Limit

The Cave

‘The Stellar Dome was originally planned for the highest point of the island, where the crystal dome with the restaurant is now,’ Lynn Orley explained as she walked through the lounge ahead of the group. ‘Until, while we were exploring the place, we discovered something that led us to abandon our previous plans. The mountain provided us with an alternative that we could barely have imagined.’

On the evening of the third and last day of their stay on the Isla de las Estrellas the group was waiting for the prelude to their big adventure. Lynn led them to a wide, locked doorway set in the back wall of the lobby.

‘It can’t have escaped anyone that the Stellar Island Hotel looks like an ocean steamer stranded in the volcano. And officially that volcano is extinct.’ Here and there she registered unease. In Momoka Omura’s imagination in particular, streams of lava seemed to be flowing through the lounge and spoiling the evening once and for all. ‘At the summit and along the flank moderate temperatures prevail. Pleasantly cool, ideally suited for storing food and drink, for locating pumps, generators and processing plants, the laundry, janitor’s office and various other things. Just behind me’ – she turned her head towards the bulkheads – ‘offices were planned. We started drilling into the rock, but after only a few metres we found ourselves in a fault that extended into a cave, and at the end of that cave—’

Lynn rested the palm of her hand on a scanner, and the door slid open.

‘—lay the Stellar Dome.’

A steeply descending passageway with roughly carved walls stretched beyond the doorway, and turned a corner so that it was impossible to see where it went next. Lynn saw faces filled with curiosity, excitement and anticipation. Only Momoka Omura, once she had been reassured that she would not be burning up in liquid rock, seemed to have lost interest completely, and stared earnestly at the ceiling.

‘Any more questions?’ Lynn let a mysterious smile play around the corners of her mouth. ‘Then let’s go.’

A collage of sounds enveloped them, all apparently of natural origin. There were clicks, echoes, whispers and drips, and orchestral surfaces created a timeless atmosphere. Lynn’s idea of turning the emotional screw without slipping into the Disneyesque was taking effect: sounds on the boundary edge of perception, as a subtle way of creating moods, which had required the building of a complicated technical installation, but the result exceeded all expectations. The two sides of the door closed behind them, and cut them off from the airy, comfortable atmosphere of the lobby.

‘We laid out this section ourselves,’ Lynn explained. ‘The natural part begins just past the bend. The cave system extends through the whole of the eastern flank of the volcano. You could walk around in it for hours, but we preferred to close the passageways. Otherwise there might be a danger of you getting lost in the heart of the Isla de las Estrellas.’

Past the bend, the corridor stretched out considerably. It grew darker. Shadows flitted over pitted basalt, like the shadows of strange and startled animals escaping to safety from the horde of tourists. The echoes of their footsteps seemed to the group to precede and follow them at the same time.

‘How are caves like this formed?’ Bernard Tautou threw his head back. ‘I’ve seen a few, but every time I’ve forgotten to ask.’

‘They can have all kinds of possible causes. Tensions in the rock, pockets of water, landslips. Volcanoes are porous structures; when they cool down they often leave cavities. In this case it’s most probably lava drainage channels.’

‘Oh great,’ blustered Donoghue. ‘We’ve landed in the gutter.’

The corridor turned in a curve, narrowed and debouched into an almost circular room. The walls were lined with motifs from the dawn of humanity, some painted, some carved into the rock. Bizarre life-forms stared at the visitors from the penumbra, with fathomlessly dark eyes, horns and tails and helmets with aerial-shaped growths sprouting from them. Some of the clothes looked like spacesuits. They saw creatures that seemed to have merged with complicated machines. A huge, rectangular relief showed a humanoid creature in a foetal position operating levers and switches. The sound changed, becoming eerie.

‘Horrible,’ Miranda Winter sighed with relish.

‘I hope so,’ grinned Lynn. ‘After all, we’ve brought together the most mysterious testimonies of human creativity. Reproductions, obviously. The figures in the striped suits, for example, were discovered in Australia, and according to tradition they represent the two lightning brothers Yagjagbula and Tabiringl. Some researchers think they are astronauts. Next to them, the so-called Martian God, originally a six-metre cave drawing from the Sahara. The creatures there on the left, the ones who seem to be holding their hands up in greeting, were found in Italy.’

‘And this one?’ Eva Borelius had stopped in front of the relief and was looking at it with interest.

‘The gem of our collection! A Mayan artefact. The gravestone of King Pakal of Palenque, an ancient pyramid city in Chiapas in Mexico. It’s supposed to depict the ruler’s descent to the underworld, symbolised by the open jaws of a giant snake.’ Lynn walked over to it. ‘What do you recognise?’

‘Hard to say, but it looks as if he’s sitting in a rocket.’

‘Exactly!’ cried Ögi, rushing over. ‘And you know what? It was a Swiss man who was responsible for that interpretation!’

‘Oh?’

‘You don’t know of Erich von Däniken?’

‘Wasn’t he a sort of fantasist?’ Borelius smiled coldly. ‘Someone who saw extraterrestrials everywhere?’

‘He was a visionary!’ Ögi corrected her. ‘A very great one!’

‘I’m sorry.’ Karla Kramp gave a little cough. ‘But your visionary has been regularly contradicted.’

‘So?’

‘In that case I’d just like to understand what makes him so great.’

‘How often do you think, my dear, that the Bible has been contradicted,’ Ögi bellowed again. ‘Without fantasists the world would be more boring, more average, more stale. Who cares whether he was right? Do you always have to be right to be great?’

‘I’m sorry, I’m a doctor. If I’m wrong, my patients don’t generally reach the conclusion that I’m great.’

‘Lynn, could you come over here for a moment?’ Evelyn Chambers called. ‘Where does that come from? It looks as if they’re flying.’

Conversations sprouted, a little knowledge blossomed. The motifs were admired and discussed. Lynn provided explanations and hypotheses. This was the first time that a group of visitors had been inside the cave. Her plan to use prehistoric drawings and sculptures to get people in the mood for the mystery to come was a success. At length she drummed the group together and led them from the cave-room to the next stretch of passageway, which grew even steeper, even darker—

And warmer.

‘What’s that noise?’ Miranda Winter wondered. ‘Voom, voom! Is that normal?’

And true enough, a dull rumble mingled with the soundtrack, coming from the depths of the mountain, and creating a menacing atmosphere. Reddish wisps of smoke drifted over the rock.

‘There’s something there,’ Aileen Donoghue whispered. ‘Some sort of light.’

‘God, Lynn,’ laughed Marc Edwards. ‘Where are you taking us?’

‘We must be quite deep already, aren’t we?’ It was the first time Rebecca Hsu had spoken. Since her arrival she had been constantly on the phone, and nobody had been able to engage her.

‘Just over eighty metres,’ said Lynn. She stepped briskly on, towards another turn, bathed in flickering firelight.

‘Exciting,’ O’Keefe observed.

‘Oh, come on, it’s just theatre,’ Warren Locatelli announced from above. ‘We’re entering a strange world, is what they’re trying to suggest. The inside of the Earth, the interior of a strange planet, some waffle like that.’

‘Just wait,’ said Lynn.

‘What’s she got for us this time?’ Momoka Omura said, striving for disenchantment, while the tone of her voice revealed that streams of lava were starting to flow in her head again. ‘A cave, another cave. Brilliant.’

The rumbling and roaring rose in a crescendo.

‘So, I think it’s—’ Evelyn Chambers began, stopped in the middle of the sentence and said, ‘Oh, my!’

They had passed the bend. Monstrous heat came roaring at them. The passageway widened, suffused with a pulsating glow. Some of the guests came to an abrupt standstill, others ventured hesitantly forwards. On the right-hand side the rock opened up, providing a glimpse into a huge, adjacent vault, from which the thundering and roaring emanated, drowning out their conversation. A glowing lake half filled the chamber, boiling and bubbling, spitting red and yellow fountains. Basalt spikes jutted from the sluggish surge towards the domed ceiling, which flickered spectrally in the glow. With quiet delight, Lynn studied fear, fascination, astonishment; she saw Heidrun Ögi shielding herself against the heat with her raised hands. Her white hair, her skin seemed to be blazing. As she uncertainly approached, she looked for a moment as if she had just emerged from some inferno.

‘What on earth is that?’ she asked in disbelief.

‘A magma chamber,’ Lynn explained calmly. ‘A store that keeps the volcano fed with lava and gases. Such chambers form when liquid rock rises from a great depth to the weak areas of the Earth’s crust. As soon as pressure in the chamber gets out of control, the lava forces its way up, and the eruption occurs.’

‘But didn’t you say the volcano was extinct?’ Mukesh Nair said in amazement.

‘Officially extinct, yes.’

Suddenly everyone was talking at the same time. O’Keefe was the first to voice some suspicion. During the whole excursion he had been strolling thoughtfully along the passageway, absorbed, keeping his distance; now he walked right up to the seething cauldron.

‘Hé, mon ami!’ called Tautou. ‘Don’t singe your hair.’

‘Pas de problème,’ O’Keefe turned round and grinned. ‘I hardly think there’s anything to be afraid of. Isn’t that right, Lynn?’

He held out his right hand. His fingers touched a surface. Warm, but not hot. Entirely smooth. He pressed the palm of his hand against it and smiled appreciatively.

‘When was the last time it looked like this inside the mountain?’

Lynn smiled.

‘According to the geologists, about a hundred thousand years ago. But not as far up. Magma chambers usually lie at a depth of twenty-five to thirty kilometres, and they’re much bigger than this one.’

‘Anyway, it’s the best hologram I’ve seen in ages.’

‘We do our best to please.’

‘A hologram?’ echoed Sushma.

‘More precisely, an interplay of holographic projections with sound, coloured light and thermal panels.’

Sushma stepped up beside O’Keefe and tapped her finger against the surface of the screen, as if there might still be a chance that he was mistaken. ‘But it looks perfectly real!’

‘Of course. We don’t want to bore you, after all.’

Everybody touched the screen now, stepped respectfully back and yielded once more to the illusion. Chuck Donoghue forgot to wisecrack, Locatelli to prattle condescendingly. Even Momoka Omura stared into the digital lava lake and looked almost impressed.

‘We’re practically at our destination,’ said Lynn. ‘In a few seconds we’ll be able to enter that chamber, only then it will look completely different. You will be travelling from the distant past to the future of our planet, the future of mankind.’

She tapped a switch hidden in the rock. At the end of the passageway a tall, vertical crack appeared. Faint light seeped from it. The music swelled, powerful and mystical, the crack widened and provided a glimpse of the vault beyond. It really did, in appearance and dimensions, look very much like the holographic depiction, except that there was no lava sloshing about. Instead, there was a kind of theatrical arena suspended above the bottomless pit. Steel walkways led to banked rows of comfortable-looking seats, which hovered freely above the abyss. At the centre there arched a transparent surface measuring at least a thousand square metres in area. Its bottom end was lost in the lightless depths, the top reached to just below the domed ceiling, its sides stretched far beyond the rows of seats.

Standing on the gallery was a lone man.

