Limit

by Frank Schätzing

  ‘Then I need to—’

  ‘And what are you going to surprise us with this evening, young man?’ Aileen asked in a saccharine voice.

  Kokoschka ran his hand over his bald head. Amazing, just a few millimetres of scalp. How it kept producing more sweat. Layer after layer, as if he were sweating out his brain.

  ‘Ossobucco with risotto milanese,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oooh!’ said Winter. ‘I love risotto!’

  ‘I make it the Venetian way,’ Aileen told Kokoschka. ‘You know you constantly have to keep stirring? Never stop stirring.’

  ‘He’s a chef, darling,’ said Chuck.

  ‘I know that. May I ask where you learned your craft?’

  ‘Erm …’ Kokoschka squirmed, like a bug on flypaper. ‘Sylt – among other places.’

  ‘Oh, Sylt, wait, that’s, that’s, don’t tell me, it’s that city in northern Norway, right? Up at the top.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘No.’ He had to get away, find Tim. ‘An island.’

  ‘And who did you learn from, Alex?’ Aileen twinkled intimately at him. ‘I can say Alex, can’t I?’

  ‘Axel. From Johannes King. Sorry, I’ve really got to—’

  ‘Do you use beef marrow in your risotto?’

  Kokoschka looked nervously at the stairs, a fox in a trap, a fish in a net.

  ‘Come on, tell us your secrets.’ Aileen smiled. ‘Sit down, Alex, Axel, sit down.’

  * * *

  The deeper Sophie Thiel dug into the recordings, the stranger it all seemed. Via cleverly disguised cross-connections, you reached lists of unofficial hot keys, some of them cryptic, others designed to control the hotel’s communication system. Among other things, they also blocked the laser connection between Gaia and the moon base, or more precisely they directed the signal to a mobile phone connection. By now she also thought she knew what the mysterious menu was for. It wasn’t the LPCS itself that was coming under attack, it was more that an impulse was sent to the Earth, and as far as she could tell that impulse had prompted a block that didn’t just affect lunar satellites. A lot of work had been done here; the Moon had been completely cut off from the Earth.

  And suddenly she doubted that all that effort had been devoted only to the purpose of destroying the hotel.

  Who were they?

  Tim! She desperately hoped Tim would appear at last. Hadn’t Axel found him? She didn’t know enough to lift the block, particularly since she didn’t know what it had actually unleashed. On the other hand she was confident that she could undo the interference with the laser connection to Peary Base. She would make contact with the astronauts there and ask for help, even if it might put her life in danger, because somebody might be listening in on her, but in that case she would just lock herself away somewhere.

  Lock herself away, what nonsense! Childish idea. Where are you going to lock yourself away when the bomb goes off?

  She had to get out of here! They all had to get out of here!

  Her fingers darted over the touchscreen, barely touching the smooth, cool surface. After a few seconds she heard footsteps, and the familiar shadow settled on her again. The lamb cutlets were going cold beside her, in silent reproach.

  ‘Did you find him?’ she asked, without looking up, as she corrected a command. She had to rewrite that one sequence, but perhaps it wasn’t even Axel, it was Tim.

  No reply.

  Sophie looked up.

  As she leapt up and recoiled, sending her chair flying, she realised that she had made a crucial blunder. She should have stayed calm. She shouldn’t have turned a hair. Instead her eyes were wide with horror, revealing all her deadly knowledge.

  ‘You,’ Sophie whispered. ‘It’s you.’

  Again, no answer. At least not in words.

  * * *

  Heidrun felt a little awkward as she stepped into the suite, in dressing gown and flip-flops. Unusually, but in pointed contrast to Finn, she had opted against the familiar rock-climbing match up the bridges, and instead primly pressed the lift button, as if it was the last thing that the pitiful remains of her arrogance could still manage. Aghast at what she had just surrendered, when Walo had never been unsatisfactory in that regard, she had the lift cabin carry her up to Gaia’s ribcage, away from the pool of temptation, stiff as a board, no false moves, just carefully sniffing her fingers for traces of lust. She felt as if her whole body exuded betrayal. The air in the lift struck her as heavy with clues, thick with vaginal aromas and the ozone stench of alien sperm, even though nothing had happened, at least not really, and yet –

  Walo, her heart thumped. Walo, oh Walo!

