Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘Any time.’

‘Careful! You know that I’m better.’

‘Just wait and see how things work out in reduced gravity,’ Ögi chuckled. ‘Could be I’ll leave you both behind.’

‘All right then, you know we’ve just got to have a swimming race,’ Miranda announced, spreading her fingers. ‘I lo-o-o-o-ove being in the water.’

‘I got it. Huey and Dewey.’ O’Keefe lowered his eyes reverently. ‘Lord love a duck.’

They visited the floor with the conference rooms, the multi-religious chapel, a meditation centre and a sickbay that gleamed reassuringly like a new pin, then up to Gaia’s ribcage. The group all had rooms on floors fourteen to sixteen, in the outer curve of the breasts. The lobby lay almost fifty metres below them. To get to their suites from the lifts, they had to cross the glass bridges. More bridges on the lower floors were set at zigzag angles, obviously placed quite at random. None of them had a railing.

‘Anyone suffer from vertigo?’ asked Dana. Sushma Nair raised her hand hesitantly. Some of the others looked disconcerted. This time Dana’s smile was a little broader.

‘Please understand. When you jump from a two-metre-high wall on the Earth, you reach the ground 0.6 of a second later. During that time, your body has accelerated to twenty-two kilometres an hour. On the Moon, the same jump would take three times longer, and your final speed would be less than half. That’s to say that you would have to jump from a height of twelve metres to get the same effect as a two-metre jump on the Earth, or in other words, on the Moon you could happily jump from three floors up in an ordinary high-rise. This means that you really don’t need to take the lift every time you want to go downstairs. Just jump from bridge to bridge, they’re barely four metres apart, which is nothing. Anybody want to try?’

‘I will,’ said Carl Hanna.

She gave him an appraising look. Tall, muscly, deliberate in his movements.

‘The real experts can jump back up again,’ she added meaningfully.

Hanna grinned and walked onto the nearest bridge.

‘If it turns out she was lying,’ he called to the others, ‘just throw her after me, okay?’

He sprang from the bridge with Donoghue’s cackles of laughter following after. He fell, and landed four metres below without the slightest jar.

‘Like jumping down from the kerbstone,’ he called up.

In the next moment O’Keefe sailed out from the edge, then Heidrun. They both landed as though they had never moved any other way.

‘My goodness,’ said Aileen, ‘My goodness!’ and then looked at each of them in turn, with a ‘My goodness!’ for everyone.

‘C’mon, guys,’ Chucky boomed. ‘Show us what you’re made of! Up you come!’

‘You’ll have to make room.’ Hanna shooed them away with a flap of his hands. They scurried backwards. He looked thoughtfully up at the ledge. When he raised his arms, he was just about two metres fifty tall, so there was still a metre and a half to make up.

‘How tall are you?’ O’Keefe asked, disconcerted.

‘Six foot three.’

‘Hmm.’ The Irishman rubbed his chin. ‘I’m five foot nine.’

‘Could be a near thing. Heidrun?’

‘One hundred and seventy-eight – five foot ten. Whatever. Whoever doesn’t make it has to stand us all a meal.’

‘Forget it.’ O’Keefe waved the idea away. ‘It’s all free here anyway.’

‘Then back on Earth. Hey, in Zürich! All right with that? A round of schnitzels in the Kronenhalle.’

‘Meaning all of us!’ called Julian.

‘Good, we’ll all jump together,’ Hanna declared. ‘Make room, so we don’t get in one another’s way. You guys up there, get back! Ready!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Heidrun grinned. ‘Ready.’

‘And up we go!’

Hanna sprang powerfully upwards. It looked astonishingly easy. As calmly as a superhero, he flew towards the ledge, grabbed hold, boosted himself up again and landed on his feet. Next to him Heidrun fluttered down, struggling for balance. O’Keefe’s hands threatened to slip off the edge of the bridge, then he clambered up, as elegantly as circumstances allowed.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Kronenhalle is cancelled.’

‘You’re all invited anyway,’ Ögi called out, in the tones of a man who embraces the whole world. ‘This is the first time ever that a Swiss has taken a standing jump of four metres. We’ll meet again in Zürich!’

‘Optimist,’ said Lynn, so quietly that only Dana heard.

The hotel director was stunned. She acted as though she hadn’t caught that wan little word with its insidious undertones.

What was the matter with Orley’s daughter?

‘Please bear in mind,’ she said out loud to the group, ‘that in reduced gravity your body will be losing muscle mass. There are two guest lifts here in Gaia, the E1 and E2, and a staff lift, but we nevertheless recommend that you work out a lot and take the shortcut via the bridges as often as you can. Now we’ll tell you a little more about the facilities and show you the rooms.’

Hanna had Sophie Thiel show him all the secrets of his suite. There was no essential difference between the life-support systems here and those aboard the space station.

‘The temperature is set to twenty degrees Celsius, but that’s adjustable,’ Sophie Thiel explained with a wide-screen smile, pointing out a button by the door; she brushed so close past Hanna as she did so that it was only just within the limits of professionalism. ‘Your suite has its own water management system, with wonderfully sterile water—’

‘Don’t use words like that to the customers,’ Hanna said, looking about and at the same time feeling her hungry gaze on his back. No two ways about it, this Thiel woman liked muscular men. ‘It sounds as if you’re setting out to poison somebody.’

‘Well then, let’s just call it fresh water. Ha ha.’

He turned to face her. Her eyes were half-moons, their colour barely discernible; on the other hand she looked as if she had a double ration of bright white teeth and inexhaustible reserves of laughter. She was not the least bit beautiful, but very pretty for all that. A grown-up version of Pippi Longstocking, or whatever that Swedish minx was called. He had found the film on a Sunday afternoon at a hotel in Germany, while he was waiting for hours on end for to meet somebody who had been floating dead in the Rhine all the while, and he had watched it all the way through, curiously moved. A childish, clunky old three-reeler, but the childhood it showed him was so amazingly different from his own that it was practically science fiction. He found himself unable to change channels. He’d never watched a kids’ movie before, or at least never one like this.

And he’d never watched another one.

Thiel showed him how the lighting was controlled, opened up a respectable mini-bar and told him the numbers to call if he needed anything. The look in her eyes said, if only things were different . I’ve worked in the best hotels in the world. Never with guests. You could hardly say that she put herself forward. She was friendly and professional, it’s just that she was also an open book.

But Hanna wasn’t here for fun and games.

‘If there’s anything else you’d like—’

‘No, not at the moment. I’ll manage.’

‘Oh, I almost forgot! You’ll find your moon slippers in the bottom of the wardrobe.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘We couldn’t think of a better name for them. They have lead plates in the soles, in case you want additional weight.’

‘Why would I want that?’

‘Some people prefer to move on the Moon the way they move on Earth.’