He was of medium height, slightly squat, and youthful in appearance, although his beard and his long, collar-length hair were grey, and the ash-blond colour of earlier years was a thing of the distant past. He wore a T-shirt and jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. There were rings on his fingers. His eyes flashed jauntily, his grin was like a lighthouse beam.

‘Here you are at last,’ said Julian Orley. ‘Okay, then: let’s rock ’n’ roll!’

Tim stood apart from the others, watching his father greet the guests with handshakes or hugs according to how well he knew them. Julian, the great communicator, laying friendly traps. So keen to meet people that he never doubted for a moment that those people wanted to meet him, and that was exactly what attracted them. The physics of meeting people is based on both attraction and repulsion, but it was practically impossible to escape Julian’s gravitational pull. You were introduced to him and you instantly felt warm familiarity. Two, three more times and you were lost in memories of old times together that had never existed. Julian didn’t do much, he came out with no quips, he didn’t practise speeches in front of the mirror, he just took it for granted that in Newton’s two-body system he was the planet and not the satellite.

‘Carl, old man! Lovely to have you here!’

‘Evelyn, you look fantastic. What idiot ever said the circle was the most perfect form?’

‘Momoka, Warren. Welcome. Oh, and thank you for last time, I’ve been meaning to call for ages. To be quite honest, I have no idea how I got home.’

‘Olympiada Rogacheva! Oleg Rogachev! Isn’t this fantastic? Here we are meeting right now for the first time, and tomorrow we’ll be travelling to the Moon together.’

‘Chucky, old man, I’ve got a great joke for you, but we’ll have to step aside for a minute if you’re to hear it.’

‘Where is my Fairy Queen? Heidrun! I’ve finally met your husband. Did you ever buy that Chagall? – Of course I know about that, I know about all your passions; your wife has been doing nothing but rave about you!’

‘Finn, young man, this is where it gets serious. You’ve got to go up there now. And this isn’t a movie!’

‘Eva Borelius, Karla Kramp. I’ve been particularly looking forward to…’

And so on, and so forth.

Julian found friendly words for everyone, then he came dashing over to Tim and Amber with a furtive grin.

‘So? How do you like it?’

‘Brilliant,’ said Amber, and put an arm around his shoulders. ‘The magma chamber’s amazing.’

‘Lynn’s idea.’ Julian beamed. He could barely utter his daughter’s name without adopting a sickly tone. ‘And this is nothing! Wait till you see the show.’

‘It’ll be perfect, as always,’ Tim stammered with barely concealed sarcasm.

‘Lynn and I came up with it together.’ As usual, Julian pretended not to have noticed Tim’s ironic tone. ‘The cave is a gift from heaven, I tell you. These rows of seats mightn’t look like much, but we can now screen this spectacle for five hundred paying guests, and if it’s more—’

‘I thought the hotel only had room for three hundred?’

‘Sure, but we can basically double our capacity. Put four or five decks on our ocean steamer, either that or Lynn will build a second one. Not a problem either way. The main thing is that we rustle up the cash for another lift.’

‘The main thing is that you don’t get into difficulties.’

Julian looked at Tim with his light blue eyes.

‘And I’m not. Will you excuse me? Enjoy yourselves, see you later. Oh, Madame Tautou!’

Julian darted back and forth between the visitors, a laugh here, a compliment there. Every now and again he drew Lynn to him and kissed her on the temples. Lynn smiled. She looked proud and happy. Amber sipped at her champagne.

‘You could be a bit friendlier to him,’ she said quietly.

‘To Julian?’ snorted Tim.

‘Who else?’

‘What difference does it make if I’m friendly to him? He only sees himself anyway.’

‘Perhaps it makes a difference to me.’

Tim stared at her uncomprehendingly.

‘What’s up?’ Amber raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you slow-witted all of a sudden?’

‘No, but—’

‘Clearly you are. Then I’ll put it a different way. I don’t feel like spending the next two weeks constantly staring into your gloomy face, okay? I want to enjoy this trip, and you should too.’

‘Amber—’

‘Leave your prejudices down here.’

‘It’s not a matter of prejudices! The thing is, that—’

‘It’s always something.’

‘But—’

‘No buts. Just be a good boy. I want to hear a yes. Just a simple yes. Do you think you can manage that?’

Tim chewed his bottom lip. Then he shrugged. Lynn walked past them, followed by the Tautous and the Donoghues. She winked at them, lowered her voice and said behind her hand, ‘Hey, insider knowledge. This is confidential information for family members only. Row eight, seats thirty-two and thirty-three. Best view.’

‘Got it. Over and out.’

Amber linked arms with the group and disappeared without another word towards the auditorium. Tim sauntered along behind her. Someone drew up beside him.

‘You’re Julian’s son, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lovely to meet you. Heidrun Ögi. Your family’s completely bonkers. I mean, it’s not a problem, it’s absolutely fine,’ she added when he failed to reply. ‘I love people with bees in their bonnets. You’re far more interesting than the common run of people.’

Tim stared at her. He would have expected anything from this chalk-white woman with the violet eyes and the white mane of hair: Celtic magic spells, extraterrestrial dialects, just not that kind of misplaced remark.

‘Really?’ he managed.

‘So what sort of madman are you, then? If you take after Julian.’

‘You think my father’s mad?’

‘Of course, he’s a genius. So he must be mad.’

Tim said nothing. What kind of madman are you, then? Good question. No, he thought, what an idiotic assumption! I’m definitely the only one in the family who isn’t mad.

‘Well—’

‘See you.’ Heidrun smiled, drew away from him, waving her fingertips, and followed the jovial Swiss chap who was clearly her husband. Slightly startled, he pushed his way to the middle of the eighth row and slumped down next to Amber.

‘Who are these Ögis?’ he asked.

She looked over her shoulder. ‘The guy with the albino wife?’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Glittering couple. He runs a company called Swiss Performance. They’re involved in all kinds of areas, but mostly he’s in the construction business. I think he came up with the first pontoon estates for the flooded areas of Holland. At the moment he’s in discussions with Albert over Monaco Two.’

‘Monaco Two?’

‘Yes, just imagine! A huge floating island. It was on the news a while ago. The thing’s only going to cruise in fair-weather zones.’

‘Ögi must be the same sort of bonkers as Julian.’

‘Could be. He’s said to be a philanthropist. He supports needy artists, performers and circus folk, he’s started up educational institutions for underprivileged young people, he sponsors museums, he donates money like it was going out of fashion. Last year he donated a considerable part of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.’

‘How the hell do you know all this?’

‘You should read the gossip sheets more often.’

‘Don’t need to while I’ve got you. And Heidrun?’

‘Yeah…’ Amber smiled knowingly. ‘That’s where things get interesting! Ögi’s family isn’t exactly over the moon about their relationship.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘She’s a photographer. She’s talented. She takes pictures of celebrities and ordinary people. She’s published picture-books about the, erm… red-light scene. In her wild years she’s said to have gone so far off the rails that she was thrown out of her house and disinherited. After that she started funding her studies by working as a stripper, and later as an actress in posh porn films. At the start of the millennium she became a cult figure in Switzerland’s smart set. I mean, you couldn’t exactly claim she’s not striking.’

‘Good God, no.’

‘Eyes straight ahead, Timmy. She gave up the porn films after her studies, but went on stripping. At parties, gallery openings, just for fun. At one of those events she came across Walo, and he helped boost her career as a photographer.’

‘Which is why she married him.’

‘Apparently she isn’t an opportunist.’

‘Touching,’ said Tim, and was about to add something else when the lights went out. They were immediately sitting in inky blackness. A solo violin started playing. Gentle music wove threads through the dark, shimmering lines that formed elaborate structures. At the same time the space assumed a blue glow, a mysterious, gloomy ocean. From what seemed to be a long distance away – the impressive result of holographic projections on the huge, concave glass wall – something came towards them, pulsating and transparent, something that looked like an organic spaceship with a vague nucleus of alien, shadowy passengers.

‘Life,’ said a voice, ‘began in the sea.’

Tim turned his head. Amber’s profile shone like a ghost in the blue light. Enchanted, she watched the cell growing bigger and slowly beginning to rotate. The voice spoke of primal lakes and chemical marriages contracted many years ago. The lonely cell in the infinity of blue divided, and then that division became faster and faster, more and more cells came into being, and all of a sudden something long and serpentine came wriggling towards them.

‘Six hundred million years ago, the age of complex, multicellular living creatures began!’ the voice announced.

Over the minutes that followed, a speeded-up version of evolution occurred. The realism was so overwhelming that Tim flinched involuntarily when a monster a metre long, with shredder teeth and thorny claws, catapulted towards him, switched direction with a flick of its powerful tail and devoured not him, but a twitching trilobite. The Cambrian age emerged and faded before his eyes, followed by the Ordovician, the Silurian and the Devonian. As if someone had pressed a search button on a geological remote control, life swarmed through the blue and underwent every imaginable metamorphosis. Jellyfish, worms, lancelets and crabs, giant scorpions, octopuses, sharks and reptiles appeared in turn, an amphibian turned into a saurian, everything moved onto land, a radiant, cloud-scattered sky took the place of the depths of the sea, the Mesozoic sun shone down on hadrosaurs, brachiosaurs, tyrannosaurs and raptors, until a huge meteorite came crashing down on the horizon and set off a wave of destruction that swept all life away. In digital perfection the inferno charged onwards, taking the audience’s breath away, but when the dust settled it revealed the victory parade of the mammals, and everyone was still sitting unscathed in their rows of seats. Something ape-like swung through a summery green grove, stood upright, turned into a chattering early hominid, armed and clothed itself, changed its build, posture and physiognomy, rode a horse, drove a car, piloted an aeroplane, floated waving through the interior of a space station and out through an opening – but instead of landing in space, it stretched and dived back into the waters of the ocean. Diffuse blue, once again. The human, floating in it, smiled, and they all smiled back.

‘They say we are attracted to water because we come from water and we ourselves are over seventy per cent water. But did we originate only in the sea?’

The blue condensed into a sphere and shrank to a tiny drop of water in a black void.

‘If we go in search of our origins, we have to look a long way back into the past. Because water, which covers over two-thirds of the Earth, and which we are made of ’ – the voice paused significantly – ‘came from space!’

Silence.

To the deafening sound of an orchestra the droplet exploded into millions of glittering particles, and suddenly everything was full of galaxies, lined up like dewdrops on the threads of a spider’s web. As if they were sitting in a spaceship, they approached a single galaxy, flew into it, passed a sun and floated on, towards its third planet, until it hung before them as a fiery sphere, covered with an ocean of boiling lava. Asteroids crashed noisily in as the voice explained how the water had come to Earth on meteorites from the depths of space, bringing organic matter with it. They watched a second ocean of steam settling over the sea of lava. The whole thing reached a climax when a huge planetoid came dashing by, slightly smaller than the young Earth and bearing the name of Theia. The magma chamber shook with the impact, debris flew in all directions, and the Earth survived that too, now richer in mass and water and in possession of a moon that formed from the debris and sped around the planet. The hail of projectiles eased, oceans and continents came into being.

