Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  He dried his face, came out of the bathroom and stepped to the window. A pale, cold summer sun glittered on the sea. To the north, the snow-covered peaks of the Alaska chain loomed into the distance. Not far from the hotel he could see the former ConocoPhillips office. Now it bore the EMCO logo, in defiance of the change that was already under way. There were still office spaces to let in the Peak Oilfield Service Company building. UK Energies had put a branch of their solar division in the former BP headquarters and rented out the rest to a travel company, and here too there were many empty spaces. Everything was going down the drain. Some logos had completely disappeared, such as Anadarko Oil, Doyon Drilling and Marathon Oil Company. The place was threatening to lose its position as the most economically successful state in the USA. Since the seventies, more than eighty per cent of all state income had flowed from the fossil fuels business into the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was supposed to benefit all the inhabitants. Support that they would soon have to do without. In the mid-term, the region was left only with metals, fishing, wood and a bit of fur-farming. Oil and gas too, of course, but only on a very limited scale, and at prices so low that the stuff would have been better off left in the ground.

  The journalists and activists that he had been dealing with over the past few hours – and who reproached him now for having got involved in the extractions in the first place – certainly weren’t representing public opinion when they cheered the end of the oil economy. In fact helium-3 had met with a very muted response in Alaska, just as enthusiasm on the Persian Gulf was notably low-key. The sheikhs imagined themselves being thrown back on the bleak desert existence of former years, their territory returning to the scorpions and sand-beetles. The spectre of impoverishment stripped the potentates of Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar of their sleep. Hardly anyone seriously wanted to go to Dubai now. Beijing had abandoned its support of the Saudi Arabian Islamists; the USA seemed to have forgotten all about North Africa; in Iraq Sunnis and Shi’ites went on slaughtering each other in time-honoured fashion; Iran provoked unease with its nuclear programmes, bared its teeth in all directions and tried to get close to China, which apart from America was the only nation in the world mining helium-3, albeit in vanishingly small quantities. The Chinese didn’t have a space elevator, and didn’t know how to build one either. No one apart from the Americans had such a thing, and Julian Orley sat on the patents like a broody hen, which was why China had fallen back entirely on traditional rocket technology, at devastating expense.

  Palstein looked at his watch. He had to get over to the EMCO building, a meeting was about to start. It would go on till late as usual. He phoned the business centre and asked to be put through to the Stellar Island Hotel on the Isla de las Estrellas. It was three hours later there, and a good twenty degrees warmer. A better place than Anchorage. Palstein would rather have been anywhere else than Anchorage.

  He wanted at least to wish Julian a pleasant journey.

  Isla de las Estrellas, Pacific Ocean

  Going inside the volcano might have been spectacular, but coming out was a big disappointment. Once the lights had come on, they left the cave via a straight and well-lit corridor which aroused the suspicion that the whole mountain was actually made of scaffolding and papier mâché. It was wide enough to allow a hundred panicking, trampling and thrashing people to escape. After about 150 metres it led to a side wing of the Stellar Island Hotel.

  Chuck Donoghue pushed his way through to stand next to Julian.

  ‘My respect,’ he bellowed. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And this is how you found the cave? Come on! You didn’t help a bit? No demolition charges anywhere?’

  ‘Just for the evacuation routes.’

  ‘Incredibly lucky. Of course you realise, my boy, that I’ll have to steal this one! Haha! No, don’t worry, I still have enough ideas of my own. My God, how many hotels have I built in my life? How many hotels!’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Donoghue mumbled in amazement.

  ‘Yes, and maybe one day you might be building another one on the Moon.’ Julian grinned. ‘That’s why you’re here, old man.’

  ‘I see!’ Donoghue laughed even louder. ‘And I thought you’d invited me because you liked me.’

  At sixty-five the hotel mogul was the oldest member of the group, five years older than Julian, although Julian looked ten years younger. The insignificant age difference didn’t keep Donoghue from jovially addressing the richest man in the world as ‘my boy’.

  ‘Of course I like you,’ Julian said cheerfully as they followed Lynn to the lifts. ‘But more than anything else I want to show you my hotels so that you’ll put your money into them. Oh, and by the way, do you know the one about the man doing the survey?’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘A guy gets asked, what would you do if you had two possibilities? A: You spend all night having sex with your wife. B:— B, says the man, B!’

  It was a crap little joke, and thus exactly right for Chucky, who stayed behind laughing to tell Aileen. Julian didn’t have to turn round to see her face, as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. The Donoghues ruled over thirty of the most imposing, expensive and trashy hotels of all time, they had built various casinos, ran an international booking agency through which global stars passed with great regularity – artistes, singers, dancers and animal trainers, and of course you could, if you wished, also book shows in which nothing was left to the imagination. But Aileen, good, fat, cake-baking Aileen, opted for good old southern prudery, as if dozens of showgirls weren’t dancing across the stages of Las Vegas every night, breasts bouncing, girls who had contracts that bore her signature. She placed great emphasis on piety, gun ownership, good food, good deeds and the death penalty if all else failed, and sometimes when it didn’t. She put morality before everything else. Nonetheless, she would appear for dinner crammed into a little dress so tight it was embarrassing, to collect compliments from the younger men for her laser-firmed cleavage. She would launch her usual nannying campaign and pass on the silly joke with lots of tittering and snorting, before getting drinks for everyone, and her other side would fight its way through, marked by a genuinely felt concern for the welfare of all God’s creatures, which made it possible not only to put up with Aileen Donoghue, but even somehow to like her.

