‘I will,’ said Carl Hanna.
She gave him an appraising look. Tall, muscly, deliberate in his movements.
‘The real experts can jump back up again,’ she added meaningfully.
Hanna grinned and walked onto the nearest bridge.
‘If it turns out she was lying,’ he called to the others, ‘just throw her after me, okay?’
He sprang from the bridge with Donoghue’s cackles of laughter following after. He fell, and landed four metres below without the slightest jar.
‘Like jumping down from the kerbstone,’ he called up.
In the next moment O’Keefe sailed out from the edge, then Heidrun. They both landed as though they had never moved any other way.
‘My goodness,’ said Aileen, ‘My goodness!’ and then looked at each of them in turn, with a ‘My goodness!’ for everyone.
‘C’mon, guys,’ Chucky boomed. ‘Show us what you’re made of! Up you come!’
‘You’ll have to make room.’ Hanna shooed them away with a flap of his hands. They scurried backwards. He looked thoughtfully up at the ledge. When he raised his arms, he was just about two metres fifty tall, so there was still a metre and a half to make up.
‘How tall are you?’ O’Keefe asked, disconcerted.
‘Six foot three.’
‘Hmm.’ The Irishman rubbed his chin. ‘I’m five foot nine.’
‘Could be a near thing. Heidrun?’
‘One hundred and seventy-eight – five foot ten. Whatever. Whoever doesn’t make it has to stand us all a meal.’
‘Forget it.’ O’Keefe waved the idea away. ‘It’s all free here anyway.’
‘Then back on Earth. Hey, in Zürich! All right with that? A round of schnitzels in the Kronenhalle.’
‘Meaning all of us!’ called Julian.
‘Good, we’ll all jump together,’ Hanna declared. ‘Make room, so we don’t get in one another’s way. You guys up there, get back! Ready!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Heidrun grinned. ‘Ready.’
‘And up we go!’
Hanna sprang powerfully upwards. It looked astonishingly easy. As calmly as a superhero, he flew towards the ledge, grabbed hold, boosted himself up again and landed on his feet. Next to him Heidrun fluttered down, struggling for balance. O’Keefe’s hands threatened to slip off the edge of the bridge, then he clambered up, as elegantly as circumstances allowed.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Kronenhalle is cancelled.’
‘You’re all invited anyway,’ Ögi called out, in the tones of a man who embraces the whole world. ‘This is the first time ever that a Swiss has taken a standing jump of four metres. We’ll meet again in Zürich!’
‘Optimist,’ said Lynn, so quietly that only Dana heard.
The hotel director was stunned. She acted as though she hadn’t caught that wan little word with its insidious undertones.
What was the matter with Orley’s daughter?
‘Please bear in mind,’ she said out loud to the group, ‘that in reduced gravity your body will be losing muscle mass. There are two guest lifts here in Gaia, the E1 and E2, and a staff lift, but we nevertheless recommend that you work out a lot and take the shortcut via the bridges as often as you can. Now we’ll tell you a little more about the facilities and show you the rooms.’
Hanna had Sophie Thiel show him all the secrets of his suite. There was no essential difference between the life-support systems here and those aboard the space station.
‘The temperature is set to twenty degrees Celsius, but that’s adjustable,’ Sophie Thiel explained with a wide-screen smile, pointing out a button by the door; she brushed so close past Hanna as she did so that it was only just within the limits of professionalism. ‘Your suite has its own water management system, with wonderfully sterile water—’
‘Don’t use words like that to the customers,’ Hanna said, looking about and at the same time feeling her hungry gaze on his back. No two ways about it, this Thiel woman liked muscular men. ‘It sounds as if you’re setting out to poison somebody.’
‘Well then, let’s just call it fresh water. Ha ha.’
He turned to face her. Her eyes were half-moons, their colour barely discernible; on the other hand she looked as if she had a double ration of bright white teeth and inexhaustible reserves of laughter. She was not the least bit beautiful, but very pretty for all that. A grown-up version of Pippi Longstocking, or whatever that Swedish minx was called. He had found the film on a Sunday afternoon at a hotel in Germany, while he was waiting for hours on end for to meet somebody who had been floating dead in the Rhine all the while, and he had watched it all the way through, curiously moved. A childish, clunky old three-reeler, but the childhood it showed him was so amazingly different from his own that it was practically science fiction. He found himself unable to change channels. He’d never watched a kids’ movie before, or at least never one like this.
And he’d never watched another one.
Thiel showed him how the lighting was controlled, opened up a respectable mini-bar and told him the numbers to call if he needed anything. The look in her eyes said, if only things were different. I’ve worked in the best hotels in the world. Never with guests. You could hardly say that she put herself forward. She was friendly and professional, it’s just that she was also an open book.
But Hanna wasn’t here for fun and games.
‘If there’s anything else you’d like—’
‘No, not at the moment. I’ll manage.’
‘Oh, I almost forgot! You’ll find your moon slippers in the bottom of the wardrobe.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘We couldn’t think of a better name for them. They have lead plates in the soles, in case you want additional weight.’
‘Why would I want that?’
‘Some people prefer to move on the Moon the way they move on Earth.’
‘I see! Very far-sighted of you.’
The look in her eyes said, unless you take a bit of trouble.
‘Well then – till half past eight, in the Selene.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
He waited until she’d gone. The suite displayed the same discreet, elegant sense of style as the lobby. Hanna didn’t know a great deal about design, nothing in fact, but even he could tell that this was the work of experts. After all, he’d had to learn a little about style and appearances to take on this role. Also, he liked clean lines, simple rooms. Much as he loved India, he had always felt rather hemmed in by the local sense of decor, the way they crowded every surface with knick-knacks.
His gaze swept over to the window that took up the whole wall.
They couldn’t have found a better place for the hotel, he thought. The plateau below Gaia could be reached by lift, and from here he saw it stretching away towards the canyon, its tennis courts lost and lonely. You must have a fantastic view of the hotel from down there, it would look like a floodlit sculpture. Over on the left, where the cliffs dropped back and the canyon closed, a natural-seeming path curved away to the other side.
What was it that Julian Orley had said just now? Over on the other side of the Lunar Express tracks was the golf course.
A golf course on the Moon!
Suddenly Hanna felt a touch of regret that he wasn’t actually here as the person everybody thought he was. He crushed the feeling before it could get to work on him, opened his silver suitcase and delved into it for his computer, a touchscreen device of the usual sort, no bigger than a chocolate bar, and his washbag. He took an electric trimmer from the depths of the bag. With a practised twist, he clicked the trimmer apart and took out a tiny circuit board, which he plugged into the computer. Whistling tunelessly, he booted up and watched as the program uploaded and hooked into the LPCS.