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.

‘If someone jumps in the air, it is one hundred per cent certain that he will fall back to the ground,’ screen-Julian explained. ‘Matter exerts gravity. The more mass a body contains, the greater is its field of gravity, with which it pulls smaller objects to it.’

Sir Isaac Newton appeared dozing under a tree, until an apple fell on his head and he leapt up with a knowing expression: ‘This is exactly,’ he said, ‘how the heavenly mechanics of all bodies works. Because I am bigger than the apple, you would imagine that the fruit would succumb to my very personal physicality. And in fact I do exert modest forces of gravity. But compared with the mass of the planet, I play a subordinate role for the apple, which is ripe for gravitational behaviour. In fact this tiny apple has no chance against Earth’s gravity. The more power I summon up in my attempt to throw it back up in the air, the higher it will climb, but however hard I try, it will inevitably fall back to the ground.’ As if to prove his remarks, Sir Isaac tried his hand at apple-throwing and wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘You see, the Earth pulls the apple right back down again. So how much energy would be required to sling it straight into space?’

‘Thank you, Sir Isaac,’ Julian said affably. ‘That’s exactly what’s at issue. If we consider the Earth as a whole, a rocket is not much different from an apple, even though rockets are, of course, bigger than apples. In other words, it takes a massive amount of energy for it to be able to launch at all. And additional energy to balance out the second force that slows it as it climbs: our atmosphere.’

Rocky Rocket, exhausted by his efforts to reach his celestial beloved, walked over to an enormous cylinder marked Fuel and drank it down, whereupon he swelled up suddenly and his eyes burst from their sockets. By now, however, he was finally in a position to produce such a massive explosion of flame that he took off and became smaller and smaller until at last he could no longer be seen.

Julian wrote up a calculation. ‘Leaving aside the fact that the size of the fuel tank required for interstellar spaceships becomes a problem after a certain point, in the twentieth century each new launch cost a phenomenal sum of money. Energy is expensive. In fact, the amount of energy required to accelerate a single kilogram to flight velocity sufficient to escape the Earth’s gravity was on average fifty thousand US dollars. Just one kilogram! But the fully crewed Apollo 11 rocket with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on board weighed almost three thousand tonnes! So anything you installed on the ship, anything you took with you made the costs – astronomical. Making spaceships safe enough against meteorites, space junk and cosmic radiation looked like a wild fantasy. How could you ever get the heavy armour up there, when every sip of drinking water, every centimetre of leg-room was already far too expensive? It was all well and good sharing a sardine-tin for a few days, but who wanted to fly to Mars in such conditions? The fact that more and more people were questioning the point of this ruinous endeavour, while the bulk of the world’s population was living on less than a dollar a day, was another exacerbating factor. Given all these considerations, plans such as the settlement and economic exploitation of the Moon or flights to other planets seemed an impossible dream.’ Julian paused. ‘When in fact the solution had been sitting on the table all the time! In the form of an essay written by a Russian physicist called Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895, sixty-two years before the launch of Sputnik 1.’

An old man, with cobweb hair, a fuzzy beard and metal-rimmed glasses, stepped onto the virtual stage with all the grace of an ancient Cossack. As he spoke, a bizarre grid construction rose up on the Earth’s surface.

‘What I had in mind was a tower,’ Tsiolkovsky told the audience, hands bobbing. ‘Like the Eiffel Tower, but much, much higher. It was to reach all the way to space, a colossal lift-shaft, with a cable hung from the top end that was to reach all the way to the Earth. With such a device, it seemed to me, it would surely be possible to put objects into a stable terrestrial orbit without the need for noisy, stinky, bulky and expensive rockets. During the ascent, these objects, the further they go from the Earth’s gravity, would be tangentially accelerated until their energy and velocity are sufficient to remain at their destination, at an altitude of 35,786 kilometres, in perpetuity.’

‘Great idea,’ cried Rocky Rocket, back from his lunar pleasure-trip, and circled the half-finished tower, which immediately collapsed in on itself. Tsiolkovsky trembled, paled and went back to join his ancestors.

‘Yeah.’ Julian shrugged regretfully. ‘That was the weak point in Tsiolkovsky’s plan. No material in the world seemed stable enough for such a construction. The tower would inevitably collapse under its own weight, or be torn apart by the forces exerted upon it. It was only in the fifties that the idea regained popularity, except that now people were thinking about firing a satellite into geostationary orbit and lowering a cable from there to the Earth—’

‘Erm – excuse me,’ Rocky Rocket cleared his throat.

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘This is embarrassing, boss, but—’ The little rocket blushed and awkwardly scraped its stubby fins. ‘What does geostationary mean exactly?’

Julian laughed. ‘No problem, Rocky, Sir Isaac, an apple, please.’

‘Got it,’ said Newton, and slung another apple in the air. This time the fruit sped straight into the air, showing no signs of falling back again.

‘If we imagine that the Earth and similar bodies aren’t there, no gravity is exerted on the apple. According to the impulse that accelerated its mass when thrown by Sir Isaac Newton’s muscles, it will fly and fly without ever coming to a standstill. We know this effect as centrifugal force. Let’s put the Earth back where it was, and now gravitation, which we’ve already mentioned, comes into play, to some extent counteracting centrifugal force. If the apple is far enough away from the Earth, the Earth’s field of gravity has become too weak to bring it back, and it will disappear into space. If it’s too close, the Earth’s gravity will pull it back. Now, geostationary orbit, GEO in short, is found at the exact point where the Earth’s force of attraction and centrifugal force balance one another out perfectly, at an altitude of 35,786 kilometres. From there, the apple can neither escape nor fall back down. Instead, it remains for ever in GEO, as long as it circles the Earth synchronously with its rotational velocity, which is why a geostationary object always seems to stand above the same point.’

The Earth spun before their eyes. Newton’s apple seemed to stand motionlessly above the equator, fixed to an island in the Pacific. It wasn’t really standing still, of course, it was circling the planet at a speed of 11,070 kilometres per hour, while the Earth rotated below it at 1674 kilometres per hour, measured at the equator. The effect was startling. Just as the valve of a bicycle tyre always stands above the same point on the hub when the wheel is turned, the satellite stayed in place, as if nailed up above the island.

‘Geostationary orbit is ideal for a space elevator. First for the stable installation of the top floor in a stable position, secondly because of the fixed position of that floor. So once it was clear that you would just need to lower a cable 35,786 kilometres long from that point and anchor it to the ground, the question arose of what loads such a cable would have to support. The greatest tension would arise at the centre of gravity, in the GEO itself, which meant that a cable would have to become either broader or more resilient towards the top.’

Immediately just such a cable stretched between the island and the satellite, into which the apple had suddenly transmuted. Small cabins travelled up and down it.

‘In this context a further consideration arose. Why not extend the cable beyond the centre of gravity? To recap: in geostationary orbit gravity and centrifugal force balance one another out. Beyond it, the relationship between the two forces alters in favour of centrifugal force. A vehicle climbing the cable from the Earth needs to use only a tiny fraction of the energy that would be required to catapult it upwards on a rocket. With increasing altitude the influence of gravity declines in favour of centrifugal force, which means that less and less energy is required until hardly any at all is needed in geostationary orbit. Now, if we imagine the cable being extended to an altitude of 143,800 kilometres, the vehicle could go charging beyond the geostationary orbit: it would be continuously accelerated and would actually gain in energy. A perfect springboard for interstellar travel, to Mars or anywhere else!’

The cabins were now transporting construction components into orbit, to be assembled into a space station. Rocky Rocket loaded up the cabins and started visibly sweating.

‘One way or another the advantages of a space elevator were quite obvious. To carry a kilo of cargo load to an altitude of almost 36,000 kilometres, you no longer needed 50,000 dollars, just 200, and you could also use the lift 365 days a year around the clock. Suddenly the idea of building gigantic space stations and adequately armoured spaceships no longer seemed like a problem. The colonisation of space became a tangible possibility, and inspired the British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to write his novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he describes the construction of space elevators like this.’

‘But why does the thing have to be built at the equator, of all places?’ asked Rocky Rocket, wiping the sweat from his tip. ‘Why not at the North Pole or the South Pole, where it’s nice and cool? And why in the middle of the stupid sea and not, for example in’ – his eyes gleamed, he took a few dance steps and clicked his fingers – ‘Las Vegas?’

‘I’m not sure if you seriously want to set off for space surrounded by penguins,’ Julian replied sceptically. ‘But it wouldn’t work anyway. It’s only at the equator that you can exploit the Earth’s rotation to achieve a maximum of centrifugal force. It’s only there that geostationary objects are possible.’ He thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘Listen, I want to explain something to you. Imagine you’re a hammer-thrower.’

The little rocket seemed to like the idea. He threw out his chest and tensed his muscles.

‘Where’s the hammer?’ he crowed. ‘Bring it here!’

‘It’s not a real hammer these days, idiot, that’s just its name. These days the hammer is a metal ball on a steel cable.’ Julian conjured the object out of nowhere and pressed the handle firmly into both of Rocky’s hands. ‘Now you have to spin on your axis with your arms outstretched.’

‘Why?’

‘To speed up the hammer. Let it spin.’

‘Heavy, isn’t it?’ Rocky groaned and pulled on the steel cable. He started to spin around, faster and faster. The cable tightened, the sphere lifted from the ground and reached a horizontal position. ‘Can I throw it now?’ he panted.

‘In a minute. For now you’ve just got to imagine you’re not Rocky, you’re the planet Earth. Your head is the North Pole, your feet are the South Pole. In between them is the axis that you’re spinning around. If that’s the case, what’s the middle of your body?’

‘Huh? What? The equator, obviously.’

‘Well done.’

‘Can I throw it now?’

‘Wait. From the middle of your body, the equator, the hammer swings out, pulled tight by centrifugal force, just as the cable of the space elevator must be pulled tight.’

‘I get it. Can I do it?’

‘Just one moment! Your hands are, in a sense, our Pacific islands, the metal sphere is the satellite or the space station in geostationary orbit. That clear?’

‘It’s clear.’

‘Okay. Now raise your hands. Go on spinning, but lift them high above your head.’

Rocky followed the instructions. The steel cable immediately lost its tension and the ball came crashing down on the little rocket. He rolled his eyes, staggered and fell to the ground.

‘Do you think you get the principle?’ Julian asked sympathetically.

Rocky waved a white flag.

‘Then that’s all sorted out. Practically every point on the equator is suitable for the space elevator, but there are a few things you have to take into account. The anchor station, the ground floor, so to speak, should be in an area that is free of storms, strong winds and electrical discharges, with no air traffic and a generally clear sky. Most such places are found in the Pacific. One of them lies 550 kilometres to the west of Ecuador, and is the place where we are right now – the Isla de las Estrellas!’

Suddenly Julian was standing on the viewing terrace of the Stellar Island Hotel. Far outside the floating platform could be seen, and the two cables stretching from the inside of the Earth station into the endless blue.

