In the second part of the novel, the Phoenix achieves its political goals and, more than a hundred years after its mysterious birth, reunites the entire planet under a single government. At this point, one of its leaders asks himself the question of how it was born and by whom it was created. The discovery will be disconcerting but also fascinating and will lead the descendant of the young Marconist officer to discover, in the depths of space, many secrets of the universe.Read more about this authorRead less about this author