The ocean becomes an even, finely rippling surface, early sunlight pours in gleaming lakes across the Pacific. The lift climbs the cable at incredible speed. They hurtle through high-altitude fields of vapour, and the sky becomes bluer, dark blue, deep blue. A display on the monitor informs her that they are travelling at three times, no, four times, eight times the speed of sound! The earth curves. Clouds scatter to the west, like fat snowflakes on water. The cabin accelerates further to twelve thousand kilometres an hour. Then, very slowly, the murderous pressure eases. The seat begins to heave Evelyn back up again, and she completes the transformation back from dinosaur to human being, a human being who cares about an extra four kilos.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board OSS Spacelift One. We have now reached our cruising speed and passed through the Earth’s lower orbit, the one in which International Space Station ISS circles. In 2023 operation of the ISS was officially halted, and since then it has served as a museum featuring exhibits from the early days of space travel. Our journey time will be about three hours, the space debris forecast is ideal, so everything suggests that we will arrive at OSS, Orley Space Station, in good time. At present we are starting to pass through a Van Allen radiation belt, a shell of highly charged particles around the Earth, caused by solar eruptions and cosmic radiation. On the Earth’s surface we are protected from these particles; above an altitude of one thousand kilometres, however, they are no longer deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, and flow directly into the atmosphere. Around here, or more precisely at an altitude of seven hundred kilometres, the inner belt begins. It essentially consists of high-energy protons, and reaches its highest densities at an altitude of between three thousand and six thousand kilometres. The outer belt extends from altitudes of fifteen to twenty-five thousand kilometres, and is dominated by electrons.’
Evelyn is startled to note that the pressure has completely disappeared. No, more than that! For a brief moment she thinks she’s falling, until she realises where she has had this strange feeling of being released from her own body before. She experienced it briefly during the zero-gravity flights. She is weightless. In the main monitor she sees the starry sky, diamond dust on black satin. The voice from the speaker assumes a conspiratorial tone.
‘As many of you may have heard, critics of manned space travel see the Van Allen belts as an impassable obstacle on the way to space because of the high concentration of radiation. Conspiracy theorists even see them as proof that man was never on the Moon. Supposedly it would only be possible to pass through them behind steel walls two metres thick. Be assured, none of this is true. The fact is that the intensity of the radiation fluctuates greatly according to variations in solar activity. But even under extreme conditions, the dosage, as long as you are surrounded by aluminium three millimetres thick, is half of what is considered safe under general radiation protection regulations for professional life. Generally it’s less than one per cent of that! In order to protect your health to the optimum degree, the passenger cabins of this lift are armoured accordingly, which is, incidentally, the chief reason for the lack of windows. As long as you don’t feel an urge to get out, we can guarantee your complete safety as you pass through the Van Allen belt. Now enjoy your trip. In the armrests of your seats you will find headphones and monitors. You have access to eight hundred television channels, video films, books, games—’
The whole caboodle, then. After a while Nina Hedegaard and Peter Black come floating over, handing out drinks in little plastic bottles that you have to suck on to get anything out of them, finger food and refreshment towels.
‘Nothing that could spill or crumble,’ Hedegaard says, with a Scandinavian sibi-lance on the S. Miranda Winter says something to her in Danish, Hedegaard replies, they both grin. Evelyn leans back and grins too, even though she didn’t understand a word. She just feels like grinning. She is flying into space, to Julian’s far-away city…
…in which she felt now as if she were alone with the Earth. It lay so far below her, so small, that it looked as if she would just have to reach out and the planet would slip softly into the palm of her hand. Gradually the darkness faded towards the west and the Pacific began to glow. China still slept, while staff in North America were already hurrying to their lunch-breaks, talking on their phones, and Europe was spinning towards the end of the working day. She was astonished to realise that three more earths would have fitted in the space between her and the blue and white sphere, although it would have been a bit of a tight squeeze. Almost 36,000 kilometres above her home, the OSS drifted in space. That in itself stretched her imagination to its limits, and yet to reach the Moon they would have to travel ten times as far.
After a while she pushed herself away from the window and floated over to one of the upside-down sofas. She clambered rather inelegantly into it. Strictly speaking, there was no point in even having furniture in a place like this. Underwater, buoyancy compensated for gravitation to allow you to float, but you were still subject to influences such as water density and current, while in zero gravity no forces at all affected the body. You didn’t weigh anything, you didn’t tend to move in any particular direction, you didn’t need a chair to keep you from falling on your behind, or the comfort of soft cushions, or a bed to stretch out on. Basically you needed only to float in the void with your legs and forearms bent, except that even the tiniest motor impulses, a twitch of a muscle, were enough to set the body drifting, so that you were in constant danger of cracking your head in your sleep. Millions of years of genetic predisposition also required you to lie on something, even if it was vertical or stuck to the ceiling. At the same time concepts such as ‘vertical’ were irrelevant in space, but people were used to systems of reference. Investigations had shown that space travellers found the idea of an earth at their feet more natural than one floating above their heads, which was why psychologists encouraged the so-called gravity-oriented style of construction, to create the illusion of a floor. You just strapped yourself firmly to the bed, in the chair you acted as if you were sitting down, and in the end it felt almost homey.
She stretched, did a somersault and decided to go – float, rather – to breakfast. In the concave wall that seemed to conceal the life-support system, there was a wardrobe from which she chose a pair of dark three-quarter-length trousers and a matching T-shirt and tight-fitting slippers. She paddled over to the bulkhead and said, ‘Evelyn Chambers. Open.’
The computer tested pressure, atmosphere and density, then the module opened to reveal a tube several metres across. Many miles of such tubes stretched all the way across the station, connecting the modules to one another and with the central structure, and creating lines of communication and escape routes. Everything was subject to the redundancy principle. There were always at least two possible ways of leaving a module, each computer system had matching mirror systems, there were several copies of the life-support systems. Months before the trip, Evelyn had tried to imagine the massive construction by studying it using models and documents, before establishing, as she had now, that her fantasy had been blinding her to the reality. In the isolation of the cell in which she was staying, she could hardly imagine the colossus that loomed above it, its size, its complex ramifications. The only thing that was certain was that next to it the good old ISS looked like a toy out of a blister pack.