Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  Am I too cautious? wondered O’Keefe. When all is said and done, am I just a coward?

  Suddenly the disquieting feeling crept over him that he’d just thrown away his last chance of getting out of here alive.

  * * *

  ‘It’s awful,’ said Eva softly. ‘When I think of how Aileen and Chuck—’

  ‘Don’t think about it then,’ said Karla, staring straight ahead.

  The cabin set itself in motion.

  ‘It’s moving,’ commented Hsu.

  ‘I just hope it will a second time too,’ said Sushma, concerned. ‘The others should have come with us.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mukesh reassured her. ‘It will.’

  The familiar feeling of weight loss set in. The elevator sped up, past—

  * * *

  —the cabin of E2, the interior of which was shimmering with red-yellow embers as the oxygen tank incessantly spat flames out into the wasteland of the neck. Inside the lift it was getting hotter and hotter. In spite of their density, the panes of the glazed section at the front were straining to brace themselves against the fire, but in vain, as the pressure began to shift to the inside and forced the components of the cabin slowly but steadily apart. The elevator shafts were separated from one another by thin, longitudinal walls, that were pierced by passageways a metre square. Contrary to their outer appearance, they were incredibly robust, made of mooncrete and designed to stand up to even heavy loads.

  Not as heavy as this, though, admittedly.

  For over three-quarters of an hour, ferrostatic tension had been building up inside the cabin. Now that the tolerable maximum had been exceeded, it exploded with such destructive force that one of the side casings split off with a deafening noise, smashed the shaft wall into pieces and spread out like shrapnel into the neighbouring shaft, making the staff elevator come to a jolting standstill.

  * * *

  It stopped so abruptly that its passengers were torn off their feet, shot up weight-lessly, banged their heads together and tumbled down wildly. In the next moment, something crashed down onto the roof, making the cabin shake heftily.

  ‘What was that?’ Sushma sat up and looked around, her eyes wide. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We’re stuck!’

  ‘Mukesh?’ Panic rippled through her voice. ‘I want to get out. I want to get out immediately.’

  ‘Calm down, my love, I’m sure everything is—’

  ‘I want to get out. I want to get out!’

  He took her arm and spoke to her insistently, quickly and under his breath. One after another, they clambered to their feet, their faces pale and anxious.

  ‘Did you hear that crash?’ Hsu stared up at the roof of the cabin.

  ‘But we were already past it,’ Karla said to herself, as if wanting to make the obvious impossible. ‘We were already below the gallery.’

  ‘Something stopped us.’ Eva glanced at the controls. The lights had gone out. She pressed the button for the intercom system. ‘Hello? Can anyone hear us?’

  No answer.

  ‘What a mess,’ cursed Hsu.

  ‘I want to get out,’ pleaded Sushma. ‘Please, I want—’

  ‘Don’t start!’ Hsu barked at her. ‘You were the one that talked us into getting in this thing. It’s because of you that we’re stuck.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come too!’ Mukesh replied furiously. ‘Leave her be.’

  ‘Oh, shut it, Mukesh.’

  ‘Hey!’ Eva interrupted. ‘Don’t argue, we—’

  Something made a crunching noise above them. A hollow, grinding noise joined it, followed by deathly silence.

  The cabin jolted.

  Then it fell.

  * * *

  ‘You did what?’

  Lynn stared at the monitor and Funaki’s baffled face.

  ‘They wanted to get in at all costs, Miss Orley,’ the Japanese man groaned. He gazed downwards. His head jerked forwards and backwards in quick succession, gestures of submission. ‘What was I supposed to do? I’m not an army general – people have their own free will.’

  ‘But it didn’t work! And we can’t make contact with them any more.’

  ‘Did they – get stuck?’

  Lynn glanced at the controls. They had seen the cabin stop suddenly under the gallery, but after that the icon had disappeared.

  No one said a word. Walo Ögi was pacing through the room, while Heidrun and Tim stared at the controls as if they could conjure up the icon again just by gazing at it.

  There was a state of emergency in Lynn’s mind.