  She found him reading, gave him a kiss, that familiar, scratchy moustachioed kiss. He smiled.

  ‘Have fun?’

  ‘Lots,’ she said and fled to the bathroom. ‘And you? Not in the bar?’

  ‘I was, darling. It was only moderately bearable. Chuck’s jokes are starting to offend Aileen’s Christian sensibilities. A while ago he asked what a healthy dog and a short-sighted gynaecologist have in common.’

  ‘Let me guess. A wet nose?’

  ‘So I thought I might as well read.’

  She looked at herself in the mirror, her white, violet-eyed elfin face, just as she had seen Finn’s face down below, in the merciless light of the realisation that people aged, they aged inexorably, that their once immaculate skin began to wrinkle, that she was a depressing forty-six, and had something in common with many men who tried to recapture their lost youth, something that women generally said they would never undergo: a proper midlife crisis.

  If you want to grow old with someone, she thought, you shouldn’t need anyone else to make you feel younger.

  And she loved Walo, she loved him so much!

  Naked, she walked back into the living room, lay down on the carpet in front of him, folded her hands behind her head, stretched out a foot and tapped his left knee.

  ‘What are you reading there?’

  He lowered the book and studied her outstretched body with a smile.

  ‘Whatever it was,’ he said, ‘I’ve just forgotten it.’

  * * *

  Tim pressed the door buzzer again.

  ‘Lynn? Please let me in. Let’s talk.’

  No reaction. What if he was mistaken? He’d just missed her in the Mama Quilla Club, and had assumed that she had gone to her suite. But perhaps she was doing other things. What frightened him more than any bomb was the idea that she might actually be losing her mind, that she had already lost it. Crystal, too, hadn’t just been depressive, she’d increasingly lost touch with reality.

  ‘Lynn? If you’re there, open up.’

  After a while he gave in and jumped down the bridges to the lobby, deeply concerned. He wondered what Sophie was up to. Whether the Gravedigger had uncovered the footage. At the same time his thoughts revolved around himself: Amber, Julian, bomb, Lynn, Hanna, accomplices, satellite failure, bomb, Amber, Lynn, worries that devoured one another, a madhouse.

  The control centre was empty. Sophie was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Sophie?’

  He looked helplessly around. A bulkhead led to a back room, but when he put his finger on the sensor field, he found it was locked. He saw Dana running towards him through the lobby. She entered the control centre and looked around with a frown.

  ‘Have you seen Sophie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is everything spiralling out of control?’ Her face darkened. ‘She was supposed to be here. Someone has to be in the control centre. I guess you haven’t bumped into Kokoschka?’

  ‘No.’ Tim scratched the back of his head. ‘Weird. Sophie was working on something very interesting.’

  ‘Which was?’

  He told Dana about the authorisation program and what they’d hoped to find with it. The manager’s face was expressionless. When he had finished, she did what he too had done when he came in, and studied the monitor wall.

 
‘Forget it,’ said Tim. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t seem to have got very far. Did she even install the program?’

  ‘I was here when she did.’

  Dana walked in silence to the touchscreen, keyed in the call-codes of Ashwini Anand, Axel Kokoschka, Michio Funaki and Sophie Thiel and put all of them on a single channel. Only Ashwini and Michio replied.

  ‘Can anyone tell me where Sophie and Axel are?’

  ‘Not here,’ said Michio. Chuck’s booming bass voice could be heard in the background.

  ‘Not with me either,’ said Ashwini. ‘Isn’t Sophie in the control centre?’

  ‘No. Tell them to check in as soon as possible if you meet them. Point number two – we’re evacuating.’

  ‘What?’ cried Tim.

  She told him to keep his voice down.

  ‘In five minutes I’m going to put out a message and ask our guests to make their way to the Mama Quilla Club at half past eight. You are to be there too. We’ll tell them exactly what’s going on, and then leave the hotel together.’

