Heidrun felt a little awkward as she stepped into the suite, in dressing gown and flip-flops. Unusually, but in pointed contrast to Finn, she had opted against the familiar rock-climbing match up the bridges, and instead primly pressed the lift button, as if it was the last thing that the pitiful remains of her arrogance could still manage. Aghast at what she had just surrendered, when Walo had never been unsatisfactory in that regard, she had the lift cabin carry her up to Gaia’s ribcage, away from the pool of temptation, stiff as a board, no false moves, just carefully sniffing her fingers for traces of lust. She felt as if her whole body exuded betrayal. The air in the lift struck her as heavy with clues, thick with vaginal aromas and the ozone stench of alien sperm, even though nothing had happened, at least not really, and yet –
Walo, her heart thumped. Walo, oh Walo!
She found him reading, gave him a kiss, that familiar, scratchy moustachioed kiss. He smiled.
‘Have fun?’
‘Lots,’ she said and fled to the bathroom. ‘And you? Not in the bar?’
‘I was, darling. It was only moderately bearable. Chuck’s jokes are starting to offend Aileen’s Christian sensibilities. A while ago he asked what a healthy dog and a short-sighted gynaecologist have in common.’
‘Let me guess. A wet nose?’
‘So I thought I might as well read.’
She looked at herself in the mirror, her white, violet-eyed elfin face, just as she had seen Finn’s face down below, in the merciless light of the realisation that people aged, they aged inexorably, that their once immaculate skin began to wrinkle, that she was a depressing forty-six, and had something in common with many men who tried to recapture their lost youth, something that women generally said they would never undergo: a proper midlife crisis.
If you want to grow old with someone, she thought, you shouldn’t need anyone else to make you feel younger.
And she loved Walo, she loved him so much!
Naked, she walked back into the living room, lay down on the carpet in front of him, folded her hands behind her head, stretched out a foot and tapped his left knee.
‘What are you reading there?’
He lowered the book and studied her outstretched body with a smile.
‘Whatever it was,’ he said, ‘I’ve just forgotten it.’
Tim pressed the door buzzer again.
‘Lynn? Please let me in. Let’s talk.’
No reaction. What if he was mistaken? He’d just missed her in the Mama Quilla Club, and had assumed that she had gone to her suite. But perhaps she was doing other things. What frightened him more than any bomb was the idea that she might actually be losing her mind, that she had already lost it. Crystal, too, hadn’t just been depressive, she’d increasingly lost touch with reality.
‘Lynn? If you’re there, open up.’
After a while he gave in and jumped down the bridges to the lobby, deeply concerned. He wondered what Sophie was up to. Whether the Gravedigger had uncovered the footage. At the same time his thoughts revolved around himself: Amber, Julian, bomb, Lynn, Hanna, accomplices, satellite failure, bomb, Amber, Lynn, worries that devoured one another, a madhouse.
The control centre was empty. Sophie was nowhere to be seen.
‘Sophie?’
He looked helplessly around. A bulkhead led to a back room, but when he put his finger on the sensor field, he found it was locked. He saw Dana running towards him through the lobby. She entered the control centre and looked around with a frown.
‘Have you seen Sophie?’
‘No.’
‘Is everything spiralling out of control?’ Her face darkened. ‘She was supposed to be here. Someone has to be in the control centre. I guess you haven’t bumped into Kokoschka?’
‘No.’ Tim scratched the back of his head. ‘Weird. Sophie was working on something very interesting.’
‘Which was?’
He told Dana about the authorisation program and what they’d hoped to find with it. The manager’s face was expressionless. When he had finished, she did what he too had done when he came in, and studied the monitor wall.
‘Forget it,’ said Tim. ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘No, she doesn’t seem to have got very far. Did she even install the program?’
‘I was here when she did.’
Dana walked in silence to the touchscreen, keyed in the call-codes of Ashwini Anand, Axel Kokoschka, Michio Funaki and Sophie Thiel and put all of them on a single channel. Only Ashwini and Michio replied.
‘Can anyone tell me where Sophie and Axel are?’
‘Not here,’ said Michio. Chuck’s booming bass voice could be heard in the background.
‘Not with me either,’ said Ashwini. ‘Isn’t Sophie in the control centre?’
‘No. Tell them to check in as soon as possible if you meet them. Point number two – we’re evacuating.’
‘What?’ cried Tim.
She told him to keep his voice down.
‘In five minutes I’m going to put out a message and ask our guests to make their way to the Mama Quilla Club at half past eight. You are to be there too. We’ll tell them exactly what’s going on, and then leave the hotel together.’
‘What’s happening to the Ganymede?’ Anand asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She glanced at the time. ‘We’re going to put out a radio flare for it Ganymede, which will reach it as soon as it’s within range of Gaia. They aren’t to land, but to fly on immediately to Peary Base. Not a word to the guests before eight thirty.’
‘Got it.’
‘Okay,’ said Funaki.
‘I’m not surprised about Axel Kokoschka,’ said Dana, and rang off. ‘You can never get hold of him; he’s always forgetting his phone. A great chef, a hopeless knuckle-head in every other respect. If he and Sophie haven’t appeared by eight thirty, put out a call for them.’
‘Are we really going to clear this place?’ asked Tim.
‘What would you do in my place?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You see? I do, though. Let’s not fool ourselves – our father’s been overdue for an hour and a half now, and even though we haven’t found a bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t ticking away somewhere even so.’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘Hmm. Do atom bombs tick?’
‘No idea.’
‘No matter. We’ll send Nina Hedegaard to the Aristarchus Plateau and take the Lunar Express to the base.’
‘End of a pleasure trip,’ said Tim, and suddenly he became aware that his bottom lip was beginning to tremble. Amber! He fought against it and stared at his shoes. Dana let a smile play around her lips.
‘We will find Ganymede,’ she said. ‘Hey, Tim, chin up.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I need you with a clear head right now. Go back to the bar, tell a joke, lighten the mood a bit.’
Tim gulped. ‘Chuck’s the guy in charge of jokes.’
‘Tell better ones.’
‘Mr Orley? Er – Tim?’
The fitness area was huge. Quite how huge, you discovered when you set about trying to find someone there, and Kokoschka looked conscientiously. After escaping Aileen’s suffocating curiosity, he had to face fatherly advice from Chuck. He should look for Julian’s son where men who valued high life expectation and firm abdominal muscles tended to go, and where Tim had been going every evening.
But the gyms were deserted, the tennis courts abandoned. In the steam bath, a mist of droplets mixed with tinkling Far Eastern music. Tim wasn’t in the Finnish sauna, he wasn’t pounding along a treadmill or punishing an exercise bike, in fact he seemed instead to have put all his energy into running away from Kokoschka. A moment of optimism when he heard sounds from the pool, but it made for disappointment when he discovered that only Nina Hedegaard was there, swimming lonely lengths in the crater. Tim wasn’t there, and he hadn’t been there, and what was going on, where was the Ganymede and were the satellites still sleeping?