Another lump. This one I nearly choke on, because that was top-level classified. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him.
He smiles, satisfied to see he’s right. “Point is, I’d like to offer you this job, because I think you’d be good at it. It would be five times your current salary, plus benefits, stock options, housing, moving costs, everything. Top medical care.”
That last bit hangs in the air, deliberate, bold. Glaring.
“Why would I need top medical care?”
He doesn’t speak for a few moments. Then he says, “Your condition.”
“My condition.”
“I own a biotech company that’s doing promising research into being Unstuck,” he says. “We can’t cure it. Not yet. But we can slow the progress. We’re currently testing an improved version of Retronim. And there are some holistic treatments that I hear are very effective.”
“You know,” I tell him, dropping my feet to the floor and putting my elbows on the desk, leaning close, which causes him to lean in, matching my posture. “First you screw with my pet. Then you make a bananas job offer to someone you haven’t said more than a hundred words to. Then you tell me you know my personal and private medical history. And the worst part is, I know it’s not over, because there’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there? What do you want in return for your remarkable generosity?”
He shuffles in the seat. Brings his leg up to cross over his opposite knee. Folds his hands. Looks at everything around us except for me.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “There it is.”
“The room.”
“What room?”
He tilts his head a little, reading my response, like he’s trying to decide whether he believes me.
“I know about the ghosts,” he says.
“People think the hotel is haunted.” I shrug. “So what? People think every hotel is haunted. It’s how hotels work. They’re creepy. Sound carries.”
“What do you believe?”
“I’m a nihilist. I don’t believe in anything.”
Kolten nods and smiles. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Oh god.”
He sits back in his chair and says, “When this hotel was being planned out, they picked Fairbanks for two reasons. One was, she really did have a very good design sense.” He glances around him. “The blue aside. It should have been red. Like the old TWA Hotel. Anyway, she was also a woman. And the federal government knew that naming the timeport after Einstein instead of Dorothy Simms was a misstep.”
“Damn straight,” I say.
He nods. “Did you know Simms spent a lot of time here during the construction?”
“I hear she was around a lot while they were building Einstein, yeah.”
“Yes, but,” he says. “She also worked closely with Fairbanks. The two of them collaborated on the design of the hotel. Unofficially. And I guess the prevailing attitude is that the two of them were acquaintances. But I think it’s more than that. I think Simms was weighing in on the actual construction. I think she was helping. And not picking out décor. She was doing something inside the hotel. I don’t think those ghosts are a coincidence. I think they’re a sign of something.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. But based on some research I’ve done, I believe there’s an unmapped room in this hotel. And I feel like if anyone is going to know about it…” He waves his hands toward me.
I sigh, hard, just in case there’s any question about how I feel here. “I do know every inch of this place. And I would know if there was a secret room.”
He sits up in the seat and looks around, making sure we’re alone, then tugs at the mala beads on his wrist. “Had you applied for the job I would have given you serious consideration anyway. It’s not like…” He trails off.
“You can say ‘quid pro quo,’?” I tell him.
“It’s not that,” he says. “But if you can get me into that room, if you can get me access to internal documents on the hotel—maybe the original print schematics…”
“Like you haven’t gotten access to that stuff already. You knew my medical history.”
He gets up, looks at the books, paces the platform. “There’s a crucial piece of information here that’s missing. Something that’ll make the whole thing fall into place. I’m asking you to help me find it.”
“Why?”
He stops, turns to me. “Why?”
“That’s right, why? Why do you want this place? Why does anyone want this place, if it’s a money-losing operation?”
Kolten gives a pained little smile. “It’s not always about the money.”
“Yes it is,” I tell him. “And don’t you dare tell me it isn’t. I don’t give a shit how much you give to charity. I don’t give a fuck about your education programs, or all this gobbledy-gook about changing the world. It all comes down to money for you people. I spent years chasing down assholes like you who thought the rules didn’t apply to them. Why would you be doing it otherwise?”
Kolten sits back heavily in the chair. “Because the planet is dying.”
Well, yeah. We’d long since accepted that we couldn’t turn back the thermostat. We broke off the knob by not taking appropriate action decades ago, when it would have counted. And now populations are shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. Florida is under three feet of water and New Orleans is a modern-day Atlantis. At this point we’re the frog in the boiling pot of water. No one’s doing anything about it, just adapting the best they can.
Tomorrow, they say. We’ll get to it tomorrow.
“And?” I ask.
“The prevailing science says we’ve got, what, two generations left? And the Mars resettlement plan is not going well. This hasn’t been publicized, but the radiation shielding on the habitats isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. So where does that leave us? Stuck on a dying planet? No. So many of my predecessors…” He pauses. “Contemporaries? Whatever.” He waves the word away. “They were so concerned about getting off the planet. But what if we could fix the planet?”
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
“Say what?”
“The TEA has one and only one goddamn rule related to time travel…”
He gets up again, back to pacing. And as he does, his words tumble out, like he can barely keep up with them. “Yes, look, don’t touch. I get it. But what if that’s a mistake? What if we should be touching? What if there’s a way to get us to invest in clean energy initiatives when it actually matters, decades ago?”
He stops. Closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Warwick is going to kill me. I’m not supposed to be telling you this.” He looks at me with sad puppy-dog eyes. Please don’t tell on me.
I shrug at him. “And if you blow up the timestream in the process of saving the world, doesn’t that sort of defeat the point?”
“That’s just a theory,” Kolten says. “The timestream adapts to little changes here and there. Just by standing in a room in the past we’re altering things, because something is happening that hadn’t happened. But people have been traveling in time for years now without any major repercussions.”