‘Hello,’ he murmured.
The DS had been waiting here since he’d abandoned it. It had stood in this spot beneath the sea while he’d been in England, hearing and seeing nothing, just standing here behind the train. It had been standing here in the dark when he got to Smalltown. Standing here with these handlebars and this seat and this footrest. Click-click. With this gear change. Here. While he was far away.
And now the moped was standing at the other end of the train. It would continue to stand there for a long time. Until it rusted away and disintegrated, or until the roof of the tunnel collapsed. For many years. All alone in the dark.
Jonas wedged the suitcase between himself and the handlebars. He’d had more room on the moped, but there was enough to enable him to ride straight along a tunnel. He stepped on the kick-starter. The engine caught, the headlight came on.
‘Ah,’ he said softly.
*
Stars were twinkling overhead when he reached the other side, and he felt he ought to greet each one. The moon was shining, the air was mild. Silence reigned.
The truck was standing where he’d left it. He thumped the side with his fist. No sound of movement. Cautiously, he opened the tailboard and peered in. Darkness.
He crawled inside. He knew roughly where a torch was to be found. While feeling around for it he sang a marching song at the top of his voice, one his father had taught him. Whenever he couldn’t remember the words he plugged the gaps with barrack-room expletives.
He turned on the torch and searched every corner of the interior, even shining a light beneath the furniture. It wouldn’t have surprised him to come across an explosive charge or an acid bath, but he found nothing. Nothing that struck him as suspicious.
He wheeled the DS on board. He was about to secure it to the bars when the floor beneath his feet gave a lurch. At the same time, he heard a clatter.
He leapt out of the truck. On the ground the swaying sensation was even stronger. Feeling dizzy, he lay down.
An earthquake.
It stopped just as this occurred to him, but he went on lying there for several minutes with his arms and legs stretched out, waiting.
An earthquake. Only a minor one, but an earthquake in a world in which only one human being existed provided the latter with food for thought. Was this an ordinary natural phenomenon — part of a process that would continue for countless millions of years? Was it a displacement of tectonic plates, in other words, or was it a message?
After lying on the bare ground for ten minutes and getting his clothes wet again, he ventured back into the truck. He promptly closed the tailboard and turned on all the lights. Then he stripped off his wet things and took some trousers and a pair of shoes from a cupboard.
While changing he recalled what had been reported about another quake some years ago. That one had occurred on the sun, not the earth. Its magnitude had been estimated at 12 on the Richter scale. The most powerful quake ever recorded here on earth had reached a magnitude of 9.5. Because magnitude 12 defied the imagination, the scientists added that the sunquake had been comparable in extent to the cataclysm that would result if dynamite were laid across all five continents to a depth of one metre and detonated all at once.
A layer of dynamite one metre deep. All over the world. Detonated all at once. That was magnitude 12. It sounded colossal, but who could really imagine the devastation that would be wrought by the detonation of some 150 million cubic kilometres of dynamite?
Jonas had pictured that sunquake, yet no one had been there to witness it. The sun had quaked in solitude. At magnitude 12. Neither he nor anyone else had been there. Nobody had seen that quake, just as nobody had seen the robot land on Mars, but it had happened just the same. The sun had quaked, the robot had floated down to the surface of Mars. Those events had taken place — had exerted an influence on other things.
*
Dawn was breaking when Jonas collected the first camera at Metz. He was delighted to discover that it hadn’t rained and the mechanism was still working. He rewound the tape, which appeared to have recorded something. He would have liked to watch it right away, but there was no time.
Although his eyes were smarting more and more, he drove on. He didn’t bother with another tablet for the time being. He wasn’t tired. The problems with which his body was contending were mechanical. His eyes. His joints. It was as if the marrow had been sucked from his bones. He swallowed a Parkemed.
He stared at the grey ribbon ahead of him. This was him, Jonas. Here on the motorway to Vienna. Homeward-bound with Marie’s suitcase. And with unsolved mysteries.
He thought of his parents. Could they see him at this moment? Were they sad?
Jonas had always done this at the sight of someone in distress: thought of the parents of the person concerned and wondered how they would feel if they could see their offspring in that state.
Whenever he watched a cleaning woman at work, he wondered whether it saddened her mother that her daughter had to pursue such a menial occupation. Or when he saw the holes in the dirty socks of a wino sleeping it off on a park bench. He too had had a mother and father, and his parents must have dreamt of a different future for their son. The same applied to the workman breaking up asphalt in the street with a pneumatic drill, or to the timid young woman sitting anxiously in a doctor’s waiting room, awaiting his diagnosis. Their parents weren’t present, but they would be riven with pity if they could see how their offspring were faring. The concern they felt would be directed at a particular aspect of those offspring: at the child whom they’d reared, whose nappies they’d changed, whom they had taught to speak and walk, whom they had nursed through childhood ailments and accompanied to school. The child whose life they had shared from the very first day, and whom they had loved from first to last. That child was now in distress. It wasn’t leading the life its parents had wanted for it.
Jonas had thought of the parents whenever he saw a small boy in a sandpit being bullied by a bigger one. Or workmen with gaunt faces and grimy fingernails and coughs, with worn-out bodies and atrophied minds. Or failures. Or those in distress, in dread, in despair. Their faces spoke of their parents’ sorrow, not merely their own.
Could his own parents see him at this moment?
*
Jonas took the next tablet after collecting another camera at Saarbrücken. He could hear the roar of a waterfall that existed only in his head. He looked around. He was sitting on the end of the truck with his legs dangling. The bottle of mineral water beside him had toppled over and spilled some of its contents on the asphalt. He took a swig and screwed the cap on.
He drove on, picking up more cameras as he went. Sometimes he deliberately concentrated on the difficulties that lay ahead, sometimes he allowed his thoughts to wander. This occasionally caused him to sideslip into a world he found uncomfortable, and he had to extricate himself by force — by feeding his mind with images and subjects that had proved themselves in the past. Images of an icy waste. Images of the seashore.
He drove as fast as he could. It would be hard to spot the cameras on the motorway at night, he realised, but he had to stop three times. Once to relieve himself, once because he was hungry, and once because he couldn’t bear to sit in the cab any longer and felt he would go mad if he didn’t get out at once and stretch his legs.
He got to Regensburg and picked up the camera there. At the service area where he’d eaten on the outward trip he strolled around the shop, eyeing the shelves full of chocolate bars and drinks, but nothing took his fancy. All he wanted to do was walk and allow his mind to wander.