Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Oh, yeah. Hasn’t he done it before?’

‘He hasn’t, in fact.’ Rogachev smiles. ‘Maybe you mean Putin.’

‘No, no, it’s longer ago, something with an “a” and “in” at the end.’ Miranda trawls through the nursery of her education. ‘Nope, it’s not coming.’

‘Maybe you mean Stalin?’ O’Keefe asks slyly.

The PA system puts an end to all their speculation. A soft, dark woman’s voice issues safety instructions. Almost everything she says sounds to Evelyn like a perfectly normal aeroplane safety routine. They fasten their belts, like horse harnesses. In front of each row of seats, monitors light up and transmit vivid camera pictures of the outside world, giving the illusion that you’re looking through windowpanes. They see the inside of the cylinder, increasingly illuminated by the rising sun. The hatch closes, life-support systems spring to life with a hum, then the seats tip backwards so that they’re all lying as if they’re at the dentist’s.

‘Tell me, Miranda,’ whispers O’Keefe, turning his head towards Miranda. ‘Do you still have names for them?’

‘Who?’ she asks back, just as quietly. ‘Oh, right. Of course.’ Her hands become display units. ‘This one’s Huey. That other one’s Dewey.’

‘What about Louie?’

She looks at him from under lowered eyelids.

‘For Louie we’ll have to get to know each other better.’

At that moment a jolt runs through the cabin, a tremor and a vibration. O’Keefe slips lower in his seat. Evelyn holds her breath. Rogachev’s face is blank. Olympiada has her eyes shut. Somewhere someone laughs nervously.

What happens next is nothing, but nothing, like the launch of a plane.

The lift accelerates so quickly that Evelyn feels momentarily as if she has merged with her seat. She is pressed into the plump upholstery until arms and armrests seem to have become one. The vehicle shoots vertically out of the cylinder. Below them, from the perspective of a second camera, the Isla de las Estrellas shrinks to a long, dark scrap with a turquoise dot inside it, the pool. Was it really only yesterday that she was lying down there, critically eyeing her belly, bewailing the extra four kilos that had recently driven her from bikini to one-piece, while everyone around her was constantly insisting that her weight increase suited her and stressed her femininity? Forget the four kilos, she thinks. Now she could swear she weighs tonnes. She feels so heavy that she’s afraid she might at any moment crash through the floor of the lift and plop down in the sea, causing a medium-sized tsunami.

The ocean becomes an even, finely rippling surface, early sunlight pours in gleaming lakes across the Pacific. The lift climbs the cable at incredible speed. They hurtle through high-altitude fields of vapour, and the sky becomes bluer, dark blue, deep blue. A display on the monitor informs her that they are travelling at three times, no, four times, eight times the speed of sound! The earth curves. Clouds scatter to the west, like fat snowflakes on water. The cabin accelerates further to twelve thousand kilometres an hour. Then, very slowly, the murderous pressure eases. The seat begins to heave Evelyn back up again, and she completes the transformation back from dinosaur to human being, a human being who cares about an extra four kilos.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board OSS Spacelift One. We have now reached our cruising speed and passed through the Earth’s lower orbit, the one in which International Space Station ISS circles. In 2023 operation of the ISS was officially halted, and since then it has served as a museum featuring exhibits from the early days of space travel. Our journey time will be about three hours, the space debris forecast is ideal, so everything suggests that we will arrive at OSS, Orley Space Station, in good time. At present we are starting to pass through a Van Allen radiation belt, a shell of highly charged particles around the Earth, caused by solar eruptions and cosmic radiation. On the Earth’s surface we are protected from these particles; above an altitude of one thousand kilometres, however, they are no longer deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and flow directly into the atmosphere. Around here, or more precisely at an altitude of seven hundred kilometres, the inner belt begins. It essentially consists of high-energy protons, and reaches its highest densities at an altitude of between three thousand and six thousand kilometres. The outer belt extends from altitudes of fifteen to twenty-five thousand kilometres, and is dominated by electrons.’

Evelyn is startled to note that the pressure has completely disappeared. No, more than that! For a brief moment she thinks she’s falling, until she realises where she has had this strange feeling of being released from her own body before. She experienced it briefly during the zero-gravity flights. She is weightless. In the main monitor she sees the starry sky, diamond dust on black satin. The voice from the speaker assumes a conspiratorial tone.

‘As many of you may have heard, critics of manned space travel see the Van Allen belts as an impassable obstacle on the way to space because of the high concentration of radiation. Conspiracy theorists even see them as proof that man was never on the Moon. Supposedly it would only be possible to pass through them behind steel walls two metres thick. Be assured, none of this is true. The fact is that the intensity of the radiation fluctuates greatly according to variations in solar activity. But even under extreme conditions, the dosage, as long as you are surrounded by aluminium three millimetres thick, is half of what is considered safe under general radiation protection regulations for professional life. Generally it’s less than one per cent of that! In order to protect your health to the optimum degree, the passenger cabins of this lift are armoured accordingly, which is, incidentally, the chief reason for the lack of windows. As long as you don’t feel an urge to get out, we can guarantee your complete safety as you pass through the Van Allen belt. Now enjoy your trip. In the armrests of your seats you will find headphones and monitors. You have access to eight hundred television channels, video films, books, games—’

The whole caboodle, then. After a while Nina Hedegaard and Peter Black come floating over, handing out drinks in little plastic bottles that you have to suck on to get anything out of them, finger food and refreshment towels.

‘Nothing that could spill or crumble,’ Hedegaard says, with a Scandinavian sibi-lance on the S. Miranda Winter says something to her in Danish, Hedegaard replies, they both grin. Evelyn leans back and grins too, even though she didn’t understand a word. She just feels like grinning. She is flying into space, to Julian’s far-away city…

…in which she felt now as if she were alone with the Earth. It lay so far below her, so small, that it looked as if she would just have to reach out and the planet would slip softly into the palm of her hand. Gradually the darkness faded towards the west and the Pacific began to glow. China still slept, while staff in North America were already hurrying to their lunch-breaks, talking on their phones, and Europe was spinning towards the end of the working day. She was astonished to realise that three more earths would have fitted in the space between her and the blue and white sphere, although it would have been a bit of a tight squeeze. Almost 36,000 kilometres above her home, the OSS drifted in space. That in itself stretched her imagination to its limits, and yet to reach the Moon they would have to travel ten times as far.

After a while she pushed herself away from the window and floated over to one of the upside-down sofas. She clambered rather inelegantly into it. Strictly speaking, there was no point in even having furniture in a place like this. Underwater, buoyancy compensated for gravitation to allow you to float, but you were still subject to influences such as water density and current, while in zero gravity no forces at all affected the body. You didn’t weigh anything, you didn’t tend to move in any particular direction, you didn’t need a chair to keep you from falling on your behind, or the comfort of soft cushions, or a bed to stretch out on. Basically you needed only to float in the void with your legs and forearms bent, except that even the tiniest motor impulses, a twitch of a muscle, were enough to set the body drifting, so that you were in constant danger of cracking your head in your sleep. Millions of years of genetic predisposition also required you to lie on something, even if it was vertical or stuck to the ceiling. At the same time concepts such as ‘vertical’ were irrelevant in space, but people were used to systems of reference. Investigations had shown that space travellers found the idea of an earth at their feet more natural than one floating above their heads, which was why psychologists encouraged the so-called gravity-oriented style of construction, to create the illusion of a floor. You just strapped yourself firmly to the bed, in the chair you acted as if you were sitting down, and in the end it felt almost homey.