Meanwhile, bonds were formed between Rebecca Hsu, Momoka Omura, Olympiada Rogacheva and Miranda Winter. Evelyn Chambers got on well with everyone, apart from Chuck Donoghue perhaps, who had told Mimi in confidence that he thought Evelyn was godless, a comment which she had immediately passed on to Olympiada and Amber Orley, who, in turn, had told Evelyn. Locatelli, who had now recovered from his space sickness, started showing off again with stories of sailing and motor yachts and how he had won the America’s Cup, of his love of running, solar-powered racing cars and the possibility of extracting enough energy even out of a tick that it could make its contribution to the protection of the environment.
‘Every single body, even the human one, is a machine,’ he said. ‘And machines create warmth. All of you here are nothing more than machines, mere heaters. I tell you, people, if we collected everyone around the world into one great big machine, we wouldn’t need helium-3.’
‘And what about the soul?’ asked Mimi indignantly.
‘Bah, the soul!’ Locatelli threw his arms apart, floated away a little and tapped his finger against his skull. ‘The soul is software, my dear lady. Just thinking flesh. But if there were a soul, I would be the first to build a machine out of it. Hahaha!’
‘Locatelli was telling us the most amazing things,’ said Heidrun to Walo later. ‘Do you know what you are?’
‘What am I, my love?’
‘An oven. Now come here and warm me up.’
Mimi and Karla made their peace with one another, Hanna played guitar – unifying the others at least on a musical level, and winning a fan in Locatelli, who was photographing him constantly – and O’Keefe read screenplays. Each one of them acted as though their noses weren’t filled with the steadily intensifying mélange of sweat, intimate odours, flatulence and hair sebum, against which even the high-tech air synthesiser on board was struggling in vain. Space travel might be fascinating, but one of its disadvantages was definitely not being able to open a window to let some fresh air in. Evelyn wondered how it was supposed to work on long-term missions, with all the smells and increasing tension. Hadn’t a Russian cosmonaut once said that all the prerequisites for committing murder were there if two men were shut into a narrow cabin and left alone together for two months? But perhaps they would take different people on a mission like that. No individualists, certainly not a load of crazy super-rich people and celebrities. Peter Black, their pilot, certainly seemed well-balanced, one might even say quite boring. A team player without any flamboyant or alarmist characteristics.
‘Start braking manoeuvre.’
From a distance of 220 kilometres away they could still see half of the Moon, revealing magnificent detail. It looked so round, on account of its modest proportions, that there seemed good reason to fear they wouldn’t be able to get a grip when landing and would just slide down the side. Nina Hedegaard floated over to help them put on their pressure suits, which also contained bladder bags.
‘For later, when we land,’ she explained with a puzzling smile.
‘And who says we’ll need to go?’ called out Momoka Omura.
‘Physics.’ Nina’s dimples deepened. ‘Your bladder could take the onset of gravity as a reason to empty itself without any advance warning. Do you want to soak your pressure suit?’
Momoka looked down at herself as if she already had.
‘This whole venture seems to be somewhat lacking in the elegance stakes,’ she said, pulling on what she had to wear.
Nina shooed the Moon walkers through the connecting airlock into the landing craft, yet another barrel, this time conically shaped at the top and equipped with four powerful telescopic legs. In comparison with the living module it offered all the movement radius of a sardine-tin. Most of them let the procedure of being strapped in wash over them with the embalmed facial expression of old hands; after all, it was only two and a half days ago that they had sat alongside one another in just the same way, waiting for the shuttle to catapult them from the docking port of the OSS into outer space with an impressive blast of fire. But contrary to all their expectations, the ship had moved away slowly as if it were trying to disappear unnoticed. It was only once they were at a suitable distance from the space city that Peter had ignited the thruster, accelerating to maximum speed then turning off the engines, after which they had raced silently through space towards their pockmarked destination.
The time for relaxing was over, and everyone was happy about it. It was good to finally arrive.
Once again, they were pressed forcefully back into their seats until, at 70 kilometres above the Moon’s surface, Peter braked the spaceship down to a speed of 5600 kilometres per hour, rotated 180 degrees and stabilised in orbit. Below them, craters, rock formations and powdery grey plateaux drifted past. Just as in the space elevator, cameras were transmitting all the images from outside onto holographic monitors. They did a two-hour lap of honour around the satellite, during which Nina Hedegaard explained the sights and particularities of this foreign world to them.
‘As you already know from your preparatory training, a Moon day lasts quite a bit longer than an Earth one,’ she hissed in her Scandinavian-tinged English. ‘Fourteen Earth days, eighteen hours, twenty-two minutes and two seconds to be precise, and the Moon night is just as long. We call the boundary between light and shadow the terminator. It moves at an incredibly slow pace, which means you don’t need to be afraid of suddenly being plunged into darkness during a walk. But when it gets dark, it really does! The terminator is clear-cut: there’s light or shadow, but no dusk. Some of the sights lose their appeal in the dull midday light, so that’s why we’ll visit the most interesting places in the Moon’s morning or evening, when the shadows are long.’
Beneath them they noticed another impressive crater, followed by a bizarrely fissured landscape.
‘The Lunar Appenines,’ explained Nina. ‘The whole area is filled with rimae, groove-like structures. Early astronomers thought they were transport networks made by the Selenites. It’s a wonderful landscape! The broad valley winding upwards over there is Rima Hadley; it leads through the Swamp of Laziness, a funny name, because there’s neither a swamp there, nor is it lazy. But it’s like that all over the Moon, seas which aren’t actually seas and so on. Do you see the two mountains to the side of the rima? That’s Mons Hadley, and beneath it Mons Hadley Delta. Both of them are well known from photographs, you often see them with a Moon Rover in the foreground. The Apollo 15 landed not far from there. The lunar module’s landing gear is still there, along with some other things the astronauts left behind.’
‘What other things?’ asked Nair, his eyes gleaming.
‘Shit,’ muttered Locatelli.
‘Why do you always have to be so negative?’
‘I’m not. They left their shit behind. Everyone knows that, it would have been crazy not to, right? Believe me, wherever there’s landing gear like that there’ll be astronaut shit lying around somewhere.’
Nair nodded. Even that seemed to fascinate him. The spaceship flew swiftly over more rilles, mountains and craters and finally over the shore of the Sea of Tranquillity. Nina pointed out a small crater, named after Moltke and known for its sprawling cave system, created by flowing lava aeons ago.
‘Similar systems have been discovered in the walls and plateaux of the Peary Crater in the northern polar region, where the American moon base was built. We’ll visit Moltke at the start of the Moon evening, when the terminator is in the middle of the crater. It’s a unique sight! And then there’s the museum of course, admittedly a little barren scenically, but an essential visit nonetheless because—’