Limit (153 page)

‘In principle, no.’ She hesitated. ‘The likelihood is very slim. The shaft system is connected via passageways, but structured in such a way that flames and smoke can’t spread that quickly. And besides, the shaft itself is inflammable.’

‘What does “that quickly” mean exactly?’ asked Eva Borelius.

‘It means that we should test it,’ said Lynn with a steady voice. ‘We’ll send the staff elevator up to you. If the system considers it to be safe, its doors would open in Selene. After that we’ll call it back, look inside, and if there’s nothing to suggest otherwise, we’ll send it up again. Then you should be able to actually use it.’

O’Keefe exchanged glances with Funaki and tried to make eye contact with the others. Sushma was frozen in a state of fear, Olympiada was gnawing at her lower lip, and Karla and Eva were signalling their agreement.

‘Sounds sensible,’ said Mukesh.

‘Yes.’ A nervous laugh escaped from Karla. ‘Better than smoke-filled ventilation shafts.’

‘Okay,’ decided Funaki. ‘So let’s do it.’

‘Nothing can shock me now anyway,’ warbled Miranda.

The re-enlivening effect of having a plan seeped into the bloodstream of the small group and motivated them to climb down to Selene, where the temperatures were significantly higher. Funaki threw a precautionary glance at the bulkheads on the floor. There was nothing to suggest that smoke or flames were making their way upwards.

They waited. After a short while they heard the elevator approaching. For what felt like an eternity, the doors remained closed, then finally glided silently apart.

The cabin looked the same as it always did.

Funaki took a step inside and looked around.

‘It looks good. Very good even.’

‘Mukesh.’ Sushma grabbed her husband’s upper arm and looked at him pleadingly. ‘Did you hear what he said? We could go now—’

‘No, no.’ Funaki, with one leg still in the cabin, turned around hurriedly and shook his head. ‘We’re supposed to send it down empty. Just like Miss Orley said.’

‘But it’s fine.’ Sushma’s shoulders were quivering with tension. ‘It’s intact, isn’t it? Every time we send it back and forth, it could only get more dangerous. I want to go down now,
please
, Mukesh.’

‘Oh, honey, I don’t know.’ Mukesh looked at Funaki uncertainly. ‘If Michio says—’

‘It’s
my
decision!’

The Japanese man pulled a face and scratched himself behind the ear.

‘I’m in,’ said Karla. ‘I agree.’

‘What, you want to go down now?’ asked Eva. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

‘What is there to debate? The cabin made it up, so it will make it back down again too. Sushma’s right.’

‘I’m coming in any case,’ said Hsu. ‘Finn?’

O’Keefe shook his head.

‘I’m staying here.’

‘Me too,’ said Olympiada.

Funaki looked helplessly at Miranda Winter. She ran her hands through the singed tips of her hair and pinched her nose.

‘So, the thing is, I believe in voices,’ she said, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘Voices from the universe, you know – sometimes you have to listen really closely, then the universe speaks to you and tells you what you have to do.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Karla.

‘You have to listen with your whole body of course.’

O’Keefe gave her a friendly nod. ‘And what does it say, the cosmos?’

‘To wait. I mean, that
I
should wait!’ she hurried to confirm. ‘It can only speak for me after all.’

‘Of course.’

‘We’re losing time,’ urged Funaki. ‘They’ve already called the elevator back down again. The light’s flashing.’

Mukesh grasped Sushma’s hand.

‘Come on’ he said.

They walked past Funaki into the cabin, followed by Hsu, Karla and Eva, who peered in sceptically.

‘You’re coming too?’ asked Karla, surprised.

‘Do you think I’m going to let you go down by yourselves?’

‘It’s best if you stay in Selene.’ Mukesh called out to those staying behind. ‘We’ll send the elevator back right away.’

The doors closed.

Am I too cautious? wondered O’Keefe. When all is said and done, am I just a coward?

Suddenly the disquieting feeling crept over him that he’d just thrown away his last chance of getting out of here alive.

* * *

‘It’s awful,’ said Eva softly. ‘When I think of how Aileen and Chuck—’

‘Don’t think about it then,’ said Karla, staring straight ahead.

The cabin set itself in motion.

‘It’s moving,’ commented Hsu.

‘I just hope it will a second time too,’ said Sushma, concerned. ‘The others should have come with us.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Mukesh reassured her. ‘It
will
.’