‘As you can see, we have built not one, but two lifts. Two cables stretch in parallel into orbit. But even a few years ago it seemed doubtful whether we would ever experience this sight. Without the research work of Orley Enterprises the solution would probably have had to wait for several more years, and all this’ – Julian spread his arms out – ‘would not exist.’

The illusion vanished; Julian floated in Bible-blackness.

‘The problem was to find a material from which a cable 35,786 kilometres long could be manufactured. It had to be ultra-light and at the same time ultra-stable. Steel was out of the question. Even the highest quality steel cable would break under its own weight alone after only thirty or forty kilometres. Some people came up with the idea of spiders’ silk, given that it’s four times more resilient than steel, but even that wouldn’t have given the cable the requisite tensile strength, let alone the fact that for 35,786 kilometres of cable you’d need one hell of a lot of spiders. Frustrating! The anchor station, the space station, the cabins, all of that seemed manageable. But the concept seemed to founder on the cable – until the start of the millennium, when a revolutionary new material was discovered: carbon nanotubes.’

A gleaming, three-dimensional grid structure began to rotate in the black. Its tubal form vaguely resembled the kind of bow net that people use for fishing.

‘This object is actually ten thousand times thinner than a human hair. A tiny tube, constructed from carbon atoms in a honeycomb arrangement. The smallest of these tubes has a diameter of less than one nanometre. Its density is one-sixth that of steel, which makes it very light, but at the same time it has a tensile strength of about 45 gigapascals, whereas at 2 gigapascals steel crumbles like a cookie. Over the years ways were found to bundle the tubes together and spin them into threads. In 2004 researchers in Cambridge produced a thread 100 metres long. But it seemed doubtful whether such threads could be woven into larger structures, particularly since experiments showed that the tensile strength of the thread declined dramatically in comparison with individual tubes. A kind of weaving flaw was introduced by missing carbon atoms, and besides, carbon is subject to oxidation. It erodes, so the threads needed to be coated.’

Julian paused.

‘For many years Orley Enterprises invested in research into the question of how this flaw could be remedied. Not only were we able to replace the missing atoms, we also managed to enhance the tensile strength of the cables to 65 gigapascals through cross-connections! We found ways to layer them and protect them against meteorites, space junk, natural oscillations and the destructive effect of atomic oxygen. They are just one metre wide but flatter than a human hair, which is why they seem to disappear when you see them from the side. At a distance of 140,000 kilometres from Earth, where they end, we have connected them to a small asteroid, which acts as a counterweight. In future we want to accelerate spaceships along that stretch of ribbon in such a way that they could fly to Mars, or beyond, without any notable outlay of energy.’ He smiled. ‘In geostationary orbit, however, we have built a space station unlike anything that has ever existed before: the OSS, the Orley Space Station, accessible within three hours by space elevator: research station, space station and port! All manned and unmanned transfer flights to the Moon start from there. In turn, compressed helium-3 from the mining sites comes to OSS, is loaded onto the space elevator and sent to Earth, so that the prospect of ten billion people being provided with unlimited supplies of clean and affordable energy is becoming more and more of a reality every day. We can now say that helium-3 has supplanted the age of fossil fuels, because the necessary fusion reactors required have also been developed to market maturity by Orley Enterprises. The significance of oil and gas has dramatically declined. The plundering of our home planet is coming to an end. Oil wars will be a thing of the past. None of this would have been possible without the development of the space elevator, but we have taken to its conclusion the dream that Konstantin Tsiolkovsky dreamed – and made it reality!’

A moment later everything was back – the viewing terrace, the slope of the Isla de las Estrellas, the floating platform in the sea. Julian Orley, with waving ponytail and sparkling eyes, stretched his arms to the sky as if to receive the eleventh Commandment.

‘Twenty years ago, when Orley Enterprises began thinking about the construction of space elevators, I promised the world that I would build it an elevator into the future. Into a future that our parents and grandparents would never have dared to dream of. The best future we have ever had. And we have built it! In a few days you will travel on it to the OSS. You will see the Earth as a whole, our unique and wonderful home – and you will be amazed as you turn your gaze to the stars, to our home of tomorrow.’

To dramatic background music, on columns of red light, two shimmering cabins rose from the cylindrical station building on the sea platform and shot up into the sky. Julian threw back his head and gazed after them.

‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘to the future.’

Anchorage, Alaska, USA

Not again, thought Gerald Palstein. Not the same accusation, the same question, for the fourth time.

‘Perhaps it would have been cleverer, Mr Palstein, to keep on the people you are now throwing out of their workplaces and keep them otherwise engaged instead of digging up the last intact ecosystems on Earth in an obsessive quest for oil. Wasn’t it a grave mistake by your department to install the facility in the first place, as if energy sources like helium-3 and solar power were an irrelevance?’

Suspicion, incomprehension, malice. The press conference that EMCO was holding to bury the Alaska project had assumed the character of a tribunal, with him as whipping boy. Palstein tried not to let his exhaustion show.

‘From the perspective of the time, we acted completely responsibly,’ he said. ‘In 2015, helium-3 was a crazy dream. The United States of America couldn’t base their energy policy purely on the off-chance of a technological stroke of genius—’

‘In which you now want to participate,’ the journalist interrupted. ‘A bit late, don’t you think?’

‘Of course, but perhaps I could refer you to a few things I thought were familiar to both of us. On the one hand I wasn’t yet presiding over the strategy sector of EMCO in 2015—’

‘But you were its deputy manager.’

‘The final decision for what was to be built was my predecessor’s responsibility. But you’re right. I supported the Alaska project because there was no way of telling whether either the space elevator or fusion technology would work as predicted. So the project was clearly in the interest of the American nation.’

‘Or in the interest of a few profiteers.’

‘Let’s reconsider the situation. At the start of the millennium our energy policy was aimed at freeing us from dependency on the Middle East. Particularly since we were forced to accept that the one who decides to fight a war doesn’t necessarily win the peace. Going into Iraq was madness. The American market couldn’t profit from it nearly as much as we had hoped. We had planned to send our people down there and take over the oil business; instead we saw American soldiers coming back in coffins week after week, so we hesitated until other people had divided up the cake between themselves. Except that after even conservative Republicans had reached the conclusion that George W. Bush had been a hugely dangerous fool, who had ruined both our economy and our standing in the world, no one really felt like marching into Iran carrying guns.’

‘Do you mean you regret that the option of another war was off the cards?’

‘Of course not.’ Incredible! The woman just wasn’t listening. ‘I was always vehemently opposed to war, and still am today. You just have to understand what a jam the United States was in. Asia’s hunger for raw materials, Russia’s gamble on resources, our disappointing performance in the Middle East, one great big disaster. Then 2015, the uprising in Saudi Arabia. The Stars and Stripes burning in the streets of Riyadh, the whole folklore of the Islamist seizure of power, except that we couldn’t just throw those guys out because China had lent them money and arms. An official military intervention in Saudi Arabia would have amounted to a declaration of war on Beijing. You know yourself how things look down there now. Nobody might be interested in it today, but in those days it would have been reckless to depend entirely on Arab oil. We had to take alternatives into consideration. One of those lay in the sea, the other in the exploitation of oil sand and shale, the third in the resources of Alaska.’

Another journalist put her hand up. Loreena Keowa, environmental activist with native American roots, and reporter-in-chief for Greenwatch. Her reports were hugely popular on the net. She was critical, but Palstein knew that under certain circumstances he could see her as an ally.

‘I don’t think anyone can blame a company for declaring a corpse to be dead,’ she said. ‘Even if it means a loss of jobs. I just wonder what EMCO has to offer the people who are now losing their workplaces. Perhaps there’s no point crying over spilt milk, but didn’t the refusal of ExxonMobil to invest in alternative energies lead to their present disastrous situation?’

‘That is correct.’

‘I remember Shell pointing out twenty years ago that it was an energy company and not an oil company, while ExxonMobil insisted that it didn’t need a foothold in the alternative energies. The end of the oil age, which many saw on the horizon, was, literally, a widespread misunderstanding.’

‘That assessment was clearly incorrect.’

‘And we are feeling the after-effects all the more painfully for that. Perhaps it’s true that no one could have predicted a turnaround in the energy market on the present scale. What is clear is that EMCO isn’t in a position to employ its people in alternative fields, because there are no alternative fields.’

‘That’s exactly what we want to change,’ said Palstein patiently.

‘I know you want to change it, Gerald.’ Keowa grinned crookedly. ‘But your critics see your planned involvement in Orley Enterprises as smoke and mirrors.’

‘Incorrect.’ Palstein smiled back. ‘You see, I don’t want to make excuses for anything, but in 2005 I was responsible for drilling projects in Ecuador for Conoco-Phillips, and only switched to strategic management in 2009. At that time the American oil and gas business was dominated by ExxonMobil. Prognoses about alternative energies were pretty much divided on either side of the Atlantic. ExxonMobil invested in the Arabian Gulf and tried to take over Russian oil companies, backed high growth-rates as the result of rising oil prices and disregarded things like ethics and sustainability. In Europe it looked quite different. By the end of the nineties Royal Dutch Shell had created a new commercial division for renewable energies. BP had been a bit shrewder, in opening up deep-sea projects and becoming involved in Russian projects, while at the same time using slogans like “Beyond Petroleum” and diversifying their commercial areas wherever they could.’

Palstein knew that the younger journalists in particular were short of information. He outlined how the process of consolidation had peaked immediately before the seizure of power by the Saudi Islamists, when Royal Dutch Shell was absorbed into BP, producing UK Energies, while in America ExxonMobil had merged with Chevron and ConocoPhillips into EMCO.

‘In 2017 I assumed the position of deputy director within the strategic sector of EMCO. On the very first day a press release landed on my table, saying that Orley Enterprises had made a breakthrough in the development of a space elevator. I suggested entering negotiations with Julian Orley for a participation in Orley Energy. I also recommended that we purchase shares in Warren Locatelli’s Lightyears or, better still, buy the whole company. Locatelli’s market leadership in photovoltaics didn’t just come out of the blue; he would still have been open to negotiation in 2015.’

He saw approval on their faces. Keowa nodded.

‘I know, Gerald. You tried to steer the EMCO juggernaut in the direction of renewable energies. Everybody knows that you are highly critical about your own sector. But they also know that none of your suggestions has been taken on board.’

‘That is regrettably the case. The old Exxon management who still had EMCO in their clutches were only interested in our core products. It was only when the oil market went into free fall, when even the hard-liners had to step aside and the new chairman put me in charge of strategic management, that I was able to act. EMCO has been transformed in the meantime. Since 2020 we have done everything we can to make up for the shortcomings of the past. We have moved into photovoltaics, into wind and water power. Perhaps people aren’t generally aware, but we are in a position to transfer our staff into future-oriented commercial sectors. Except that when mistakes have been made for decades, we can’t sort them out overnight.’

‘Can it still be repaired?’

