Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Jellyfish, table or parasol, such associations are due to the vertical construction and symmetry of the station,’ said Haskin. ‘We mustn’t forget that space stations aren’t buildings with fixed foundations. In fact they don’t actually need foundations at all, but they are exposed to the constant redistribution of mass and all kinds of possible impact, from joggers on treadmills to moon shuttles attaching themselves to the outer ring. All of these things set the structure vibrating independently, and a symmetrical construction is ideally suited to the redistribution of vibration energies. The vertical alignment contributes to the stabilisation, and matches the principle of the space elevator. As you can see, the smallest moment of inertia is directed towards the Earth.’

  Right at the bottom the torus with the hotel in it could be seen, with its outrigger suites, and Kirk and Picard protruding above them. Along the lattice masts, modules containing fitness centres, staff accommodation, storerooms and offices were stacked all the way up to Torus-2, at the centre of which the space elevator came to a halt. Retractable gangways linked the bagel-shaped module with the cabins.

  ‘This is where we arrived yesterday,’ Lynn explained. ‘Torus-2 serves as the reception area for the OSS Grand, and also as a terminal for passengers and freight. As you see, corridors radiate in a spoke arrangement from there to a larger, surrounding ring.’ Her hand passed through a lattice structure that stretched generously around the torus. ‘Our spaceport. Those things that look like aeroplanes are evacuation pods, the little tins are moon shuttles. In one of them, the Charon, we’ll be heading for the satellite tomorrow.’

  ‘I should have gone on a diet,’ Aileen said excitedly to Chuck. ‘How am I going to fit in one of those? My bum’s the size of Halley’s Comet.’

  Lynn laughed.

  ‘Oh, no, they’re very spacious. Very comfortable. The Charon is over thirty metres long.’

  ‘And that thing there?’ Ögi had spotted crane-like structures on the top side of the ring and along the mast. He floated over to them, passed through the projection beam for a moment and looked like a huge cosmic monster attacking the OSS.

  ‘Manipulators,’ said Haskin. ‘Robot arms on tracks. They unload the arriving cargo shuttles, take out the tanks of condensed helium-3, bring them inside the torus and anchor them to the lifts.’

  ‘What happens exactly when one of those shuttles docks?’

  ‘There’s a big bang,’ said Haskin.

  ‘But doesn’t that mean that the station has too much weight on one side? There isn’t always the same number of ships at anchor.’

  ‘That isn’t a problem. All the docking sites are transferable, we can always right the balance. Well spotted, by the way.’ Haskin looked impressed. ‘Are you an architect?’

  ‘An investor. But I’ve built various things. Residential modules for cities: you click them into already existing structures or put them on high-rise roofs, and when you move, your little house simply goes with you. The Chinese love it. Flood-resistant estates on the North Sea. You know that Holland’s being flooded; are they all supposed to move to Belgium? The houses are fixed to jetties and float when the water rises.’

  ‘He’s also building a second Monaco,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Why do we need a second Monaco?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Because the first one’s filled to bursting,’ Ögi explained. ‘The Monégasques are stacking up like the Alps, so Albert and I flicked through our Jules Verne. Have you heard of Propeller Island?’

  ‘Isn’t that the story of the mad captain in that weird underwater boat?’ Donoghue asked.

  ‘No, no!’ One of the Frenchmen dismissed the idea. ‘That was the Nautilus! Captain Nemo.’

  ‘Rubbish! I’ve seen that one. It’s by Walt Disney.’

  ‘No! Not Walt Disney! Mon Dieu!’

  ‘Propeller Island is a mobile city state,’ Ögi explained. ‘A floating island. You can’t extend Monaco indefinitely, not even with offshore islands, so we hit on the idea of building a second one that will cruise the South Sea.’

  ‘A second Monaco?’ Haskin scratched his head. ‘You mean a ship?’

  ‘Not a ship. An island. With mountains and coasts, a pretty capital city and a wine cellar for old Prince Ernst August. But artificial.’