  ‘What’s happening to the Ganymede?’ Anand asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She glanced at the time. ‘We’re going to put out a radio flare for it Ganymede, which will reach it as soon as it’s within range of Gaia. They aren’t to land, but to fly on immediately to Peary Base. Not a word to the guests before eight thirty.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Funaki.

  ‘I’m not surprised about Axel Kokoschka,’ said Dana, and rang off. ‘You can never get hold of him; he’s always forgetting his phone. A great chef, a hopeless knuckle-head in every other respect. If he and Sophie haven’t appeared by eight thirty, put out a call for them.’

  ‘Are we really going to clear this place?’ asked Tim.

  ‘What would you do in my place?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You see? I do, though. Let’s not fool ourselves – our father’s been overdue for an hour and a half now, and even though we haven’t found a bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t ticking away somewhere even so.’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘Hmm. Do atom bombs tick?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘No matter. We’ll send Nina Hedegaard to the Aristarchus Plateau and take the Lunar Express to the base.’

  ‘End of a pleasure trip,’ said Tim, and suddenly he became aware that his bottom lip was beginning to tremble. Amber! He fought against it and stared at his shoes. Dana let a smile play around her lips.

  ‘We will find Ganymede,’ she said. ‘Hey, Tim, chin up.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I need you with a clear head right now. Go back to the bar, tell a joke, lighten the mood a bit.’

  Tim gulped. ‘Chuck’s the guy in charge of jokes.’

  ‘Tell better ones.’

  * * *

  ‘Mr Orley? Er – Tim?’

  The fitness area was huge. Quite how huge, you discovered when you set about trying to find someone there, and Kokoschka looked conscientiously. After escaping Aileen’s suffocating curiosity, he had to face fatherly advice from Chuck. He should look for Julian’s son where men who valued high life expectation and firm abdominal muscles tended to go, and where Tim had been going every evening.

  But the gyms were deserted, the tennis courts abandoned. In the steam bath, a mist of droplets mixed with tinkling Far Eastern music. Tim wasn’t in the Finnish sauna, he wasn’t pounding along a treadmill or punishing an exercise bike, in fact he seemed instead to have put all his energy into running away from Kokoschka. A moment of optimism when he heard sounds from the pool, but it made for disappointment when he discovered that only Nina Hedegaard was there, swimming lonely lengths in the crater. Tim wasn’t there, and he hadn’t been there, and what was going on, where was the Ganymede and were the satellites still sleeping?

  Kokoschka concluded that Nina knew nothing about the bomb. Perhaps because in all the excitement they’d forgotten to tell her. He was tempted for a moment to put her in the picture, but tough girl Dana might have reasons for restricting the number of initiates. He was a chef, not a corrector of higher decisions, so he mumbled a word of thanks and decided to give Sophie Thiel at least an interim report.

  * * *

  As soon as Tim appeared in Gaia’s forehead again, the announcement came through:

  ‘As you will already have established, ladies and gentlemen, our schedule is rather disrupted, not least because Ganymede is late and we are unfortunately having problems with satellite communication.’ Dana’s voice sounded apathetic and toneless. ‘There is no need to worry, but I ask all of Gaia’s guests and staff members to make their way to the Mama Quilla Club at 8.30 p.m., where we will inform you about the latest state of development. Please be on time.’

  ‘That’s in ten minutes,’ Rebecca said in a thick voice.

  ‘Doesn’t sound good,’ muttered Chuck.

  ‘How come?’ Unimpressed, Miranda emptied down a bowl of cheese puffs. ‘She said there was no need to worry.’

  ‘Sure, that’s her job.’ Chuck rocked angrily back and forth, fists clenched, drumming arhythmically on the seat of his chair. ‘I’m telling you, she’s messing with us. I’ve been saying that all along!’

  ‘At least we’re going to be informed now,’ Aileen reassured him.

  ‘No, Chuck’s right,’ Olympiada observed listlessly. ‘The most reliable clue for an impending catastrophe is when higher authorities deny them.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Miranda.

  ‘No, we’ve got to assume the worst,’ Donoghue said to Olympiada.

  Miranda plundered another bowl. ‘You guys are all so negative. Bad karma.’

  ‘Remember my words.’