Palstein leaned back in his chair. Basically he didn’t need to reply. Helium-3 was establishing itself as the energy source of the future, there was no doubt about that. Orley’s fusion reactors were working reliably around the clock, and in terms of the balance between energy and environment everything was fine; the transport of the element from the Moon to the Earth was no longer a problem. Palstein’s sector, however, seemed to be traumatised. The oil companies had reckoned with everything – except the end of the oil age, without oil and gas running out! Not even the boldest visionaries of Royal Dutch Shell or BP had been able to imagine that their sector could be wiped out so quickly by an alternative energy source. Only ten years before, UK Energies had calculated the market share of alternative technologies at thirty per cent, nuclear energy included. Equally, it had been clear to everyone that most of those technologies could only be offered at competitive prices by companies operating on a global level. The photovoltaic sector, for example, got a good market share in sunny countries, but it required complex logistical infrastructures. And who was capable of doing that, if not the big multinational oil companies, who only had to make sure that they could make a quick getaway and switch to a different area when it came to the crunch?

That most of the companies weren’t even ready to make this shift was down to prognoses about when oil and gas would actually run dry. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses constantly changing the date of the end of the world, throughout the 1980s various prophets of doom had predicted that the oil age would come to an end in 2010; in the 1990s it was 2030; at the start of the new millennium, in spite of increased consumption, it was 2050. But now it was clear that the existing reserves would last until 2080, even though production had already peaked, while the resources available suggested an even longer life. There was only one point on which they had all agreed: there would never be cheap oil again. Never again.

But in fact it had become very cheap.

So cheap, in fact, that the sector had started to feel like the Incredible Shrinking Man, for whom a house spider represented a deadly threat. The most likely survivors were those who had invested in renewable energies early on. UK Energies had succeeded in reversing their fortunes, the French Total group had diversified enough to survive, even though personnel downsizing was rife. High-efficiency solar technology, as developed by Locatelli’s Lightyears, was considered the most trustworthy fuel, alongside helium-3, and there was also money to be made in wind power. On the other hand the Norwegian association Statoil Norsk Hydro was in its death-throes, while China’s CNPC and Russia’s Lukoil gazed dispiritedly into an oil-free future, clearly in culpable ignorance of the now legendary statement of Ahmed al Jamanis, the former Saudi Arabian oil minister: ‘The Stone Age didn’t end for want of stones.’

The problem wasn’t so much that petrol wasn’t needed any more: it was used for plastics, fertilisers and cosmetics, in the textile industry, in food production and pharmaceutical research. Orley’s new-fangled fusion reactors were still thin on the ground; most cars ran on combustion engines, aeroplanes were fuelled with kerosene. The United States was the chief beneficiary of the new resource. The global switch to a helium-3-based energy economy was still years away, that much was clear.

But not decades away.

The mere fact that the so-called aneutronic fusion of helium-3 with deuterium worked in reactors had sent already sickly oil prices through the floor. At the end of the first decade it had turned out that people were not in fact prepared to pay just any sum for oil; if it became too expensive, their ecological conscience sprang to life, they saved electricity and encouraged the development of alternative energies. The notion popular among speculators that the barrel price might be driven up by panic buying had not become reality. There was also the fact that most countries had set aside strategic reserves, and had not had to make any new purchases, that new generations of cars had batteries with generous storage capacities and filled up at sockets on environmentally friendly electricity which, thanks to helium-3, would soon be available in ample quantities. The United States of America, which had turned a deep dark green in the years after Barack Obama’s terms as president, was urging an international agreement on emission reduction, and had discovered the devil in CO₂. A few years after the first helium-3-fuelled fusion reactor had gone live, it was also clear that astronomically high profits could be achieved with environmental-oriented thinking. In the course of these developments, EMCO had slipped in the ranking of the world’s biggest mineral-oil companies from first place to third, while the entire sector was threatening to shrink to a microverse. Atrophied by ignorance, EMCO increasingly found itself stumbling, like King Kong just before the fall and, dimly aware that it was doomed to failure, clutching around for something to hold on to, and grasping only air.

Now they’d lost Alaska too.

The drilling plans won through years spent battling against the environmental lobby had to be abandoned because no one was interested in the huge natural gas deposits there any longer. This press conference was barely different from the one they had had to hold in Alberta, Canada a few weeks before, where the exploitation of oil sand was coming to an end, an expensive and environmentally harmful procedure that had given the conservationists nightmares for ages, but which had been feasible as long as the world was still crying out for oil like a baby for milk. What use was it that certain representatives of the Canadian government shared EMCO’s concerns, when two-thirds of the world’s oil resources were stored in this sand, 180 million barrels on Canadian soil alone? The overwhelming majority of Canadians were glad that it would soon be all over. In Alberta, mining had permanently destroyed rivers and marshes, the northern forest, the complete ecosystem. In view of this, Canada had not been able to stick to its international obligations. Greenhouse emissions had risen, the signed protocols were so much waste paper.

‘It can be repaired,’ said Palstein firmly. ‘We’re about to conclude negotiations with Orley Enterprises. I promise you, we will be the first oil company to be involved in the helium-3 business, and we are also in discussion about possible alliances with strategists from other companies.’

‘What concrete offers do Orley Enterprises have to make to you?’

‘There are a few things.’

The man wouldn’t let go. ‘The problem with the multinationals is that they haven’t a clue about the fusion business. I mean, some of the companies have pounced on photovoltaics, on wind and water power, bioethanol and all that stuff, but fusion technology and space travel – you’ll forgive me, but that’s not exactly your area of expertise.’

Palstein smiled.

‘I can tell you that at present Julian Orley is looking for investors for a second space elevator, not least to develop the infrastructure for the transport of helium-3. Of course we’re talking about vast amounts of money here. But we’ve got that money. The question is how we want to use it. My sector is in a state of shock at the moment. Should have seen it coming, you might say, so what do you think we should do? Go down in flames, feeling sorry for ourselves? EMCO isn’t going to achieve supremacy in solar energy, however much we might try to get a foothold in it. Other people are historically ahead of us there. So either we can watch one market after another breaking away until our funds are devoured by social programmes. Or we put the money into a second elevator and organise logistical processes on the Earth. As I have said, discussions are almost concluded, the contracts are about to be signed.’

‘When’s that due?’

‘At the moment Orley is staying with a group of potential investors on the Isla de las Estrellas. From there he will go on to OSS and the opening of Gaia. Yeah.’ Palstein shrugged in a gesture somewhere between melancholy and fatalism. ‘I was supposed to be there. Julian Orley isn’t just our future business partner, he’s also a personal friend. I’m sorry not to be able to take this journey with him, but I don’t need to remind you what happened in Canada.’

With these words he had rung the bell for round two. Everyone began talking at the same time.

‘Have they discovered who shot you?’

‘Given the state of your health, how will you get through the coming weeks? Did the injury—’

‘What are we to make of conjectures that the attack might have something to do with your decision to put EMCO and Orley Enterprises—’

‘Is it true that a furious oil worker—’

‘You’ve made loads of enemies with your criticism of abuses in your sector. Might any of them have—’

‘How are you generally, Gerald?’ asked Keowa.

‘Thanks, Loreena, not bad in the circumstances.’ Palstein raised his left hand until silence returned. His right arm had been in a sling for four weeks. ‘One at a time. I’ll answer all your questions, but I would ask you to show understanding if I avoid speculation. At the moment I can say nothing more except that I myself would love to know who did it. All I know for certain is that I was incredibly lucky. If I hadn’t stumbled on the steps up to the podium, the bullet would have got me in the head. It wasn’t a warning, as some people thought, it was a botched execution. Without any doubt at all, they wanted to kill me.’

‘How are you protecting yourself at the moment?’

‘With optimism.’ Palstein smiled. ‘Optimism and a bullet-proof vest, to tell you the truth. But what use is that against shots to the head? Am I supposed to go into hiding? No! Was it Tschaikovsky who said you can’t tiptoe your way through life just because you’re afraid of death?’

‘To put it another way,’ said Keowa, ‘who would benefit if you disappeared from the scene?’

‘I don’t know. If anyone wanted to stop us merging with Orley Enterprises, he would destroy EMCO’s biggest and perhaps only chance of a quick recovery.’

‘Maybe that’s the plan,’ a voice called out. ‘Destroying EMCO.’

‘The market’s become too small for the oil companies,’ said someone else. ‘In fact the company’s death would make sense in terms of economic evolution. Someone eliminating the competition in order to—’

‘Or else someone wants to get at Orley through you. If EMCO—’

‘What’s the mood like in your own company? Whose toes did you tread on, Gerald?’

‘Nobody’s!’ Palstein shook his head firmly. ‘The board approved every aspect of my restructuring model, and top of the list is our commitment to Orley. You’re fumbling around in the dark with assumptions like that. Talk to the authorities. They’re following every lead.’

‘And what does your gut tell you?’

‘About the perpetrator?’

‘Yes. Any suspects in mind?’

Palstein was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Personally I can only imagine it was an act of revenge. Someone who’s desperate, who’s lost his job, possibly lost everything, and is now projecting his hatred onto me. That I could understand. I’m fully aware of where we are right now. A lot of people are worried about their livelihoods, people who had confidence in us in better years.’ He paused. ‘But let’s be honest, the better times are only just beginning. Perhaps I’m the wrong man to say this, but a world that can satisfy its energy needs with environmentally friendly and renewable resources makes the oil economy look like a thing of the past. I can only stress again and again that we will really do everything we can to secure EMCO’s future. And thus the future of our workforce!’

An hour later Gerald Palstein was resting in his suite, his head cradled on his left arm, his legs stretched out as if it would have taken too much effort to cross them. Dog-tired and raddled he lay on the bedspread and stared up at the canopy of the four-poster bed. His delegation was staying in the Sheraton Anchorage, one of the finer addresses in a city not exactly blessed with architectural masterpieces. Anything of any historical substance had fallen victim to the 1964 earthquake. The Good Friday earthquake, as it was known. The most violent hiccup that seismologists had ever recorded on American territory. Now there was just one really beautiful building, and that was the hospital.

After a while he got up, went into the bathroom, splashed cold water into his face with his free hand and looked at himself in the mirror. A droplet hung trembling on the tip of his nose. He flicked it away. Paris, his wife, liked to say she had fallen in love with his eyes, which were a mysterious earthy brown, big and doe-like, with thick eyelashes like a woman’s. His gaze was filled with perpetual melancholy. Too beautiful, too intense for his friendly but unremarkable face. His forehead was high and smooth, his hair cut short. Recently his slender body had developed a certain aesthetic quality, the consequence of a lack of sleep, irregular meals and the hospital stay in which the bullet had been removed from his shoulder four weeks previously. Palstein knew he should eat more, except that he barely had an appetite. Most of what was put in front of him he left. He was paralysed by an unsettlingly stubborn feeling of exhaustion, as if a virus had taken hold of him, one that occasional snoozes on the plane weren’t enough to shake.

