Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘No, it’s great,’ Black agreed.

‘I think the quote’s too long,’ said Finn. ‘Far too long. A real sermon – I nearly dozed off.’

‘It’s sacred.’

‘No, it’s just too long, that’s all.’

‘We’ll cut in shots of the Earth,’ said Lynn. ‘But if you like we’ll do an alternative shot. There’s another quote from James Lovell: People on Earth don’t understand what they have. Maybe because not many of them have the opportunity to leave it and then come back. ’

‘Lovell won’t do,’ said Black. ‘He never set foot on the Moon.’

‘Is that so important?’ asked O’Keefe.

‘Yes, and there’s another reason why not. He was the commander of Apollo 13. Anybody remember? Houston, we have a problem . Lovell and his people nearly snuffed it.’

‘Didn’t Cernan say something clever?’ Lynn asked. ‘He was a pretty good talker.’

‘Nothing comes to mind.’

‘Armstrong?’

‘ It’s one small step for —’

‘Forget it. Aldrin?’

Black thought for a moment. ‘Yeah, something short too. He who has been to the Moon has no more goals on Earth .’

‘That sounds a bit fatalistic,’ Finn complained.

‘What happened to the monkeys?’ Heidrun’s voice joined in. O’Keefe saw her coming down the hill in front of Shepard’s Green. Even faceless and armoured her elfin figure was unmistakable.

‘What monkeys?’ Lynn’s laugh was slightly too shrill.

‘Didn’t you send monkeys up at some point? What did they say?’

‘I think they spoke Russian,’ said Black.

‘What are you doing here?’ O’Keefe grinned. ‘Don’t you fancy golf?’

‘I’ve never fancied golf,’ Heidrun announced. ‘I just wanted to watch Walo falling in the dirt as he took his swing.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘He knows. Didn’t you boast about beating me at swimming, big-mouth? You’d have the opportunity.’

‘What, now?’

Instead of answering, she waved to him and skipped away on her gazelle-like legs.

‘We’ve got filming to do,’ he called after her; it was as superfluous as his head-shaking, since radio contact remained constant only while visual contact was maintained.

‘Dinner’s on me if you win,’ she whispered, a small, white snake in his ear. ‘Schnitzel and röstis.’

‘Hey, Finn?’ said Lynn.

‘Mm-hm?’

‘I think that’s a wrap.’ Was he wrong, or did she sound nervous? Throughout the whole shoot she’d had a tense expression on her face. ‘I think the Mitchell quote is fine.’

O’Keefe saw Heidrun setting off along the other side of the gorge.

‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Me too, as a matter of fact.’

Nina Hedegaard was freshening herself up, and freshening Julian up as well. He lay on his back as she guided him like a joystick. He didn’t have to do much more than put his arms around her buttocks and contract his own from time to time, to establish counter-pressure – at least that was normally how things worked, but at the moment her soft, tanned, golden body weighed only nine and a half kilos, and threatened to bounce away whenever he thrust too enthusiastically. On the Moon, taking possession of strategically crucial millimetres called for basic knowledge of applied mechanics: where exactly to grip, what contribution the muscles had to make – biceps, triceps, pectoralis major – holding the hip bones like a hinge, drawing them to him, pushing them away at a precisely calculated angle, then bringing them back down… It was all frustratingly complicated. They managed to crack the problem at one point, but Julian didn’t feel entirely comfortable. As Hedegaard slowly writhed her way towards a G-spot tornado measuring 5 on the Fujita scale, he was lost in idiotic thoughts, like the consequences of sex on the Moon if a few meddlesome beams in New Zealand had been enough to make little Maoris. Could they expect decuplets? Would Nina squat like a termite queen in the rocky seclusion of the Gaia Hotel, her abdomen monstrously swollen, popping out a human child every four seconds, or would she simply burst?

He stared at her glimmering, carefully trimmed, downy thicket and saw tiny trains driving through it, glittering reflections on spun gold, while his own Lunar Express valiantly stoked the engine. Hedegaard started moaning in Danish, usually a good sign, except that today it sounded somehow cryptic to his ears, as if he were to be sacrificed on the altar of her desire, to bring a Julian or a Juliana into the world as quickly as possible, a future Master or Miss Orley, and he started feeling uneasy. She was twenty-eight years younger than him. He hadn’t asked her for ages what she expected from all this, not least because in the few private moments that they enjoyed together he hadn’t had time to ask any questions, so quickly had they leapt out of their clothes, but eventually he would have to ask her. Above all he would have to ask himself . Which was much worse, because he already knew the answer, and it wasn’t that of a sixty-year-old man.

He tried to hold out, then he reached his orgasm.

The climax peaked in a brief erasure of all thoughts, swept clean the convolutions of his brain and reinforced the certainty that old was still twenty years older than he was. For a moment he felt immersed in the pure, delicious moment. Nina snuggled up to him, and his suspicion immediately welled up again. As if sex were merely the pleasurable preamble to a stack of small print, a magnificent portal leading inevitably to the nursery, the most perfidious kind of ambush. He looked helplessly at the blonde shock of hair on his chest. Not that he wanted rid of her. He actually didn’t want her to go. It would have been enough for her simply to turn back into the astronaut whose job it was to entertain his guests without that moist promise in her eyes that she would never leave him , that henceforth she would always be there for him, for a whole lifetime ! He ran his pointed fingers through the down on the back of her neck, embarrassed by his own reaction.

‘I ought to get back to the control room,’ he murmured.

His suggestion met with harsh, muted sounds.

‘Okay, in ten minutes,’ he agreed. ‘Shall we shower?’

In the bathroom the general luxury of the equipment continued. Tropically warm rain sprang from a generously curved shower-head, droplets so light that they floated down rather than falling. Hedegaard insisted on soaping him, and concentrated an excess of foam on a small if expanding area. His concern about her excessive demands made way for fresh arousal; the shower cabin was spacious and resplendent with all kinds of handy grips, Hedegaard pressed herself against him and he into her and – bang! – another thirty minutes had passed.

‘I’ve really got to go now,’ he said into his fluffy towel.

‘Will we meet up again later?’ she asked. ‘After dinner?’

He had towel in his eyes, towel in his ears. He didn’t hear her, or at least not loudly enough, and when he was about to ask what she’d said she was on the phone to Peter Black about something technical. He slipped quickly into jeans and T-shirt, kissed her quickly on the cheek and disappeared before she could end the call.

Seconds later he stepped into the control room and found Lynn in a hushed conversation with Dana Lawrence. Ashwini Anand was planning routes for the coming day on a three-dimensional map. Half the room was dominated by a holographic wall, whose windows showed the public areas of the hotel from the perspective of surveillance cameras. Only the suites were unobserved. In the pool, Heidrun, Finn and Miranda were having a diving competition, watched by Olympiada Rogacheva, whose husband was having a weight-lifting contest with Evelyn Chambers in the gym. The outside cameras showed Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker playing tennis, or at least Julian assumed that it was Marc and Mimi, while the golf-players on the far side of the gorge were just setting off for home.