  The glass lift cabins filled up with people and chatter. After a short trip they discharged the group onto the viewing terrace, beneath a starry sky worthy of a Hollywood movie. With regal dignity an old and beautiful lady in evening dress was directing half a dozen waiters to the guests. Champagne and cocktails were handed out, binoculars distributed. A jazz quartet played ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.

  ‘Everyone over here,’ Lynn called cheerfully. ‘To me! Look to the east.’

  The guests happily followed her instructions. Out on the platform yet more lights had been lit, glowing fingers reaching into the night sky. As tiny as ants, people were seen walking around among the structures. A big ship, apparently a freighter, lay massively on a calm sea.

  ‘Dear friends.’ Julian stepped forward, a glass in his hand. ‘I didn’t let you see the whole show earlier. In another version you would also have met the OSS and Gaia, but that one is intended for visitors without the advantage of what you will experience. Relatives of travellers, spending a few days on the island before going back home. To you, however, I wanted to demonstrate the lift. For the rest you won’t need films, because you will see it with your own eyes! You will never forget the two weeks ahead of you, I promise you that!’

  Julian showed his perfect teeth. There was applause, scattered at first, then everyone clapped enthusiastically. Miranda Winter yelled, ‘Oh, yeah!’ Glowing with pride, Lynn went and joined her father.

  ‘Before we invite everyone to join us for dinner, we have a little taster of your imminent trip.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘In the next few minutes the two cabins are expected back from orbit. Both will be bringing b
ack to Earth, amongst other things, compressed helium-3 that was loaded onto them on OSS. I think it might be an idea to throw your heads back now, and not just to drink—’

  ‘Although I advise you do that too,’ said Julian, raising his glass to everyone.

  ‘Of course,’ Lynn laughed. ‘What he hasn’t yet told you, in fact, is that on OSS we will drastically reduce alcohol consumption.’

  ‘How regrettable.’ Bernard Tautou pulled a face, drank his glass down in one and beamed at her. ‘So we should make provision.’

  ‘I thought your passion was water?’ teased Mukesh Nair.

  ‘Mais oui! Particularly if it’s topped up with alcohol.’

  ‘“These vessels here from which we drink / When emptied their appeal does shrink”,’ declaimed Eva Borelius with a superior smile.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Wilhelm Busch, you wouldn’t know him.’

  ‘Can you actually get a hangover in zero gravity?’ Olympiada Rogacheva asked timidly, prompting her husband to turn away from her and stare pointedly up at the stars. Miranda Winter snapped her fingers like a schoolgirl:

  ‘And what if you throw up in zero gravity?’

  ‘Then your puke will find you wherever you are,’ Evelyn Chambers explained.

  ‘Sphere formation,’ nodded Walo Ögi and formed a hypothetical ball of vomit with both hands. ‘The puke forms itself into a ball.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure it spreads,’ said Karla Kramp.

  ‘Yes, so that we all get some,’ Borelius nodded. ‘Nice topic, by the way. Perhaps we should—’

  ‘There!’ cried Rebecca Hsu. ‘Up there!’

  All eyes followed her outstretched hand. Two little points of light had started moving in the firmament. For a while they seemed to be heading to the south-east on orbital paths, except that at the same time they were getting bigger and bigger, a sight that contradicted everything that anyone had seen before. Clearly something had gone dimensionally awry. And then, all of a sudden, everyone worked out that the bodies were dropping from space in a perfect vertical. As if the stars were climbing down to them.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Sushma Nair whispered reverently.

  Binoculars were yanked up. After a few minutes, even without magnification, two long structures could be made out, one slightly higher than the other, looking a bit like space shuttles, except that they were both standing upright and their undersides ended in broad, plate-like slabs. The conically pointed tips were brightly illuminated, and navigation lights darted evenly as heartbeats along the sides of the cylindrical bodies. The cabins approached the platform at great speed, and the lower they came the harder the air vibrated, as if stirred by giant dynamos. Julian registered with satisfaction that even his son wasn’t immune to the fascination. Amber’s eyes were as wide as if she were waiting for her Christmas presents.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ Julian nodded. ‘It’s technology, and it’s still a miracle. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke. Great man!’

  Tim said nothing.

  And suddenly Julian was aware of the bitter taste of repressed rage in his mouth. He simply couldn’t work out what was up with the boy. If Tim didn’t want to take the job that awaited him at Orley Enterprises, that was his business. Everyone had to go his own way, even if Julian couldn’t really understand that there were other paths to take apart from a future in the company, but okay, fine. Except – what the hell had he actually done to Tim?

  Then everything happened very quickly.