  ‘And it works?’

  ‘You of all people are asking me that?’ Ögi laughed and spread his arms out as if to press the OSS to his heart. ‘Where’s the problem?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ Lynn laughed. ‘Or do we look as if we’ve got problems?’

  Her eye rested on Tim. Was he actually aware of what was wrong with her? His unease touched and shamed her in equal measure, as he had had every reason to be uneasy since that day, that terrible moment five years before, that was to change their lives, just before six in the evening …

  * * *

  … Lynn is in the middle of the traffic jam, ten lanes of pumping, overheated metal chugging its way along the M25 to Heathrow with the pace of a glacier, under a ruthless, cold February sun gleaming down from a yellowish, cloudy Chernobyl sky, and suddenly it happens. She has to go to Paris for a meeting, she’s always going to some sort of meeting or other, but all of a sudden someone turns off the light in her head, just like that, and everything sinks into a morass of hopelessness. Profound grief sweeps over her, followed by 10,000 volts of pure panic. Later she’s unable to say how she got to the airport, but she isn’t flying, she’s just sitting in the terminal, robbed of all certainties but one, which is that she will not be able to bear her own existence for a second longer, because she doesn’t want to go on living with so much sadness and anxiety. But at that point her memory stops till the morning, when she finds herself fully dressed on the floor of her penthouse flat in Notting Hill, mailbox, email and answering machine spilling over with other people’s excitement. She walks out onto the terrace, into the icy rain that has started falling diagonally, and wonders whether the twelve storeys will be enough. Then she changes her mind and calls Tim, thus sparing the sensibilities of anyone who might have been passing by.

  Henceforth, whenever the topic turns to her illness, Julian invokes various baleful viruses and protracted colds as a way of explaining to himself and others what it is that is so terribly afflicting his daughter, his shining light; Tim, on the other hand, is always talking in terms of therapies and psychiatrists. Her condition is a mystery to Julian, and he represses what he perhaps guesses at, just as he has repressed the memory of Crystal’s death. It is ten years since Lynn’s and Tim’s mother died in a state of mental derangement, but Julian develops a remarkable capacity for denial. Not because he is traumatised, but because he is actually incapable of making a connection between the two.

  It’s Tim and Amber who come to her rescue. When she feels nothing but naked terror at the loss of all sensation, Tim walks around the block with her, in sunshine and in pouring rain, for hours, he forces her mind back into the present until she is able once again at least to feel the cold and wet, and to become aware of the metallic taste of her fear on her tongue. When she thinks she’ll never be able to sleep again, or keep down a bite of food, when seconds stretch into infinities and everything around her – light, colours, smells, music – emits shock-waves of menace, when every house-roof, every parapet, every bridge invites her to leap, when she fears going mad as Crystal did, running amok, killing people, he makes it clear to her that no demon has taken possession of her, that no monsters are after her, that she wouldn’t hurt anyone, not even herself, and very gradually she starts to believe him.

  Things get better, and Tim bugs her. Forces her to take professional help at last, to lie down on the couch. Lynn refuses, plays down the nightmare. Examining the causes? What for? She isn’t even slightly willing to show respect to this miserable phase of her otherwise perfect life. Her nerves have been going haywire, exhaustion, crashing synapses, biochemical mayhem, whatever. Reason to be ashamed, but not to go rummaging for the source of her distress. Why should she? To fi
nd what? She is glad and grateful that the company has camouflaged her condition with a series of explanations – flu, very bad flu, bronchitis – now that she’s up and smiling and shaking hands again. The crisis has been survived, the broken doll repaired. Again she sees herself as Julian sees her, a perspective that she temporarily lost. Who cares whether she likes herself? Julian loves her! Seeing herself through his eyes solves all her problems. The stale familiarity of self-debasement, she could live with that.

  * * *

  ‘—are the dining and common rooms for the scientific operations,’ she heard herself saying.

