Frank Schätzing - Limit

Sitting beside Tim, Julian said quietly, ‘Of course the idea that you can have noises in a vacuum is total nonsense. Lynn would rather have stuck to the facts, but I thought we should think about the children.’

‘What children?’ Tim whispered back. Only now did he notice his father sitting on his other side.

‘Well, most of the people making the journey will be parents with their children! To show them the wonders of the universe. The whole show is aimed at children and adolescents. Just imagine how excited they’re going to be.’

‘So we aren’t just drawn back to the sea,’ the voice was saying. ‘An even older legacy guides our eyes to the stars. We look into the night sky and feel an unsettling closeness, almost something like homesickness, which we can barely explain to ourselves.’

The imaginary spaceship had passed through the planet’s new atmosphere, and was now heading towards New York. The Manhattan skyline with the illuminated Freedom Tower lay impressively beneath a fairy-tale night sky.

‘And the answer is obvious. Our true home is space. We are island-dwellers. Just as people in every age have pushed their way into the unknown to expand their knowledge and find new places to live, the natural desire to explore is written in our genes. We look up to the stars and ask ourselves why our technological civilisation shouldn’t be able to do what the nomads of early times managed using the simplest means, with boats made of animal skins, on peregrinations that lasted for years, defying the wind and weather, impelled only by their curiosity, their endlessly inventive spirit and their yearning for knowledge, the deep desire to understand.’

‘And that’s where I come in!’ squeaked a little rocket, that stomped into the picture and clicked its fingers.

The wonderful panoramic view of New York at night, starry sky and all, disappeared. Some of the audience laughed. The rocket did actually look funny. It was silver and fat with a pointy tip: a spaceship out of a picture-book, with four tailfins on which it marched around, wildly waving arms, and a rather odd-looking face.

‘Kids will love this,’ Julian whispered with delight. ‘Rocky Rocket! We plan comics with this little fellow, cartoons, cuddly toys, the whole shebang.’

Tim was about to reply when he saw his father arriving to stand next to the rocket in the black void. The virtual Julian Orley wore jeans too, an open white shirt and glittering silver trainers. The inevitable rings sparkled on his fingers as he shooed the little rocket off to the side.

‘You’re not needed here for the time being,’ he said, and spread his arms. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Julian Orley. A warm welcome to the Stellar Dome. Let me take you on a journey to—’

‘Yes, with me,’ trumpeted the rocket, and came sliding into the foreground in full showbiz style, also with his arms spread, on his knees or whatever rockets called knees. ‘Me, the one it all started with, Follow me to—’

Julian shoved the rocket aside again, and it in turn tripped him up. The two of them squabbled for a while about who was going to lead everybody through the history of space travel, until they agreed to do it together. The auditorium was plainly amused, and Chucky’s expansive laughter roared out at every trick that Rocky played. What followed was once again accompanied by images, such as a brick-built space station orbiting the Earth which, as Julian informed them, came from the science-fiction story ‘The Brick Moon’ by the English clergyman Edward Everett Hale. Rocky Rocket dragged a startled-looking dog into orbit and explained that it was the first satellite. The scenery changed again. A huge cannon, its barrel driven into a tropical mountainside. People in old-fashioned clothes climbed onto a kind of projectile and were fired into space by the cannon.

‘That was in 1865, eight years after the appearance of “The Brick Moon”. In his novels De la Terre à la Lune and Autour de la Lune , Jules Verne described the beginning of manned space flight with astonishing far-sightedness, even though the cannon, because of the length required, would have been impossible to make. But all the same, the projectile is successfully fired from Tampa in Florida, where, and just think about this, NASA is based today. Unfortunately, over the course of the story the unfortunate dog is thrown overboard at some point and circles the spaceship for a short time, the very first satellite.’

Rocky Rocket threw a bone to the puzzled creature, which tried in vain to catch it, with the result that the bone now went into orbit along with the dog.

‘In novels and short stories people started speculating a long time ago about how we could travel to the stars, but it was the Russians who first managed to fire an artificial heavenly body into near-Earth orbit. On 4 October 1957 at 22.29 hours and 34 seconds they fired an aluminium sphere into orbit, just over 84 kilos in weight and with four antennae that broadcast a series of now legendary beeps as a radio signal on 15 and 7.5 metre wavelengths, all across the world: Sputnik 1 took the world’s breath away!’

Over the next few minutes the imaginary spaceship turned once again into a time machine, as new objects were constantly fired into space. The dogs Strelka and Belka barked cheerfully on board Sputnik 4. Alexei Leonov ventured out of his capsule and floated like an astral baby on his umbilical cord through space. They met Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the first woman in space, they saw Neil Armstrong leaving his boot-prints in the Moon’s dust on 20 July 1969, and all kinds of space stations circling the Earth. Space Shuttles and Soyuz capsules carried goods and crews to the ISS, China started its first moon probe. A new international space race began, the Space Shuttle was mothballed, Russia revived its Soyuz programme, Ares rockets now headed for the endless construction site that was ISS, the spaceship Orion brought people to the Moon again, the European Space Agency immersed itself in preparations for a flight to Mars, China started to build a space station of its own, almost everyone fantasised about the colonisation of space, via Moon landings, flights to Mars and ventures into galaxies to which no man had ever boldly gone, as a science-fiction series of the early years had so nicely put it.

‘But all these plans,’ Julian explained, ‘shared the problem that spaceships and space stations couldn’t be built the way they ideally should have been built. Which was down to two unavoidable physical givens: air resistance – and gravitation.’

Now Rocky Rocket made his grand entrance again, balancing on a stylised globe, with a distant, friendly lunar face hanging over it. The satellite, unambiguously female, with crater acne but pretty nonetheless, winked at Rocky and flirted so brazenly with the little rocket that he sent sparks into ether from his pointed tip. Tim slipped deeper into his seat and leaned over to Julian.

‘Very child-friendly,’ he teased quietly.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘The whole thing’s a bit phallic. I mean, the Moon is female, so Miss Luna wants to be fucked. Or what?’

‘Rockets are phallic,’ Julian complained. ‘What should we have done in your view? Make the Moon masculine? Would you rather have had a gay Moon? I wouldn’t.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘I don’t want a gay Moon. No one wants a gay Moon. Or a gay spaceship with a glowing arse. Forget it.’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I just—’

‘You’re a born sceptic.’

Arguing for argument’s sake. Tim wondered how they would survive the next two weeks together. Meanwhile Rocky Rocket packed everything a rocket might need into his suitcase, cleanly folded a few astronauts in there too, stuffed the case into his belly, and then, blowing kisses, fired off a cute little stream of fire and leapt into the air. Immediately the Earth’s surface threw out a dozen extendable arms and pulled him back down again. Rocky, extremely puzzled, tried again, but escaping the planet seemed impossible. High above him, the randy Moon fell into a mild depression.