The familiar feeling of weight loss set in. The elevator sped up, past—

* * *

—the cabin of E2, the interior of which was shimmering with red-yellow embers as the oxygen tank incessantly spat flames out into the wasteland of the neck. Inside the lift it was getting hotter and hotter. In spite of their density, the panes of the glazed section at the front were straining to brace themselves against the fire, but in vain, as the pressure began to shift to the inside and forced the components of the cabin slowly but steadily apart. The elevator shafts were separated from one another by thin, longitudinal walls, that were pierced by passageways a metre square. Contrary to their outer appearance, they were incredibly robust, made of mooncrete and designed to stand up to even heavy loads.

Not as heavy as this, though, admittedly.

For over three-quarters of an hour, ferrostatic tension had been building up inside the cabin. Now that the tolerable maximum had been exceeded, it exploded with such destructive force that one of the side casings split off with a deafening noise, smashed the shaft wall into pieces and spread out like shrapnel into the neighbouring shaft, making the staff elevator come to a jolting standstill.

* * *

It stopped so abruptly that its passengers were torn off their feet, shot up weight-lessly, banged their heads together and tumbled down wildly. In the next moment, something crashed down onto the roof, making the cabin shake heftily.

‘What was that?’ Sushma sat up and looked around, her eyes wide. ‘What happened?’

‘We’re stuck!’

‘Mukesh?’ Panic rippled through her voice. ‘I want to get out. I want to get out
immediately
.’

‘Calm down, my love, I’m sure everything is—’

‘I want to get out.
I want to get out!
’

He took her arm and spoke to her insistently, quickly and under his breath. One after another, they clambered to their feet, their faces pale and anxious.

‘Did you hear that crash?’ Hsu stared up at the roof of the cabin.

‘But we were already past it,’ Karla said to herself, as if wanting to make the obvious impossible. ‘We were already below the gallery.’

‘Something stopped us.’ Eva glanced at the controls. The lights had gone out. She pressed the button for the intercom system. ‘Hello? Can anyone hear us?’

No answer.

‘What a mess,’ cursed Hsu.

‘I want to get out,’ pleaded Sushma. ‘Please, I want—’

‘Don’t start!’ Hsu barked at her. ‘You were the one that talked us into getting in this thing. It’s because of you that we’re stuck.’

‘You didn’t have to come too!’ Mukesh replied furiously. ‘Leave her be.’

‘Oh, shut it, Mukesh.’

‘Hey!’ Eva interrupted. ‘Don’t argue, we—’

Something made a crunching noise above them. A hollow, grinding noise joined it, followed by deathly silence.

The cabin jolted.

Then it fell.

* * *

‘
You did what?
’

Lynn stared at the monitor and Funaki’s baffled face.

‘They wanted to get in at all costs, Miss Orley,’ the Japanese man groaned. He gazed downwards. His head jerked forwards and backwards in quick succession, gestures of submission. ‘What was I supposed to do? I’m not an army general – people have their own free will.’

‘But it didn’t work! And we can’t make contact with them any more.’

‘Did they – get stuck?’

Lynn glanced at the controls. They had seen the cabin stop suddenly under the gallery, but after that the icon had disappeared.

No one said a word. Walo Ögi was pacing through the room, while Heidrun and Tim stared at the controls as if they could conjure up the icon again just by gazing at it.

There was a state of emergency in Lynn’s mind.

The drugs had unleashed their narcotic effect while the acute drama lashed away at her, pushing her beyond her limits. She felt confused, drunk almost, but at the same time acutely aware of every detail of her surroundings, a strange, unsettling clarity. There was no before and after, no more primary and secondary perception. Everything bombarded her at once, while less and less was making its way out. Different levels of reality layered on top of one another, broke apart, forced their way back together again, splintered, and created surreal backing scenery for the performance of incomprehensible plays. The blood rushed in her ears. For the hundredth, thousandth, zillionth time, she asked herself how on earth she could have let herself
in for this, building space stations and moon hotels, instead of finally standing up to Julian and making it clear to him that she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t a superhuman, wasn’t even a healthy human for that matter. She should have told him that the task would destroy her, that you may well need a lunatic to create something brilliant and crazy, but certainly not to maintain it or even promote it. Because that,
precisely that
, was a task for the healthy ones, the mentally clear and stable, those who flirted with lunacy, flirted with it without a care in the world, not having the slightest idea what it really felt like.

How long would she be able to keep going?

