on the door. But there was one there now. Also, a note-
Theo-
You must be sick to death of this rabbit hutch by now, so I’ve moved you to Room 9998 on the ground floor. It’s much nicer.
Cheers,
Bill.
It was well after 1 a.m. by the time he eventually found Room 9998. He eventually tracked it down at the far end of a long corridor leading from the laundry, a huge vaulted chamber crammed with vast, silent machines. The door was open and the light was on.
His first reaction was that he’d come home. It took him a moment to figure out why. Then he realised. He’d been in a very similar room before; in fact, he’d spent a great deal of time there. He hadn’t made the connection immediately because he’d never really noticed the room, only the stuff that was in it. Room 9998 was an almost exact replica of the static inversion chamber at the VVLHC complex; the place where the chain reaction had started, when he made his big mistake.
There were differences, of course. The static inversion chamber had been lined with a hundred and ninety centimetres’ thickness of lead panelling and had housed the impulse matrix and the muon wave generator, along with twelve billion dollars’ worth of computers and telemetry equipment. Room 9998, by contrast, was empty apart from a bed, a bedside table, an Ikea wardrobe, a single straight-backed wooden chair and a Corby trouser press. But the cathedral-high vaulted ceiling with the clear-glass observation cupola set in the exact centre were pretty much the same. The walls were bare plaster, but at regular intervals there were rows of plugged holes, where retaining bolts could once have held lead panels to the walls. There were also something like a thousand electric points set into the skirting; rather an extravagance for a room whose only electrical appliance was one table lamp, with a hundred-metre extension cable.
It made no sense, of course. But, in a cock-eyed sort of a way, it might explain why the corridor he’d just walked down was absolutely dead straight and lined with the same brand of ceramic tile that they’d used for the space shuttle project. And, of course, the projection range at the VVLHC.
Pieter’s friend, he thought, in a sudden flash of intuition. And a very good friend he must have been, to have given Pieter space in his hotel to build a private, entirely unofficial replica of the VVLHC; several orders of magnitude greater than the more usual can-I-dump-my-scuba-gear-in-your-garage sort of favour that passes for an act of friendship between ordinary mortals. Fine. Even so. Passing over the question of why anyone would feel the need to build a pirate hadron collider out back of a hotel; why, having built such a thing, would you then dismantle it, strip out all the gear and convert it into a bedroom?
A very good question, but not one he felt up to answering after a very long day. He kicked off his shoes, flopped on to the bed and reached for the light switch. He pressed it. The light came on.
Theo sighed, got off the bed and set off on the long, long walk to the doorway to turn off the overhead light. When he got there, however, there was no switch. He paused, frowned and looked up. It took him quite a while to scan the vast ceiling, and he got a crick in his neck from tilting his head back, but his search left him with some valuable but disturbing data. There was no overhead light.
Nor were there lights on the walls, or angled spots set into the floor. The only light bulb in the whole place was the one in the bedside lamp. The light, almost painfully bright, was coming from the walls. In other words, the room glowed in the dark.
Some time after 4 a.m., Theo finally got to sleep, in a semi-derelict bathroom on the third floor. He’d taken twelve consecutive baths, and only stopped there because he ran out of soap. At 5.16 he was woken by Call-me-Bill, standing over him with a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry.
“There you are,” he said. “We were worried. You weren’t in your room.”
Theo scowled at him. “That room,” he said, “is radioactive.”
“A bit,” Call-me-Bill said. “Nothing to worry about, though. Don’t you like it?”
“I just said, it’s radio—”
“Apart from that.”
Theo took a deep breath, then let it go. “I quit,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m resigning. I don’t want this