Gemini Man: The Official Movie Novelization

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The train route from Liège, Belgium, to Budapest, Hungary, is a crooked line, passing through Germany and Austria, then skirting the southwestern border of Slovakia before it finally reaches its destination in north-central Hungary. Travel times can be as little as thirteen hours or an entire day, depending on how many stops there are and how many times you have to change trains. There is no way to get from Liège to Budapest without changing trains. Four or five transfers are most common, although on some itineraries there are seven or even ten changes.

All things considered, this made Valery Dormov’s itinerary a minor miracle. It required only two changes—the first in Frankfurt, the second in Vienna, and a total of eleven stops altogether, twelve if you counted Budapest—for an estimated travel time of not quite thirteen hours.

This extraordinary bit of scheduling had not been devised by Dormov himself but by some faceless rabotnik with a gift for seeing timetables in three dimensions rather than merely columns of numbers that most people would find almost impossible to coordinate. Dormov imagined that when the rabotnik came up from their basement office and presented this amazing bit of work to their superiors they’d had to withstand a chorus of bitching about the number of stops, rather than applause or even a pat on the back. But the stops couldn’t be helped—there weren’t any non-stop trains. On European railways there was no such thing as flyover cities.

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