  The drugs had unleashed their narcotic effect while the acute drama lashed away at her, pushing her beyond her limits. She felt confused, drunk almost, but at the same time acutely aware of every detail of her surroundings, a strange, unsettling clarity. There was no before and after, no more primary and secondary perception. Everything bombarded her at once, while less and less was making its way out. Different levels of reality layered on top of one another, broke apart, forced their way back together again, splintered, and created surreal backing scenery for the performance of incomprehensible plays. The blood rushed in her ears. For the hundredth, thousandth, zillionth time, she asked herself how on earth she could have let herself in for this, building space stations and moon hotels, instead of finally standing up to Julian and making it clear to him that she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t a superhuman, wasn’t even a healthy human for that matter. She should have told him that the task would destroy her, that you may well need a lunatic to create something brilliant and crazy, but certainly not to maintain it or even promote it. Because that, precisely that, was a task for the healthy ones, the mentally clear and stable, those who flirted with lunacy, flirted with it without a care in the world, not having the slightest idea what it really felt like.

  How long would she be able to keep going?

  Her head was ringing. She closed her eyes, pressing the tips of her fingers against her temples. She had to stay upright. She couldn’t allow the dam holding the flood of blackness to break. She was the only one that knew the hotel like the back of her hand. She had built it.

  It was all down to her.

  Filled with fear, she opened her eyes.

  The symbol was back.

  * * *

  ‘Help! Help! Can anyone hear us?’

  Eva hammered furiously on the intercom button, shouting and shouting, while Sushma threw herself against the closed internal doors and tried to force them apart with her bare hands. Mukesh pulled her back by her shoulders and held her close to him.

  ‘I want to get out of here,’ she whimpered. ‘Please.’

  The elevator had only dropped a metre, but the blood had rushed from all five faces and collected in their feet. As white as chalk, they looked at one another, like a group of ghosts suddenly realising they have already been dead for a long time.

  ‘Okay.’ Eva abandoned the intercom, raised her hand and tried to sound practical, which she was remarkably successful in doing. ‘The most important thing now is that we stay calm. That means you too, Sushma. Sushma? Okay?’

  Sushma nodded, her lower lip trembling, her face wet with tears.

  ‘Good. We don’t know what’s wrong, and we can’t get through to anyone, so we have to find out.’

  ‘It can’t be all that bad,’ said Hsu. ‘I mean, there’s only a sixth of the—’

  ‘Twelve metres on the Moon are like two on Earth, you know that,’ retorted Karla. ‘And I guess we’re about a hundred and twenty metres up.’

  ‘Sshh! Listen.’

  A rising and falling roaring sound filled their ears. A tormented howling mixed in with it, like a material under intense strain. Eva looked up to the ceiling. There was a bulkhead in clear view in the middle. She saw the operator control next to the display. She hesitated for a moment, then activated the mechanism. For a number of seconds, nothing happened, giving rise to the fear that this function had been damaged too. How were they supposed to get outside if the
bulkhead had failed? But even while she was still pondering the alternatives, it stirred into motion and slowly rose. A flickering orange-red glow made its way in, the roaring intensified. She crouched down, pushing off from her knees, got a grip on the edge of the hatch, pulled herself up with a powerful swinging movement and clambered onto the roof.

  ‘My God,’ she whispered.

  On the right-hand side, a large section of the dividing wall had been torn away, which meant she could see through to the neighbouring shaft. Five, perhaps six metres above her, was the smouldering, half-destroyed cabin of E2. The side casing was completely gone, exposing its inside, the source of the roaring sound, which was now even louder. Red apparitions darted across the floor of the burning elevator, streaks of rust were collecting further up in the shaft. There was debris wherever she looked. A bizarrely distorted, glowing and pulsing piece of metal was directly in front of her feet. She took a step back. At first she thought the brake shoes of the staff elevator had gripped and surrounded the guide rails, but on closer inspection two of them seemed to be blocked by splinters or possibly damaged. The heat was making thick beads of sweat build up over her forehead and upper lip.

  Then, suddenly, the floor collapsed from under her feet.

