He stared at her glimmering, carefully trimmed, downy thicket and saw tiny trains driving through it, glittering reflections on spun gold, while his own Lunar Express valiantly stoked the engine. Hedegaard started moaning in Danish, usually a good sign, except that today it sounded somehow cryptic to his ears, as if he were to be sacrificed on the altar of her desire, to bring a Julian or a Juliana into the world as quickly as possible, a future Master or Miss Orley, and he started feeling uneasy. She was twenty-eight years younger than him. He hadn’t asked her for ages what she expected from all this, not least because in the few private moments that they enjoyed together he hadn’t had time to ask any questions, so quickly had they leapt out of their clothes, but eventually he would have to ask her. Above all he would have to ask himself. Which was much worse, because he already knew the answer, and it wasn’t that of a sixty-year-old man.
He tried to hold out, then he reached his orgasm.
The climax peaked in a brief erasure of all thoughts, swept clean the convolutions of his brain and reinforced the certainty that old was still twenty years older than he was. For a moment he felt immersed in the pure, delicious moment. Nina snuggled up to him, and his suspicion immediately welled up again. As if sex were merely the pleasurable preamble to a stack of small print, a magnificent portal leading inevitably to the nursery, the most perfidious kind of ambush. He looked helplessly at the blonde shock of hair on his chest. Not that he wanted rid of her. He actually didn’t want her to go. It would have been enough for her simply to turn back into the astronaut whose job it was to entertain his guests without that moist promise in her eyes that she would never leave him, that henceforth she would always be there for him, for a whole lifetime! He ran his pointed fingers through the down on the back of her neck, embarrassed by his own reaction.
‘I ought to get back to the control room,’ he murmured.
His suggestion met with harsh, muted sounds.
‘Okay, in ten minutes,’ he agreed. ‘Shall we shower?’
In the bathroom the general luxury of the equipment continued. Tropically warm rain sprang from a generously curved shower-head, droplets so light that they floated down rather than falling. Hedegaard insisted on soaping him, and concentrated an excess of foam on a small if expanding area. His concern about her excessive demands made way for fresh arousal; the shower cabin was spacious and resplendent with all kinds of handy grips, Hedegaard pressed herself against him and he into her and – bang! – another thirty minutes had passed.
‘I’ve really got to go now,’ he said into his fluffy towel.
‘Will we meet up again later?’ she asked. ‘After dinner?’
He had towel in his eyes, towel in his ears. He didn’t hear her, or at least not loudly enough, and when he was about to ask what she’d said she was on the phone to Peter Black about something technical. He slipped quickly into jeans and T-shirt, kissed her quickly on the cheek and disappeared before she could end the call.
Seconds later he stepped into the control room and found Lynn in a hushed conversation with Dana Lawrence. Ashwini Anand was planning routes for the coming day on a three-dimensional map. Half the room was dominated by a holographic wall, whose windows showed the public areas of the hotel from the perspective of surveillance cameras. Only the suites were unobserved. In the pool, Heidrun, Finn and Miranda were having a diving competition, watched by Olympiada Rogacheva, whose husband was having a weight-lifting contest with Evelyn Chambers in the gym. The outside cameras showed Marc Edwards and Mimi Parker playing tennis, or at least Julian assumed that it was Marc and Mimi, while the golf-players on the far side of the gorge were just setting off for home.
‘Everything okay with you guys?’ he asked in a pointedly cheerful voice.
‘Great.’ Lynn smiled. Julian noticed that she looked somehow chalky, as if she were the only person in the room being illuminated by a different light source. ‘How was your trip?’
‘Argumentative. Mimi and Karla were discussing the copulative habits of higher beings. We need a telescope on Mons Blanc.’
‘So you can spy on them?’ Lawrence asked without a hint of amusement.
‘Hell no, just to get a better view of the hotel. God! I thought everyone would be so awestruck up here that they’d be falling into each other’s arms, and instead they’re banging on about the Holy Ghost.’ His eye wandered to the window that showed the station. ‘Has the train left again?’ he asked casually.
‘Which train?’
‘The Lunar Express. The LE-2, I mean, the one that came in last night. Has it set off again already?’
Dana stared at him as if he had thrown a pile of syllables at her feet and demanded that she cobble a sentence together.
‘The LE-2 hasn’t arrived.’
‘It hasn’t?’
Anand turned round and smiled. ‘No, that was the LE-1, the one you arrived on yesterday.’
‘I know. And where has it been? In the meantime?’
‘In the meantime?’
‘What are you actually talking about?’ Lynn asked.
‘Well, about—’ Julian hesitated. The screen really did show only one train. He felt a dark premonition creeping up on him, that it was the same Lunar Express that had brought them here. Which led to the reverse conclusion that—
‘A train did pull in this morning,’ he insisted defiantly.
His daughter and Dana exchanged a swift glance.
‘Which one?’ asked Dana, as if walking on glass.
‘That one there.’ Julian pointed impatiently at the screen.
Silence.
‘Certainly not,’ Anand tried again. ‘The LE-1 hasn’t left the station since it got here.’
‘But I’ve seen it.’
‘Julian—’ Lynn began.
‘When I was looking out of the window!’
‘Dad, you can’t have seen it!’
If she had told him she’d temporarily lent the train to a dozen aliens, he would have been less concerned. Only a few hours ago he would have put it all down to a hallucination. Not any more.
‘It’s one thing after another,’ he sighed. ‘Today I met Carl Hanna, okay? At half past five in the corridor, and then—’
‘I’m sorry, but what were you doing in the corridor at half past five?’
‘Neither here nor there! Earlier, anyway—’
Hanna? Exactly, Hanna! He would have to ask Hanna. Perhaps he had seen that ominous train. After all, he had been down there before him, exactly at the same time as—
Just a moment. Hanna had come towards him from the station.
‘No,’ he said to himself. ‘No, no.’
‘No?’ Lynn tilted her head on one side. ‘What do you mean, no?’
Mad! Completely absurd. Why would Hanna be taking secret joyrides on the Lunar Express?
‘Is it possible that you’ve been dreaming?’ she continued. ‘Hallucinating?’
‘I was wide awake.’
‘Fine, you were awake. To get back to the question of what you were doing at half past five—’