  She worked her way further up the hologram, from Torus-3 to the sports facilities in Torus-4, to dozens of accommodation and laboratory modules, which Julian had rented out to private and state research establishments from all over the world: NASA, ESA and Roskosmos, his own subsidiaries Orley Space, Orley Travel and Orley Energy. Cheeks aglow, she talked about the vegetable gardens and animal breeding facilities in the domed biospheres above Torus-4, allowed a glimpse into the observatories, workshops, control and meeting rooms of the fifth and final Torus, from which the lift cable led back out and into infinity or what the temporary residents imagined infinity to be. She described the disc-shaped roof, hundreds of metres across, with its wharfs in which moon shuttles and interplanetary spaceships were built, robots dashed busily through the vacuum and solar panels inhaled sunlight, so that the station could feed on the homemade kind during its hours in the Earth’s shadow. Laughing on the brink of the abyss, she presented the OSS, the Orley Space Station, whose builder and owner NASA had so yearned to be. But such a proposition would have required political responsibility, and by their nature politicians were voluble, slippery creatures, and tended to criticise the decisions of their predecessors rather than anything else. Hence, in the end, a private investor had taken the dream of the settlement of space that bit further and, en passant, established the necessary conditions to set off a landslide in the energy sector, which threw up the question of …

  * * *

  ‘… whose interests we are actually subsidising if we decide to join forces with Orley Enterprises.’

  ‘Well, ideally ours,’ said Locatelli. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘I completely agree,’ Rogachev replied. ‘I’d just like to know who else I’m benefiting.’

  ‘As long as Lightyears remains market leader, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else who might be getting anything out of it, if I may be so bold out here in geostationary isolation.’

  ‘Ryba ishchet gde glubzhe, a chelovek gde luchshe.’ Rogachevo smiled thinly. ‘The fish seeks the deepest place, man the best. For my part, I’d prefer a bit more of an overview.’

  Locatelli snorted. ‘You’re not going to get that by looking at everything from outside. Perspective comes from position.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘My company’s, in my case. I know you’re scared of indirectly benefiting Washington and NASA by giving Julian money. But so what? The main thing is that the figures add up at the end of the year.’

  ‘I’m not sure if you can really see it like that,’ said Marc Edwards, then realised the vacuousness of his observation and turned his attention to the pairs of boots that Nina was handing out.

  ‘I can see it like that. He can’t.’ Locatelli pointed at the Russian with his thumbs outstretched and laughed broadly. ‘You see, he’s married to politics.’

  Finn O’Keefe exchanged a glance with Heidrun Ögi. Rogachev and Locatelli were really getting on his nerves. They were having discussions which, in his opinion, really belonged at the end of the trip. And perhaps he just didn’t know enough about how the sector worked, but in any case, he planned to do nothing over the coming days but enjoy himself as best he could, and obediently shoot the little film clip that he had promised Julian he would do: Perry Rhodan on the real moon, singing the wonders of the real experience. Investor outpourings had no place, he thought, in ‘EVA’s wardrobe’, the dressing area for Extravehicular Activities.

  ‘And what about you?’ Locatelli stared at him. ‘What’s the view like from Hollywood?’

  O’Keefe shrugged. ‘Relaxed.’

  ‘He wants your money too.’

  ‘No, he wants my face, so that I can tell moneybags like you that they’ve absolutely got to get to the Moon. You’re right to that extent.’ O’Keefe rubbed his index finger and thumb together. ‘I get hold of money for him. But not mine.’

  ‘Very clever,’ Locatelli observed to Rogachev. ‘He probably even gets some for himself as well.’

  ‘Not a cent.’

  ‘And what do you really think about it? Space tourism, private flights to the Moon?’

  O’Keefe looked around. He had expected to see complete spacesuits hanging here, like limp and motionless astronauts, but the section, with its sterile lighting, felt more like a boutique. Folded overalls of all sizes, helmets, gloves and boots lined up side by side, sections of rigid armour.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Ask me again in a fortnight.’