He dried his face, came out of the bathroom and stepped to the window. A pale, cold summer sun glittered on the sea. To the north, the snow-covered peaks of the Alaska chain loomed into the distance. Not far from the hotel he could see the former ConocoPhillips office. Now it bore the EMCO logo, in defiance of the change that was already under way. There were still office spaces to let in the Peak Oilfield Service Company building. UK Energies had put a branch of their solar division in the former BP headquarters and rented out the rest to a travel company, and here too there were many empty spaces. Everything was going down the drain. Some logos had completely disappeared, such as Anadarko Oil, Doyon Drilling and Marathon Oil Company. The place was threatening to lose its position as the most economically successful state in the USA. Since the seventies, more than eighty per cent of all state income had flowed from the fossil fuels business into the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was supposed to benefit all the inhabitants. Support that they would soon have to do without. In the mid-term, the region was left only with metals, fishing, wood and a bit of fur-farming. Oil and gas too, of course, but only on a very limited scale, and at prices so low that the stuff would have been better off left in the ground.

The journalists and activists that he had been dealing with over the past few hours – and who reproached him now for having got involved in the extractions in the first place – certainly weren’t representing public opinion when they cheered the end of the oil economy. In fact helium-3 had met with a very muted response in Alaska, just as enthusiasm on the Persian Gulf was notably low-key. The sheikhs imagined themselves being thrown back on the bleak desert existence of former years, their territory returning to the scorpions and sand-beetles. The spectre of impoverishment stripped the potentates of Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar of their sleep. Hardly anyone seriously wanted to go to Dubai now. Beijing had abandoned its support of the Saudi Arabian Islamists; the USA seemed to have forgotten all about North Africa; in Iraq Sunnis and Shi’ites went on slaughtering each other in time-honoured fashion; Iran provoked unease with its nuclear programmes, bared its teeth in all directions and tried to get close to China, which apart from America was the only nation in the world mining helium-3, albeit in vanishingly small quantities. The Chinese didn’t have a space elevator, and didn’t know how to build one either. No one apart from the Americans had such a thing, and Julian Orley sat on the patents like a broody hen, which was why China had fallen back entirely on traditional rocket technology, at devastating expense.

Palstein looked at his watch. He had to get over to the EMCO building, a meeting was about to start. It would go on till late as usual. He phoned the business centre and asked to be put through to the Stellar Island Hotel on the Isla de las Estrellas. It was three hours later there, and a good twenty degrees warmer. A better place than Anchorage. Palstein would rather have been anywhere else than Anchorage.

He wanted at least to wish Julian a pleasant journey.

Isla de las Estrellas, Pacific Ocean

Going inside the volcano might have been spectacular, but coming out was a big disappointment. Once the lights had come on, they left the cave via a straight and well-lit corridor which aroused the suspicion that the whole mountain was actually made of scaffolding and papier mâché. It was wide enough to allow a hundred panicking, trampling and thrashing people to escape. After about 150 metres it led to a side wing of the Stellar Island Hotel.

Chuck Donoghue pushed his way through to stand next to Julian.

‘My respect,’ he bellowed. ‘Not bad.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And this is how you found the cave? Come on! You didn’t help a bit? No demolition charges anywhere?’

‘Just for the evacuation routes.’

‘Incredibly lucky. Of course you realise, my boy, that I’ll have to steal this one! Haha! No, don’t worry, I still have enough ideas of my own. My God, how many hotels have I built in my life? How many hotels!’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘You’re right,’ Donoghue mumbled in amazement.

‘Yes, and maybe one day you might be building another one on the Moon.’ Julian grinned. ‘That’s why you’re here, old man.’

‘I see!’ Donoghue laughed even louder. ‘And I thought you’d invited me because you liked me.’

At sixty-five the hotel mogul was the oldest member of the group, five years older than Julian, although Julian looked ten years younger. The insignificant age difference didn’t keep Donoghue from jovially addressing the richest man in the world as ‘my boy’.

‘Of course I like you,’ Julian said cheerfully as they followed Lynn to the lifts. ‘But more than anything else I want to show you my hotels so that you’ll put your money into them. Oh, and by the way, do you know the one about the man doing the survey?’

‘Tell me!’

‘A guy gets asked, what would you do if you had two possibilities? A: You spend all night having sex with your wife. B:— B, says the man, B!’

It was a crap little joke, and thus exactly right for Chucky, who stayed behind laughing to tell Aileen. Julian didn’t have to turn round to see her face, as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. The Donoghues ruled over thirty of the most imposing, expensive and trashy hotels of all time, they had built various casinos, ran an international booking agency through which global stars passed with great regularity – artistes, singers, dancers and animal trainers, and of course you could, if you wished, also book shows in which nothing was left to the imagination. But Aileen, good, fat, cake-baking Aileen, opted for good old southern prudery, as if dozens of showgirls weren’t dancing across the stages of Las Vegas every night, breasts bouncing, girls who had contracts that bore her signature. She placed great emphasis on piety, gun ownership, good food, good deeds and the death penalty if all else failed, and sometimes when it didn’t. She put morality before everything else. Nonetheless, she would appear for dinner crammed into a little dress so tight it was embarrassing, to collect compliments from the younger men for her laser-firmed cleavage. She would launch her usual nannying campaign and pass on the silly joke with lots of tittering and snorting, before getting drinks for everyone, and her other side would fight its way through, marked by a genuinely felt concern for the welfare of all God’s creatures, which made it possible not only to put up with Aileen Donoghue, but even somehow to like her.

The glass lift cabins filled up with people and chatter. After a short trip they discharged the group onto the viewing terrace, beneath a starry sky worthy of a Hollywood movie. With regal dignity an old and beautiful lady in evening dress was directing half a dozen waiters to the guests. Champagne and cocktails were handed out, binoculars distributed. A jazz quartet played ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.

‘Everyone over here,’ Lynn called cheerfully. ‘To me! Look to the east.’

The guests happily followed her instructions. Out on the platform yet more lights had been lit, glowing fingers reaching into the night sky. As tiny as ants, people were seen walking around among the structures. A big ship, apparently a freighter, lay massively on a calm sea.

‘Dear friends.’ Julian stepped forward, a glass in his hand. ‘I didn’t let you see the whole show earlier. In another version you would also have met the OSS and Gaia, but that one is intended for visitors without the advantage of what you will experience. Relatives of travellers, spending a few days on the island before going back home. To you, however, I wanted to demonstrate the lift. For the rest you won’t need films, because you will see it with your own eyes! You will never forget the two weeks ahead of you, I promise you that!’

Julian showed his perfect teeth. There was applause, scattered at first, then everyone clapped enthusiastically. Miranda Winter yelled, ‘Oh, yeah!’ Glowing with pride, Lynn went and joined her father.

‘Before we invite everyone to join us for dinner, we have a little taster of your imminent trip.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘In the next few minutes the two cabins are expected back from orbit. Both will be bringing back to Earth, amongst other things, compressed helium-3 that was loaded onto them on OSS. I think it might be an idea to throw your heads back now, and not just to drink—’

‘Although I advise you do that too,’ said Julian, raising his glass to everyone.

‘Of course,’ Lynn laughed. ‘What he hasn’t yet told you, in fact, is that on OSS we will drastically reduce alcohol consumption.’

‘How regrettable.’ Bernard Tautou pulled a face, drank his glass down in one and beamed at her. ‘So we should make provision.’

‘I thought your passion was water?’ teased Mukesh Nair.

‘Mais oui! Particularly if it’s topped up with alcohol.’

‘“These vessels here from which we drink / When emptied their appeal does shrink”,’ declaimed Eva Borelius with a superior smile.

‘Pardon?’

‘Wilhelm Busch, you wouldn’t know him.’

‘Can you actually get a hangover in zero gravity?’ Olympiada Rogacheva asked timidly, prompting her husband to turn away from her and stare pointedly up at the stars. Miranda Winter snapped her fingers like a schoolgirl:

‘And what if you throw up in zero gravity?’

‘Then your puke will find you wherever you are,’ Evelyn Chambers explained.

‘Sphere formation,’ nodded Walo Ögi and formed a hypothetical ball of vomit with both hands. ‘The puke forms itself into a ball.’

‘I’m pretty sure it spreads,’ said Karla Kramp.

‘Yes, so that we all get some,’ Borelius nodded. ‘Nice topic, by the way. Perhaps we should—’

‘There!’ cried Rebecca Hsu. ‘Up there!’

All eyes followed her outstretched hand. Two little points of light had started moving in the firmament. For a while they seemed to be heading to the south-east on orbital paths, except that at the same time they were getting bigger and bigger, a sight that contradicted everything that anyone had seen before. Clearly something had gone dimensionally awry. And then, all of a sudden, everyone worked out that the bodies were dropping from space in a perfect vertical. As if the stars were climbing down to them.

‘They’re coming,’ Sushma Nair whispered reverently.

Binoculars were yanked up. After a few minutes, even without magnification, two long structures could be made out, one slightly higher than the other, looking a bit like space shuttles, except that they were both standing upright and their undersides ended in broad, plate-like slabs. The conically pointed tips were brightly illuminated, and navigation lights darted evenly as heartbeats along the sides of the cylindrical bodies. The cabins approached the platform at great speed, and the lower they came the harder the air vibrated, as if stirred by giant dynamos. Julian registered with satisfaction that even his son wasn’t immune to the fascination. Amber’s eyes were as wide as if she were waiting for her Christmas presents.

‘That’s wonderful,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes.’ Julian nodded. ‘It’s technology, and it’s still a miracle. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke. Great man!’

Tim said nothing.

And suddenly Julian was aware of the bitter taste of repressed rage in his mouth. He simply couldn’t work out what was up with the boy. If Tim didn’t want to take the job that awaited him at Orley Enterprises, that was his business. Everyone had to go his own way, even if Julian couldn’t really understand that there were other paths to take apart from a future in the company, but okay, fine. Except – what the hell had he actually done to Tim?

Then everything happened very quickly.

An audible gasp from all the onlookers introduced the final phase. For a moment it looked as if the cabins would crash into the circular terminal like projectiles and pull the whole platform into the sea, then they abruptly slowed down, first one, then the other, and decelerated until they entered the circle of the space terminal and disappeared into it, one after the other. Again there was applause, broken by cries of ‘Bravo!’ Heidrun came and stood by Finn O’Keefe and whistled on two fingers.

‘Still sure you want to get into one of those?’ he asked.

She looked at him mockingly. ‘And you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Boaster!’

‘Someone will have to stand by your husband when you start clawing the walls.’

‘We’ll just see who’s scared, shall we?’

‘If it’s me,’ O’Keefe grinned, ‘remember your promise.’

‘When did I ever promise you anything?’

‘A little while ago. You were going to hold my hand.’

‘Oh yeah.’ The corners of Heidrun’s mouth twitched with amusement. For a moment she seemed to be thinking seriously about it. ‘I’m sorry, Finn. You know, I’m boring and old-fashioned. In my film the woman falls off her horse and lets the man save her from the Indians. Screaming her head off, of course.’

‘Shame. I’ve never acted in that kind of movie.’

‘You should have a word with your agent.’

She gracefully raised a hand, ran a finger gently over his cheek and walked away. O’Keefe watched her as she joined Walo. Behind him a voice said:

‘Pathetic, Finn. Total knock-back.’

He turned round and found himself looking into the beautiful, haughty face of Momoka Omura. They knew each other from the parties that O’Keefe avoided like the plague. If he did have to go to one, she inevitably bumped into him, as she recently had at Jack Nicholson’s eighty-eighth.