Her head was ringing. She closed her eyes, pressing the tips of her fingers against her temples. She had to stay upright. She couldn’t allow the dam holding the flood of blackness to break. She was the only one that knew the hotel like the back of her hand. She had built it.

It was all down to her.

Filled with fear, she opened her eyes.

The symbol was back.

* * *

‘Help! Help! Can anyone hear us?’

Eva hammered furiously on the intercom button, shouting and shouting, while Sushma threw herself against the closed internal doors and tried to force them apart with her bare hands. Mukesh pulled her back by her shoulders and held her close to him.

‘I want to get out of here,’ she whimpered. ‘Please.’

The elevator had only dropped a metre, but the blood had rushed from all five faces and collected in their feet. As white as chalk, they looked at one another, like a group of ghosts suddenly realising they have already been dead for a long time.

‘Okay.’ Eva abandoned the intercom, raised her hand and tried to sound practical, which she was remarkably successful in doing. ‘The most important thing now is that we stay calm. That means you too, Sushma. Sushma? Okay?’

Sushma nodded, her lower lip trembling, her face wet with tears.

‘Good. We don’t know what’s wrong, and we can’t get through to anyone, so we have to find out.’

‘It can’t be all that bad,’ said Hsu. ‘I mean, there’s only a sixth of the—’

‘Twelve metres on the Moon are like two on Earth, you know that,’ retorted Karla. ‘And I guess we’re about a hundred and twenty metres up.’

‘Sshh! Listen.’

A rising and falling roaring sound filled their ears. A tormented howling mixed in with it, like a material under intense strain. Eva looked up to the ceiling. There
was a bulkhead in clear view in the middle. She saw the operator control next to the display. She hesitated for a moment, then activated the mechanism. For a number of seconds, nothing happened, giving rise to the fear that this function had been damaged too. How were they supposed to get outside if the bulkhead had failed? But even while she was still pondering the alternatives, it stirred into motion and slowly rose. A flickering orange-red glow made its way in, the roaring intensified. She crouched down, pushing off from her knees, got a grip on the edge of the hatch, pulled herself up with a powerful swinging movement and clambered onto the roof.

‘My God,’ she whispered.

On the right-hand side, a large section of the dividing wall had been torn away, which meant she could see through to the neighbouring shaft. Five, perhaps six metres above her, was the smouldering, half-destroyed cabin of E2. The side casing was completely gone, exposing its inside, the source of the roaring sound, which was now even louder. Red apparitions darted across the floor of the burning elevator, streaks of rust were collecting further up in the shaft. There was debris wherever she looked. A bizarrely distorted, glowing and pulsing piece of metal was directly in front of her feet. She took a step back. At first she thought the brake shoes of the staff elevator had gripped and surrounded the guide rails, but on closer inspection two of them seemed to be blocked by splinters or possibly damaged. The heat was making thick beads of sweat build up over her forehead and upper lip.

Then, suddenly, the floor collapsed from under her feet.

A collective scream forced its way up to her as the cabin dropped another metre. Eva staggered, caught her balance, and saw that one of the brake shoes had opened up. No, worse than that, it had broken! In panic, she looked for a way out. Right in front of her eyes was the lower edge of the doors which led to the gallery. She wedged her finger between the gap, making a useless attempt to open them, but of course they didn’t move a single millimetre. Why would they? These weren’t normal elevator doors, but completely sealed-off bulkheads. As long as the system didn’t decide to open them, or unless someone activated them from the outside, she was only making a fool of herself and wasting valuable time.

‘Eva!’ She heard Sushma snivelling. ‘What’s happening?’

It was hard for her to ignore the poor woman, but she didn’t have time to tend to the others’ sensitivities as well. Feverishly, she searched for a solution. The still-intact wall, she now noticed, revealed a passage through to the E1 shaft, around a square metre in size. Several metres above, she spotted another passage, too high to reach, and the glowing and smoky fragments of the blasted-away cabin casing were splayed out in it. Feeling an unpleasant pressure on her chest, Eva turned to the other side to get a look at the E2 shaft. The entire upper section of the dividing wall had
disappeared, replaced by a huge, gaping hole, the jagged edge of which was level with her forehead. She had to hoist herself up a bit to look over it. Vertical guide rails stretched down into the depths of the unknown. There were crossbars positioned at intervals in between, wide enough to be able to get a grip and a foothold on them, and on the other side of the shaft she saw—