‘Simple insomnia! God almighty, I went for a walk.’
His eye scoured the monitor wall. Where was the Canadian? There, in the Mama Quilla Club. Slouching, sipping cocktails, on a sofa, with the Donoghues, Nairs and Locatellis.
‘Maybe Julian’s right,’ Dana Lawrence said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe we really did miss something.’
‘Nonsense, Dana, no way.’ Lynn shook her head. ‘We both know that no train left. Ashwini knows that too.’
‘Do we really know?’
‘Nothing was delivered, no one went anywhere.’
‘Easy to check.’ Dana walked to the monitor wall and opened a menu. ‘We just have to look at the recording.’
‘Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!’ Lynn was getting tense. ‘We don’t need to look at a recording.’
‘With the best will in the world, I can’t imagine why you’re so resistant to the idea,’ Julian said, amazed. ‘Let’s take a look at it. We should have done that straight away.’
‘Dad, we’ve got everything under control.’
‘As you wish,’ said Lawrence. ‘As a matter of fact it’s my job to keep everything here under control, isn’t it, Lynn? That’s why you employed me in the first place. I’m ultimately responsible for the security of your hotel and the wellbeing of your guests, and monorails that operate all by themselves are at odds with that.’
Lynn shrugged. Dana waited for a moment, then issued instructions with darting fingers. Another window opened, showed the interior of the station hall. The time-code said 27 May 2025, 05.00.
Should we go further back?’
‘No.’ Julian shook his head. ‘It was between five fifteen and five thirty.’
Dana nodded and ran quickly through the recording.
Nothing happened. The LE-1 didn’t leave the station, and the LE-2 didn’t pull in either. God in heaven, Julian thought, Lynn’s right. I’m hallucinating. He tried to catch her eye and she avoided his, visibly upset that he hadn’t simply believed her.
‘Hmm,’ he murmured. ‘Hmm, okay. Sorry.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ Dana said seriously. ‘It was entirely possible.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Lynn snarled. When she looked at him at last, her pupils were flickering with fury. ‘Are you actually sure that you didn’t dream that stupid walk of yours? Maybe you weren’t in the corridor at all. Maybe you were just in bed.’
‘As I said, I’m sorry.’ Taken aback, he wondered why she was so furious with him. He’d just wanted to be doubly sure. ‘Let’s just forget it, I made a mistake.’
Instead of answering she stepped up to the monitor wall, tapped in a series of orders and opened another set of recordings. Dana watched, arms folded, while Ashwini Anand pretended she wasn’t even there. Julian recognised the underground corridor, 05.20.
‘That really isn’t necessary,’ he hissed.
‘It isn’t?’ Lynn raised her eyebrows. ‘Why not? You wanted to be doubly sure, after all.’
She launched the sequence before he could start protesting again. After a few seconds Carl Hanna appeared and climbed on one of the moving walkways. He approached the end of the corridor, looked through the window into the station concourse and disappeared into one of the gangways that led to the train, only to reappear, seconds later, and be carried back again. Almost simultaneously, Julian stepped out of the lift.
‘Congratulations,’ Lynn said frostily. ‘You were telling the truth.’
‘Lynn—’
She brushed the ash-blonde hair off her forehead and turned to face him. Behind the fury in her eyes he thought he recognised something else. Fear, Julian thought. My God, she’s frightened! Then, all of a sudden, his daughter smiled, and her smile seemed to erase her fury as completely as if she knew nothing in life but benevolence and forgiveness. With a swing of her hips she came over to him, gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek and boxed him in the ribs.
‘Let me know when a UFO lands,’ she grinned, and left headquarters.
Julian stared after her. ‘I will,’ he murmured.
And suddenly the ghostly thought came to him that his daughter was an actress.
And yet!
In an act of childish perseverance he went to the Mama Quilla Club, whose dance floor was mysteriously illuminated under the eternal light show of the starry sky. Michio Funaki was mixing cocktails behind the bar. When he saw him, Warren Locatelli shot to his feet and raised his glass to him, waving his other hand wildly.
‘Julian! That was the most brilliant day of any holiday I’ve ever had!’
‘Impressive, really.’ Aileen Donoghue laughed in her tinkling soprano. ‘Even if we’ve had to learn golf all over again.’
‘Golf, bullshit!’ Locatelli pressed Julian to his chest and pulled him over to the seated group. ‘Carl and I went charging around in those moon buggies, it was absolutely crazy! You’ve got to build a racetrack up here, a real fucking Le Mans de la Lune!’
‘And he didn’t even win,’ giggled Momoka Omura. ‘He almost flattened his buggy.’
‘More to the point, he nearly flattened me,’ said Rebecca Hsu, placing a single peanut between her lips. ‘Warren’s company is inspiring, particularly when you think about moon burials.’
‘We had a wonderful day,’ smiled Sushma Nair. ‘Do come and join us.’
‘Right away.’ Julian smiled. ‘Just for a little while. Carl, have you got a minute?’
‘Of course.’ Hanna swung his legs off his sofa.
‘Just don’t go missing on me,’ Locatelli laughed. Recently he and Hanna had been spending a lot of time together. One chatty, the other taciturn, somehow strange, but plainly a friendship was developing there. They went to the bar, where Julian ordered the most complicated cocktail on the menu, an Alpha Centauri.
‘Listen, I feel a bit silly.’ He waited till Funaki was busy, and lowered his voice. ‘But I’ve got to ask you something. When we met in the corridor this morning, you were coming from the station.’
Hanna nodded.
‘And?’ Julian asked.
‘And what?’
‘Did you take a look inside?’
‘Inside the concourse? Once. Through the window.’ Hanna thought. ‘After that I went into one of the gangways. You remember, I was a bit dozy when it came to looking for the exits.’
‘And did you – did you see anything in the concourse?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘I mean, the train, was it there? Did it set off, did it pull in?’
‘What, the Lunar Express? No.’
‘So it was just parked there.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you’re a hundred per cent sure about that?’
‘I didn’t see anything else. So why do you feel silly?’
‘Because – oh, this really isn’t the place.’ And he just told Hanna the whole story, simply out of a need to get rid of it.
‘Maybe it was one of those flashes we all see up here,’ said Hanna.
Julian knew what he was referring to. High-energy particles, protons and heavy atomic nuclei, occasionally broke through the armour of spaceships and space stations, reacted with atoms in the eye and caused brief flashes of light that were perceived on the retina, but only if you had your eyes shut. Over time you got used to it, until you barely noticed them. Behind the regolith plating of the bedroom they hardly ever occurred. But in the living room—
Funaki set the cocktail down in front of him. Julian stared at the glass without really seeing it.
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘You just made a mistake,’ said Hanna. ‘If you want my advice, you should apologise to Lynn and forget the whole thing.’
But Julian couldn’t forget it. Something was wrong, something didn’t fit. He knew without question that he had seen something, just not the train. Something more subtle was bothering him, a crucial detail that proved he wasn’t fantasising. There was a second inner movie that would explain everything if he could just drag it out of his unconscious and look at it, look at it very precisely to understand what he had already seen and just hadn’t understood, whether he liked the explanation or not.