‘Shouldn’t you be filming?’ he said.

‘I didn’t end up in the mass market like you did, if that’s what you mean.’ She looked at her fingernails. A mischievous smile played around her lips. ‘But I could give you some lessons in flirting if you like.’

‘Very kind of you.’ He smiled back. ‘Except you’re not supposed to get off with your teacher.’

‘Only theoretically, you idiot. Do you seriously think I’d let you anywhere near me?’

‘You wouldn’t?’ He turned away. ‘That’s reassuring.’

Momoka threw her head back and snorted. The second woman to have walked away from him in the course of only a few minutes, she strutted over to Locatelli, who was noisily talking shop with Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker about fusion reactors, and linked arms with him. O’Keefe shrugged and joined Julian, who was standing with Hanna, Rebecca Hsu, his daughter and the Rogachevs.

‘But how do you get the cabin all the way up there?’ the Taiwanese woman wanted to know. She looked overexcited and scatterbrained. ‘It can hardly float up the cable.’

‘Didn’t you see the presentation?’ Rogachev asked ironically.

‘We’re just introducing a new perfume,’ said Rebecca, as if that explained everything. And in fact for half the show she’d been staring at the display on her pocket computer, correcting marketing plans, and had missed the explanation of the principle. At first sight it would look as if the slabs that formed the cabin sterns were sending out bright red beams, but in fact it was the other way round. The undersides of the plates were covered with photovoltaic cells, and the beams were emitted by huge lasers inside the terminal. The energy produced by the impact set the propulsion system in motion, six pairs of interconnected wheels per cabin, with the belt stretched between them. When the wheels on one side were set in motion, those on the other side joined in automatically in the opposite direction, and the lift climbed up the belt.

‘It gets faster and faster,’ Julian explained. ‘After only a hundred metres it reaches—’

There was a beep from his jacket. He frowned and dug out his phone.

‘What’s up?’

‘Forgive the disturbance, sir.’ Someone from the switchboard. ‘A call for you.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘It’s Gerald Palstein, sir.’

‘Oh. Of course.’ Julian smiled apologetically at everybody. ‘Could I neglect you for a moment? Rebecca, don’t run away. I’ll explain the principle to you every hour, or ideally more often, if that’ll make you happy.’

He dashed off into a little room behind the bar, stuck his phone into a console and projected the image onto a bigger screen.

‘Hi, Julian,’ said Palstein.

‘Gerald. Where in heaven’s name are you?’

‘Anchorage. We’ve buried the Alaska project. Didn’t I tell you about that?’

The EMCO manager looked exhausted. They had last seen each other a few weeks before the attempt on his life. Palstein was calling from a hotel room. A window in the background gave a glimpse of snow-covered mountains under a pale, cold sky.

‘No, you did,’ said Julian. ‘But that was before you were shot. Do you really have to do this to yourself?’

‘No big deal.’ Palstein waved the idea away. ‘I have a hole in my shoulder, not my head. That kind of injury lets me travel, although unfortunately not to the Moon. Regrettably.’

‘And how did it go?’

‘Let’s say Alaska’s preparing itself with some dignity for the rebirth of the age of the trapper. Of all the union representatives I’ve met there, most of them would have liked to finish the job that gunman in Canada fluffed.’

‘Just don’t beat yourself up! Nobody’s been as hard on his sector as you have, and from now on they will listen to you. Did you tell them about your planned allegiance?’

‘The press release is out. So yes, it came up.’

‘And? How was it received?’

‘As an attempt to get ourselves back in action. At least most people are being kind about it.’

‘That’s great! As soon as I get back, let’s sign the contracts.’

‘Other people think it’s a smokescreen.’ Palstein hesitated. ‘Let’s not kid ourselves, Julian. It’s a great help to us that you’re getting us on board—’

‘It’s a help to us!’

‘But it’s not going to work any miracles. We’ve been concentrating on petrol for far too long. Well, the main thing for us is to avoid competition. I’d rather have a future as a middle-sized company than go bankrupt as a giant. The consequences would be terrible. There’s nothing you can do about your downward slide, but you may be able to prevent the crash. Or cushion it at least.’

‘If anyone can do it, you can. God, Gerald! It’s a real shame you can’t be with us.’

‘Next time. Who took my place, by the way?’

‘A Canadian investor called Carl Hanna. Heard of him?’

‘Hanna?’ Palstein frowned. ‘To be quite honest—’

‘Doesn’t matter. I didn’t know him either until a few months ago. One of those people who got rich on the quiet.’

‘Interested in space travel?’

‘That’s exactly what makes him so interesting! You don’t have to make the subject tempting for him. He wants to invest in space travel anyway. Unfortunately he spent his youth in New Delhi and feels obliged to sponsor India’s moon programme because of his old connection.’ Julian grinned. ‘So I’ll have to make a big effort to win the guy over.’

‘And the rest of the gang?’

‘I’m pretty sure that Locatelli will come up with an eight-figure sum. His megalomania alone dictates that he needs a monument in space, and our facilities are equipped with his systems. Involvement would be only logical. The Donoghues and Marc Edwards have promised me major sums on the quiet, the only issue is how many zeroes there are going to be at the end. There’s a really interesting Swiss guy, Walo Ögi. Lynn and I met his wife two years ago in Zermatt; she took some pictures of me. Then we have Eva Borelius on board, perhaps you know her, German stem-cell research—’

‘Am I right in thinking that you’ve simply copied out the Forbes List?’

‘It wasn’t exactly like that. Borelius Pharmaceuticals was recommended to me by our strategic management team, and so was Bernard Tautou, the water tsar from Suez. Another guy whose ego just needs massaging. Or there’s Mukesh Nair—’

‘Ah, Mr Tomato.’ Palstein raised his eyebrows appreciatively.

‘Yes, nice guy. But he has no stake in space travel. It doesn’t do us much good that he’s rich, so we’ve had to bring a few extra criteria into play. Wanting to give humanity a more viable future, for example. Even the anti-space-travel brigade stand shoulder to shoulder on that one: Nair with food, Tautou with water, Borelius with medicine, me with energy. That unites us, and it’s encouraging the others. And then there are privately wealthy individuals like Finn O’Keefe, Evelyn Chambers and Miranda Winter—’

‘Miranda Winter? My God!’

‘What, why not? She doesn’t know what to do with all her money, bless her, so I’m inviting her to find out. Believe me, the mixture is perfect. Guys like O’Keefe, Evelyn and Miranda really loosen the gang up, it makes it really sexy, and in the end I’ll have them all on my side! Rebecca Hsu, with all her luxury brands, isn’t that interested in energy, but she goes for space travel as if she’d come up with the idea all by herself. She’s completely fixated on the idea that Moët et Chandon will be drunk on the Moon in future. Did you ever look at her portfolio? Kenzo, Dior, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, Dolce & Gabbana, Lacroix, Hennessy, not to mention her own brands, Boom Bang and the other stuff. As far as she’s concerned we’re a unique and inimitable brand. I could fund half of the OSS Grand with the advertising contracts I’m signing with her alone.’

‘Didn’t you invite that Russian too? Rogachev?’

Julian grinned. ‘He’s my very personal little challenge. If I manage to get him to put his billions into my projects, I’ll do a cartwheel in zero gravity.’

‘Moscow are hardly going to let him go.’

‘Wrong! They’ll practically force him into it if they think they can do business with me.’

‘Which will only be the case if you build them a space elevator. Until that happens, they’ll look on Rogachev as if his money’s flowing into American space travel through your project.’

‘Nonsense. It’ll look as if it’s flowing into a lucrative business, and that’s exactly what it will be doing! I’m not America, Gerald!’

‘I know that. Rogachev, on the other hand—’

‘He knows it too. A guy like that isn’t stupid, after all! There isn’t a country in the world today that’s capable of paying for space travel with its own funds. Do you really think that cheerful community of states that worked so harmoniously to set up the ISS was stirred by a spirit of international fraternity? Bullshit! None of them had the money to do it alone. It was the only way to send anything up into space without E.T. laughing himself sick. To do that they had to pull strings and swap information, with the result that they ended up with squat! Funds were short for everything, all kinds of crap was budgeted for, just not space travel. It was private individuals who changed that, after Burt Rutan flew the first commercial sub-orbital flight on Space Ship One in 2004, and who financed that? The United States of America? NASA?’

‘I know,’ Palstein sighed. ‘It was Paul Allen.’

‘Exactly! Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. Entrepreneurs showed the politicians how to get things done more quickly and efficiently. Like you, when your sector still meant something. You made presidents and toppled governments. Now it’s people like me paying off that pile of bank-breakers, doomsayers and nationalists. We have more money, more know-how, better people, a more creative climate. Without Orley Enterprises there would be no space elevator, no Moon tourism, reactor research wouldn’t be where it is today, nothing would. Even though it’s not exactly coming down with money, NASA would still have to justify itself to some incompetent regulatory agency or other every time it broke wind. We’re not regulated at all, not by any government in the world. And why? Because we’re not obliged to any government. Believe me, even Rogachev gets that one.’

‘Even so, you shouldn’t just go handing him the OSS user’s handbook. He might get it into his head to copy it.’

Julian chuckled. Then he grew suddenly serious.

‘Any news about your assassination attempt?’

‘Not really.’ Palstein shook his head. ‘They’re pretty sure where the shot was fired from, but that doesn’t really help them much. It was just a public event. There were loads of people there.’

‘I still don’t quite understand who would want to kill you. Your sector’s running out of puff. No one’s going to change that by shooting oil managers.’

‘People don’t think rationally.’ Palstein smiled. ‘Otherwise they’d have shot you. You basically invented helium-3 transport. Your lift finished off my sector.’

‘You could shoot me a thousand times, the world would still switch to helium-3.’

‘Quite. Actions like that aren’t calculated, they’re the product of despair. Of blind hatred.’

‘Exactly. Hatred has never been used to make things better.’

‘But it’s created more victims than anything else.’

‘Hmm, yes.’ Julian fell silent and rubbed his chin. ‘I’m not a hater. Hatred is alien to me. I can lose my temper. I can wish someone in hell and send him there, but only if there’s a point to it. Hatred is completely pointless.’

‘So we’re not going to find the murderer by looking for a motive.’ Palstein straightened the sling that held his arm. ‘Anyway. I just phoned you to wish you a pleasant journey.’

‘Next time you’ll be there too! Soon as you’re better.’

‘I’d love to see all that.’

‘You will see it!’ Julian grinned. ‘You’ll go walking on the Moon.’

‘Good luck, then. Squeeze that cash out of them.’

‘Take care, Gerald. I’ll call you. From up at the top.’

Palstein smiled. ‘You are up at the top.’