  Their little group – Rogachev, Locatelli, Edwards, Mimi, Heidrun Ögi and himself – had herded around Nina Hedegaard, trying not to spin chaotically away. O’Keefe was mastering the art of space ballet better by the hour, and so was Rogachev, who had allowed himself to be dragged along by the excitement of the evening conversation; in addition to football, his love of martial arts was now revealed to the world. The Russian now seemed to possess his body only to subject it to reptilian control. His feelings, in so far as he had any, lay hidden beneath the ice of his pale blue eyes. Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker, both passionate divers, held their position tolerably well, Heidrun strove for control, while Locatelli’s impetuosity had the potential to injure someone.

  ‘Could I ask you to come closer?’ called Nina.

  ‘So, between ourselves’ – Mimi Parker lowered her voice – ‘there are rumours going around. No idea if there’s anything to it, but some people are suggesting that Julian’s running out of puff.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He’s as good as broke.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Heidrun whispered. ‘You know who really is running out of puff?’

  ‘Sure.’ Mimi leaned forward. ‘Out with it.’

  ‘You lot, you bunch of chatterboxes. And you’ll be running out of puff out there if you don’t stop talking nonsense.’

  Rogachev studied her with the amusement of a cat being growled at by mice.

  ‘There’s something refreshing about you, Mrs Ögi.’

  She beamed at him as if he’d just crowned her Miss Moscow. The Russian twitched his eyebrows with amusement and floated closer to Nina. Heidrun followed him clumsily. Her limbs seemed to have grown even longer and more unwieldy in zero gravity. The Dane waited until they had all formed a semicircle around her, then clapped her hands and flashed her perfect teeth to the assembled group.

  ‘So!’ A hissed Scandinavian S. ‘You’re about to embark on your first space-walk. Everyone excited?’

  ‘Sure!’ Edwards and Mimi cried simultaneously.

  ‘With reservations,’ Rogachev smiled. ‘As we are now under your charming care.’

  Locatelli flared his nostrils. Excitement was clearly beneath his dignity. Instead he lifted his specially made, vacuum-resistant camera aloft and took a photograph. Nina received the answers and reactions with dimples of delight.

  ‘You should be a bit excited, because Extravehicular Activities are one of the most demanding aspects of manned space travel. Not only will you be entering a vacuum, you will also be exposed to extreme variations in temperature.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mimi marvelled. ‘I always thought it was just cold in space.’

  ‘From the purely physical point of view, there is no prevalent temperature in space. What we describe as temperature is the degree of energy with which the molecules of a body, a fluid or a gas move. Small example: in boiling water they’re charging about all over the place, in ice they’re almost
motionless, so we experience one as hot and the other as cold. In empty space, on the other hand—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Locatelli murmured impatiently.

  ‘—we find practically no molecules at all. So there’s nothing to measure. Theoretically this brings us to zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or minus two hundred and seventy-three degrees Celsius, absolute zero. However, we record the so-called cosmic background radiation, a kind of afterglow from the time of the Big Bang, when the universe was still unimaginably dense and hot. That comes to just three degrees. Doesn’t exactly warm things up. Nonetheless, you can burn up or freeze out there, depending.’

  ‘We all know that already,’ Locatelli pressed. ‘I’m more interested in where—’

  ‘Well I don’t know it.’ Heidrun turned her head towards him. ‘But I’d like to know. As you might imagine, I’m vulnerable to sunburn.’

  ‘But what she’s telling us is all general knowledge!’

  Heidrun stared at him. Her eyes said, fuck you, smart-arse. Nina gave a conciliatory smile.

  ‘So, in empty space any body, whether it’s a spaceship, a planet or an astronaut, assumes the temperature that matches its environment. That’s based on the factors of solar radiation and reflection into space. That’s why spacesuits are white, to reflect as much light as possible, which means they don’t heat up as much. Even so, temperatures of over a hundred and twenty degrees Celsius have been measured on spacesuits on the side facing the sun, while the temperature on the shaded side was minus a hundred and one degrees Celsius.’

  ‘Brrr,’ said Mimi.