  An audible gasp from all the onlookers introduced the final phase. For a moment it looked as if the cabins would crash into the circular terminal like projectiles and pull the whole platform into the sea, then they abruptly slowed down, first one, then the other, and decelerated until they entered the circle of the space terminal and disappeared into it, one after the other. Again there was applause, broken by cries of ‘Bravo!’ Heidrun came and stood by Finn O’Keefe and whistled on two fingers.

  ‘Still sure you want to get into one of those?’ he asked.

  She looked at him mockingly. ‘And you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Boaster!’

  ‘Someone will have to stand by your husband when you start clawing the walls.’

  ‘We’ll just see who’s scared, shall we?’

  ‘If it’s me,’ O’Keefe grinned, ‘remember your promise.’

  ‘When did I ever promise you anything?’

  ‘A little while ago. You were going to hold my hand.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ The corners of Heidrun’s mouth twitched with amusement. For a moment she seemed to be thinking seriously about it. ‘I’m sorry, Finn. You know, I’m boring and old-fashioned. In my film the woman falls off her horse and lets the man save her from the Indians. Screaming her head off, of course.’

  ‘Shame. I’ve never acted in that kind of movie.’

  ‘You should have a word with your agent.’

  She gracefully raised a hand, ran a finger gently over his cheek and walked away. O’Keefe watched her as she joined Walo. Behind him a voice said:

  ‘Pathetic, Finn. Total knock-back.’

  He turned round and found himself looking into the beautiful, haughty face of Momoka Omura. They knew each other from the parties that O’Keefe avoided like the plague. If he did have to go to one, she inevitably bumped into him, as she recently had at Jack Nicholson’s eighty-eighth.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be filming?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t end up in the mass market like you did, if that’s what you mean.’ She looked at her fingernails. A mischievous smile played around her lips. ‘But I could give you some lessons in flirting if you like.’

  ‘Very kind of you.’ He smiled back. ‘Except you’re not supposed to get off with your teacher.’

  ‘Only theoretically, you idiot. Do you seriously think I’d let you anywhere near me?’

  ‘You wouldn’t?’ He turned away. ‘That’s reassuring.’

  Momoka threw her head back and snorted. The second woman to have walked away from him in the course of only a few minutes, she strutted over to Locatelli, who was noisily talking shop with Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker about fusion reactors, and linked arms with him. O’Keefe shrugged and joined Julian, who was standing with Hanna, Rebecca Hsu, his daughter and the Rogachevs.

  ‘But how do you get the cabin all the way up there?’ the Taiwanese woman wanted to know. She looked overexcited and scatterbrained. ‘It can hardly float up the cable.’

  ‘Didn’t you see the presentation?’ Rogachev asked ironically.

  ‘We’re just introducing a new perfume,’ said Rebecca, as if that explained everything. And in fact for half the show she’d been staring at the display on her pocket computer, correcting marketing plans, and had missed the explanation of the principle. At first sight it would look as if the slabs that formed the cabin sterns were sending out bright red beams, but in fact it was the other way round. The undersides of the plates were covered with photovoltaic cells, and the beams were emitted by huge lasers inside the terminal. The energy produced by the impact set the propulsion system in motion, six pairs of interconnected wheels per cabin, with the belt stretched between them. When the wheels on one side were set in motion, those on the other side joined in automatically in the opposite direction, and the lift climbed up the belt.

  ‘It gets faster and faster,’ Julian explained. ‘After only a hundred metres it reaches—’

  There was a beep from his jacket. He frowned and dug out his phone.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Forgive the disturbance, sir.’ Someone from the switchboard. ‘A call for you.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  ‘It’s Gerald Palstein, sir.’

  ‘Oh. Of course.’ Julian smiled apologetically at everybody. ‘Could I neglect you for a moment? Rebecca, don’t run away. I’ll explain the principle to you every hour
, or ideally more often, if that’ll make you happy.’

  He dashed off into a little room behind the bar, stuck his phone into a console and projected the image onto a bigger screen.

  ‘Hi, Julian,’ said Palstein.

  ‘Gerald. Where in heaven’s name are you?’

  ‘Anchorage. We’ve buried the Alaska project. Didn’t I tell you about that?’

  The EMCO manager looked exhausted. They had last seen each other a few weeks before the attempt on his life. Palstein was calling from a hotel room. A window in the background gave a glimpse of snow-covered mountains under a pale, cold sky.

  ‘No, you did,’ said Julian. ‘But that was before you were shot. Do you really have to do this to yourself?’

  ‘No big deal.’ Palstein waved the idea away. ‘I have a hole in my shoulder, not my head. That kind of injury lets me travel, although unfortunately not to the Moon. Regrettably.’

  ‘And how did it go?’

  ‘Let’s say Alaska’s preparing itself with some dignity for the rebirth of the age of the trapper. Of all the union representatives I’ve met there, most of them would have liked to finish the job that gunman in Canada fluffed.’

  ‘Just don’t beat yourself up! Nobody’s been as hard on his sector as you have, and from now on they will listen to you. Did you tell them about your planned allegiance?’