  A collective scream forced its way up to her as the cabin dropped another metre. Eva staggered, caught her balance, and saw that one of the brake shoes had opened up. No, worse than that, it had broken! In panic, she looked for a way out. Right in front of her eyes was the lower edge of the doors which led to the gallery. She wedged her finger between the gap, making a useless attempt to open them, but of course they didn’t move a single millimetre. Why would they? These weren’t normal elevator doors, but completely sealed-off bulkheads. As long as the system didn’t decide to open them, or unless someone activated them from the outside, she was only making a fool of herself and wasting valuable time.

  ‘Eva!’ She heard Sushma snivelling. ‘What’s happening?’

  It was hard for her to ignore the poor woman, but she didn’t have time to tend to the others’ sensitivities as well. Feverishly, she searched for a solution. The still-intact wall, she now noticed, revealed a passage through to the E1 shaft, around a square metre in size. Several metres above, she spotted another passage, too high to reach, and the glowing and smoky fragments of the blasted-away cabin casing were splayed out in it. Feeling an unpleasant pressure on her chest, Eva turned to the other side to get a look at the E2 shaft. The entire upper section of the dividing wall had disappeared, replaced by a huge, gaping hole, the jagged edge of which was level with her forehead. She had to hoist herself up a bit to look over it. Vertical guide rails stretched down into the depths of the unknown. There were crossbars positioned at intervals in between, wide enough to be able to get a grip and a foothold on them, and on the other side of the shaft she saw—

  A passageway.

  A rectangular hole leading into a short, horizontal tunnel. It lay there buried in the wall, dark and mysterious, but Eva was pretty sure she knew where it led, and it was big enough for two people to crawl along it at once. With a little dexterity, they’d be able to get across to it.

  The cabin creaked in its rails beneath her, metal scraping over metal. Mukesh Nair hoisted himself up through the hatch, raised his head and stared, aghast, at the glowing wreckage of E2.

  ‘Good God! What happened here—?’

  ‘Everyone out,’ said Eva. She pushed past him and called down to the others. ‘Out, quickly! And be careful, there’s burning debris everywhere.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’ asked Mukesh.

  ‘Help me.’

  The elevator groaned and dropped a little more, while sparks rained down on her from above. In pain, Eva felt the dot-sized burns on her hands and upper arms. She had picked out a simple, sleeveless top for the evening, and now she was cursing herself for it. Hurrying, she helped Karla, Sushma and the alarmingly stiff Rebecca Hsu clamber out, until they were all standing on the roof.

  ‘Take your clothes off,’ said Eva, untucking her top from her trousers and pulling it over her head. ‘T-shirts, blouses, shirts, anything you can wrap around your hands.’

  Sushma’s head jerked back and forth.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’ll burn our mitts if we don’t protect them.’ She gestured her head towards the gaping opening. ‘We need to get over there. Once you get to the other side, stay right up against the wall. There’s strutting between the elevator rails that you can grip onto to make your way along. Don’t look down, or up, just keep going. There’s a passageway on the other side, and I suspect it leads into the ventilator shaft.’

  ‘I’ll never make it,’ said Sushma in an anxious whisper.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ said Hsu decisively. ‘We’ll all make it, including you. And I’m sorry about before.’

  Sushma smiled, her lips twitching. Without hesitation, Eva ripped the thin fabric of her top. It had been sinfully expensive, but that was irrelevant now. She wrapped the scraps around her hands and wrists and helped Karla deconstruct her own T-shirt while Mukesh assisted his wife. Hsu cursed as she stripped down to her underwear, despairing at the misappropriation of her cocktail dress. Mukesh handed her strips of his shirt.

  ‘Good’ said Eva. ‘I’ll go first.’

  The cabin of the staff elevator shook. Eva clasped the edge of the destroyed dividing wall, pulled herself up and swung a leg onto the other side.

  Not look down?