Julian thoughtfully studied the empty screen. More than a decade ago, while the oil sector had still kept the Monopolies and Mergers Commission busy with their yields and price rises, Palstein had turned up in his London office one day, curious to see what sort of work went on there. The realisation of the lift had just suffered a sharp setback, because the optimistic new material from which the cable was to be made had apparently irreparable crystal structure flaws. The world already knew that moon dust contained huge quantities of an element that could solve all the world’s energy problems. But without a plan for mining the stuff and getting it to Earth, along with the lack of appropriate reactors, helium-3 seemed like an irrelevance. Even so, Julian had gone on researching on all fronts, ignored by the oil sector, which had its hands full fighting for alternative trends like wind power and photovoltaics. Hardly anyone really took Julian’s efforts seriously. It simply seemed too unlikely that he would be successful.

Palstein, on the other hand, had listened carefully to everything, and recommended to the board of his company – which had just changed its name to EMCO after its marriage to ExxonMobil – that they buy shares in Orley Energy and Orley Space. Notoriously, the company’s directors hadn’t got on board, but Palstein stayed in contact with Orley Enterprises, and Julian came to like and esteem this melancholy character, who was always gazing into the future. Even though they had barely spent three whole weeks together, usually at spontaneous lunches, now and again at events, rarely in a private context, they were bound together by something like friendship, even though the stubbornness of the one had finally consigned the other to oblivion. Lately Palstein had been forced with increasing frequency to announce the abandonment or limitation of mining projects, as he was doing currently in Alaska and as he had done three weeks previously in Alberta, where he had had to face hundreds of furious people and had promptly been shot.

Julian knew that the manager would prove to be right. A partnership with Orley Enterprises wouldn’t save EMCO, but it might be useful to Gerald Palstein. He stood up, left the room behind the bar and returned to his guests.

‘—so back here for dinner in three-quarters of an hour,’ Lynn was saying. ‘You can stay and enjoy the drinks and the view, or freshen up and change. You could even do some work, if that’s your drug, conditions here are ideal for that too.’

‘And for that you should thank my fantastic daughter,’ said Julian, putting his arm around her shoulder. ‘She’s stunning. She did all this. She’s the greatest as far as I’m concerned.’ Lynn lowered her head with a smile.

‘No false modesty,’ Julian whispered to her. ‘I’m very proud of you. You can do anything. You’re perfect.’

A little later Tim was walking along the corridor on the fourth floor. Everything was antiseptically clean. On the way he met two security men and a cleaning robot insistently searching for the nonexistent leftovers of a world only partially inhabited. There was something profoundly disheartening about the way the machine, buzzing busily, pursued the purpose of its existence. A Sisyphus that had rolled the stone up the mountain and now had nothing left to do.

He stopped in front of her room and rang the bell. A camera transmitted his picture inside, then Lynn’s voice said:

‘Tim! Come in.’

The door slid open. He entered the suite and saw Lynn, wearing an attractive evening dress, standing at the panoramic window with her back to him. Her hair was loose, and fell in soft waves to her shoulders. When she smiled at him over her shoulder, her pale blue eyes gleamed like aquamarines. With sudden brio she swung round and displayed her cleavage. Tim ignored it, while his sister stared so closely past him that her smile bordered on the idiotic. He walked to a spherical chair, bent down and gave the woman who was lolling in it – scantily clothed in a silk kimono, legs bent and head thrown back – a kiss on the cheek.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Really.’

‘Thanks.’ The thing in the evening dress went on strutting around, twisted and turned, wallowed in its transfigured ego, while the real Lynn’s smile started sagging at the corners.

Tim sat down on a stool and pointed at her holographic alter ego.

‘Are you planning to wear that tonight?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ Lynn frowned. ‘It’s a bit too formal, don’t you think? I mean, for a Pacific island.’

‘Odd idea. You’ve already thrown the rules of South Sea romanticism to the four winds. It looks great, put it on. Or are there alternatives?’

Lynn’s thumbs slid over the remote control. Her avatar’s appearance changed without transition. Hologram-Lynn was now wearing an apricot-coloured catsuit, bare at the arms and shoulders, which she presented with the same empty grace as she had the evening dress. Her gaze was directed at imaginary admirers.

‘Can you program her to look at you?’

‘Absolutely not! Do you think I want to stare at myself the whole time?’

Tim laughed. His own avatar was a character from the days of two-dimensional animations, WALL-E, a battered-looking robot whose winning qualities bore no relation to his external appearance. Tim had seen the film as a child and immediately fallen in love with the character. Perhaps because he himself felt battered in Julian’s world of shifting mountains and fetching stars down from the sky.

The avatar’s magnificent flowing locks were replaced by a chignon.

‘Better,’ said Tim.

‘Really?’ Lynn let her shoulders droop. ‘Damn, I’ve already had it up all day. But you’re right. Unless—’

The avatar presented a tight, turquoise blouse with champagne-coloured trousers.

‘And this?’

‘What on earth kind of clothes are those?’ Tim asked.

‘Mimi Kri. Mimi Parker’s new collection. She brought her entire range with her after I had to promise to wear some of it. Her catalogue is compatible with most of the avatar programs.’

‘So mine could wear them too?’

‘If they could be restitched to fit caterpillar tracks and bulldozer hands, then sure. Afraid not, Tim, it only works with human avatars. And by the way, the program is ruthless. If you’re too fat or too small for Mimi’s creation, it won’t recalculate. The problem is that most people improve their images so much for the avatar that everything fits the calculator and they look like shit afterwards anyway.’

‘Then it’s their own fault.’ Tim narrowed his eyes. ‘Hey, your avatar’s bum’s far too small! Half the size of your real one. No, a third. And where’s your paunch? And your cellulite?’

‘Idiot,’ Lynn laughed. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Nothing? Good reason to visit me.’

‘Well, yeah.’ He hesitated. ‘Amber says I’m worrying about you too much.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘I didn’t want to get on your nerves back there.’

‘It’s sweet of you to care. Really.’

‘Still, perhaps—’ He wrung his hands. ‘You know, it’s just that I suspect Julian of being completely blind to his surroundings. He may be able to locate individual atoms in the space–time continuum, but if you’re lying dead in your grave right in front of him, he’ll complain that you aren’t listening to him properly.’

‘You exaggerate.’

‘But he completely failed to acknowledge your breakdown. Remember?’

‘But that’s more than five years ago,’ Lynn said softly. ‘And he had no experience of anything like that.’

‘Nonsense, he denied it! What special experience do you need to recognise a burn-out, complete with anxiety and depression, for what it is? In Julian’s world you don’t break down, that’s the point. He only knows superheroes.’

‘Perhaps he lacks the counterbalance. After mother died—’

‘Mother died ten years ago, Lynn. Ten years! Since he noticed that at some point she’d given up breathing, talking, eating and thinking, he’s been screwing everything that moves and—’

‘That’s his business. Really, Tim.’

‘I’ll shut up.’ He looked at the ceiling as if searching for clues to the real reason for his visit. ‘In fact I only came here to tell you your hotel is fantastic. And that I’m looking forward to the trip.’

‘That’s sweet.’

‘Seriously! You’ve got everything under control. Everything’s brilliantly organised!’ He grinned. ‘Even the guests are more or less bearable.’

‘If one of them doesn’t suit you we’ll dispose of him in the vacuum.’ She rolled her eyes and said in a hollow, sinister voice: ‘In space no one can hear you scream!’

‘Ha!’ Tim laughed.

‘I’m glad you’re coming,’ she added quietly.

‘Lynn, I promised to look after you, and that’s what I’m doing.’ He got to his feet, bent down to her and kissed her again. ‘So, see you later. Oh, and wear the trousers and the blouse. And your hair looks great down.’

‘That’s exactly what I wanted to hear, little brother.’

Tim left. Lynn let her avatar go on modelling and trying on jewellery. Traditionally, avatars were virtual assistants, programs made form, who helped organise the networked human being’s daily life and created the illusion of a partner, a butler or a playmate. They controlled data, remembered appointments, acquired information, navigated the web and made suggestions that matched their user’s personality profile. There were no restrictions on their design, which also included virtually cloning yourself, whether out of pure self-infatuation or simply to spare yourself a trip to the shops. Five minutes later Lynn called Mimi Parker. The avatar shrank and froze, while the Californian appeared on the holoscreen, dripping wet and with a towel around her hips.

‘I’m just out of the shower,’ she said apologetically. ‘Find anything nice?’

‘Here,’ Lynn said, and sent a jpeg of the avatar, which appeared simultaneously on Mimi’s display.

‘Hey, good choice. Really suits you.’

‘Great. I’ll tell the staff. Someone will come and collect the things from you.’

‘Fine. See you later, then.’

‘Yes, see you later.’ Lynn smiled. ‘And thank you!’

The projection disappeared. At the same time Lynn’s smile went out. Her gaze slipped away. Blank-faced, she stared straight ahead and recapitulated Julian’s last remark, before she had left the viewing terrace:

I’m really proud of you. You’re the greatest. You’re perfect.

Perfect.

So why didn’t she feel she was? His admiration weighed down on her like a mortgage on a house with a glorious façade and rotten pipes. Since stepping inside the suite, she had been walking as if on glass, as if the floor might collapse. She pushed herself up, dashed to the bathroom and took two little green tablets that she washed down with hasty sips of water. Then she thought for a moment and took a third.

Breathing, feeling your body. Taking a good deep breath, right into your belly.

After she had stared at her reflection for a while, her gaze wandered to her fingers. They were gripping the edge of the basin, and the sinews stood out on the back of her hands. For a moment she considered wrenching the basin from its base, which of course she wouldn’t be able to do, except that it might keep her from screaming.

You’re the greatest. You’re perfect.

Just fuck off, Julian, she thought.

At that moment a pang of shame ran through her. Heart thumping, she slumped to the floor and performed thirty panting sit-ups. In the bar she found a bottle of champagne and tossed a glass down, even though she never normally drank alcohol. The black hole that had opened up beneath her began to close. She called room service, told them to go to Mimi Parker’s suite and went into the shower. When she stepped into the lift a quarter of an hour later, wearing a blouse and trousers and with her hair down, Aileen Donoghue was already waiting there and looked as expected. Christmas baubles dangled from her earlobes. A necklace bit into the big valley of her bosom.

‘Oh, Lynn, you look—’ Aileen struggled for words. ‘Good God, what should I say? Beautiful! Oh, what a beautiful girl you are! Let me give you a hug. Julian is rightly proud of you.’

‘Thanks, Aileen,’ smiled Lynn, slightly crushed.

‘And your hair! It suits you much better down. I mean, not that you should always wear it down, but it brings out your femininity. If only you weren’t— Oops.’

‘Yes?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Say it.’

‘Oh, you young things are all so thin!’

‘Aileen, I weigh fifty-eight kilos.’

‘Really?’ That plainly wasn’t the answer that Aileen wanted to hear. ‘So in a minute, once we’re upstairs, I’ll make you a plate of something. You need to eat, my dear! People have to eat.’

Lynn looked at her and imagined tearing the Christmas balls out of her ears. Zip, zap, so fast that her earlobes ripped and a fine mist of blood sprayed onto the mirrored glass of the lift.

She relaxed. The green pills were starting to work.

‘I’m hugely looking forward to tomorrow,’ she said brightly. ‘When it gets going. It’ll be really lovely!’