  ‘Silly nonsense.’

  ‘I know this from my parliamentary work,’ Olympiada explained to her half-empty glass. ‘For example when we say we aren’t going to raise taxes, it means we are. And when—’

  ‘But we’re not in parliament,’ Tim replied, more sharply than he had meant to. ‘So far everything in this hotel has been organised very professionally, hasn’t it?’

  She looked at him. ‘My husband is on Ganymede.’

  ‘So’s my wife.’

  ‘Okay, you lot can wait.’ Chuck jumped up and hurried to the stairs. ‘I’m going down there!’

  * * *

  ‘Where’s Sophie?’

  ‘Mister Kokoschka!’ Dana glared at him. ‘How about being contactable for a change?’

  Kokoschka flinched. He rubbed his big paws on his jacket and glanced around the control centre.

  ‘Sorry. I know we’re supposed to be meeting in the Mama Quilla—’

  ‘Get used to carrying your phone around with you. The question comes back to you. Where is Sophie?’

  ‘Sophie?’ Kokoschka started poking around in his left ear. ‘I thought she was here. Don’t know. Shall I start on the dinner? I’ve got to—’ He hesitated. The note seemed to be burning a hole in his jacket pocket. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where Tim Orley is?’

  ‘What is this?’ A wrinkle appeared between Dana’s eyebrows. ‘A quiz show? Are we playing hide-and-seek?’

  ‘I’m just asking.’

  ‘Tim Orley should be in the bar. He went up there a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Okay, then—’ Kokoschka took a step back.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Dana said severely. ‘Tell me again exactly where you looked this afternoon. Did you check the sauna too?’

  ‘Yep.’ He fidgeted around in the doorway, suddenly very worried about Sophie. What was going on?

  ‘Calm down,’ said Dana. ‘We’ll go up there together in a few minutes.’

  * * *

  The bar was filling up. Karla Kramp and Eva Borelius appeared on the stairs, followed by the Nairs and Finn, and blocked Chuck’s way as he came charging down as if pursued by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  ‘Do you know anything?’ He flashed his eyes at them.
>
  ‘No more than you do, I should think.’ Eva shrugged. ‘They want to tell us something.’

  ‘I hope it’s nothing bad,’ said Sushma anxiously.

  ‘It’ll be more than the time of day, I can promise you that,’ blustered Donoghue. ‘Something’s happened.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Friends, why all this speculation?’ Nair smiled. ‘In a few minutes we will know more.’

  ‘In a few minutes we’ll hear a load of prepared blarney,’ Chuck bellowed. ‘I could tell by looking at Lynn and all those plaster saints. You can’t fool Chucky.’

  ‘Who says they’re trying to fool you?’ asked Finn.

  ‘My experience,’ snapped Donoghue. ‘My prostate!’

  ‘Have you had the golden finger?’

  ‘Now listen, young man—’

  ‘What are you getting worked up about? That they’re hiding something from us? They aren’t, you know.’

  ‘They aren’t?’ Chuck narrowed his eyes. ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘My prostate!’ Finn grinned. ‘Claptrap, Chucky. If they wanted to keep something from us, they’d hardly have called a meeting.’

  ‘But I don’t want to know what just anyone gets to hear.’ Chuck struck his chest with his fist. ‘I want the whole truth, you understand?’ He pushed past them. ‘And first, I’m telling you now, I’m not letting that stupid skank of a hotel manager go up there, just so as you know!’

  ‘Tsk, tsk.’ Karla watched after him. ‘For a hotelier, he really sounds like a grumpy guest.’

  * * *

  ‘We’ve got to get up there,’ said Heidrun.

  She was half lying on top of Ögi, half beside him, with his hairy arm under her back. As if infected by the virus of infidelity, she had forced him to make love, to receive the antidote to her own lust, and it was at the sound of Dana’s voice that she had experienced an exorbitant neuronal firework, as if it had been sparked by the hotel manager’s monotonous voice. Whatever the reason for the disturbance, Heidrun was so furious with Dana that she chose to ignore the announcement, and proceeded to do just that for a whole six minutes, with Ögi’s fingers stroking the back of her neck.