  Eva, Eva. It was easier said than done. She suddenly felt queasy, and her courage disintegrated. The distant bottom of the shaft disappeared into the ominous darkness, and even the bars suddenly seemed disconcertingly narrow. Forcing herself not to look up at the demolished remains of cabin E2, she reached out, grabbed one of the bars and felt the heat penetrate the material wrapped around her hand. With her teeth clenched, she clambered right over to the other side and rested her feet on the hot steel.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly a boulevard. But she was standing.

  Resolved, she dared to take a step sideways and groped her way forwards until she reached the front-facing shaft wall. She bridged the corner with her leg and sent the tip of her foot searching for something to grip on to. Her upper body leaned backwards, the material of her improvised bandage slipped off against the steel of the brace. For a moment she feared losing her grip and clung on with her heart beating wildly. She couldn’t stop herself from craning her head back and staring at the underside of the glowing cabin. E2 was now directly above her, black and threatening, its edges fiery.

  If the thing falls now, she thought to herself, at least I won’t have to worry about whether they still have the blouse at Louis Vuitton. Then she remembered that Rebecca Hsu had bought Louis Vuitton, years ago even.

  Rebecca will just have to sort something out for me then, she thought grimly.

  She tightened her grip. With one more courageous step, she reached the bars on the front wall. Quickly now! The heat was starting to get painful through the bandages, burn blisters were inevitable. They wouldn’t be able to last all that long in here, and to top it all off she had a sneaking suspicion that the smoke was making its way downwards now too. Arching her feet like a ballerina, she pushed her way past the lower edge of the elevator doors, then conquered the second corner as well. The opening was to her right, barely a metre away. Cautiously, she turned her head and saw Karla at the height of the doors, closely followed by Sushma, who had her face turned towards the wall and was obediently refusing to look up or down. Mukesh, who had just made it to the other side, secured himself with his right hand and helped Hsu heave her ample body across the ledge.

  ‘Take care of Sushma,’ said Hsu, ignoring Mukesh’s outstretched hand. ‘I can make it by myse—’

  Her words were drowned out by metallic screeching. She hurriedly swung herself over the ledge. A crash and clatter sounded out, disappearing quickly into the depths as the staff elevator fell.

  ‘Everything okay?’ M
ukesh’s voice echoed off the walls and was swallowed by the abyss.

  Hsu nodded, trembling on one of the bars. ‘God that’s hot!’

  ‘Wait, I’m coming.’

  ‘No, I’m fine. Go. Go!’

  Eva took a deep breath and pushed herself forward to just below the passageway. It was higher up than she had thought and she could only just peer over the ledge, but there were two narrow rungs built into the wall. With a chin-up, she managed to get inside. She crawled forwards and, almost immediately, her hands came up against a metal plate which sealed off the back of the passageway. To the side of it was a small control panel. Taking a chance, she pressed her finger on it, and at the same moment icy horror rushed through her.

  Vacuum pressure! What if the fire and smoke had already annihilated too much of the oxygen in the elevator shaft?

  To her incredible relief, the panel glided to the side and revealed an evenly lit, two-metre-square shaft. There was a ladder on the left-hand side. She contorted herself to turn around, crept back and stretched both hands out towards Karla.

  ‘In here,’ she called, her voice reverberating. ‘The ventilation shaft is behind here.’

  Karla slithered into the passage next to her.

  ‘Climb down the ladder,’ said Eva. ‘At some point there should be a way of getting out.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m helping the others.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Sushma turned her face towards her. In it, hope and deathly fear were grappling for supremacy.

  ‘Everything’s okay, Sushma.’ Eva smiled. ‘Everything’s fine now.’

  There was a loud creak above her, then a metallic crash, and sparks rained down in dense showers.

  Eva looked up. A fiery glow was gleaming through a crack in the cabin. Had that been there before? It looked as though the floor of the burning cabin was beginning to break away from the rest of it.

  No, she thought. Not yet. Please!

  Hsu looked towards the ceiling in alarm as she battled to overcome the second corner. Her knees were shaking violently.

  Sushma started to cry. Hastily, Eva pulled the Indian woman into the shaft, helped by Mukesh, who pushed from below and then hesitated, unsure as to whether he should follow his wife or help Hsu, who was edging her way along centimetre by centimetre.