"Will you melt it down?" Justin snapped.
"Okay. Okay." Garth spread his hands.
"But you better get used to it, 'cause everybody else is gonna say the same kind of stuff."
Odds were he was right, Justin realized gloomily. He grabbed a cup of coffee at the office machine, then ducked into his cubicle and got to work. That slowed the stream of comments, but didn't stop them. People would go by the cubicle, see the side view, do a double take, and start exclaiming.
Inside half an hour, Justin's division head came by to view the prodigy. She rubbed her chin. "Well, I don't suppose it looks unbusinesslike," she said dubiously.
"Thanks, Ms. Chen," Justin said. "I just wanted to-"
"Start your mid-life crisis early." As it had a few evenings before, Sean Peters's voice drifted over the walls of the cubicle.
"And thank you, Sean." Justin put on his biggest grin. Ms. Chen smiled, which meant he'd passed the test. She gave his hair another look, nodded more happily than she'd spoken, and went off to do whatever managers did when they weren't worrying about haircuts.
Sean kept his mouth shut till lunchtime, when he stuck his head into Justin's cubicle and said, "Feel like going over to Omino's? I've got a yen for Japanese food." He laughed. Justin groaned. That made Peters laugh harder than ever.
Justin shook his head. Pointing toward his monitor, he said, "I'm brownbagging it today. Got a ton of stuff that needs doing."
"Okay." Peters shrugged. "Anybody'd think you worked here or something. I'll see you later, then."
Between noon and half past one, Superstrings was nearly deserted. Munching on a salami sandwich and an orange, Justin worked on his own project, his private project.
The office machine was better than his home computer for deciding whether possible meant practical.
"Yes!" he said again, a few minutes later, and then, "Time to go shopping."
Being the sort of fellow he was, he shopped with a list. Vintage clothes came from Aaardvark's Odd Ark, undoubtedly the funkiest secondhand store in town, if not in the world. As with his haircut, he did his best to match the way he'd looked just before the turn of the century.
Old money was easier; he had to pay only a small premium for old-fashioned smallhead bills at the several coin-and-stamp shops he visited. "Why do you want 'em, if you don't care about condition?" one dealer asked.
"Maybe I think the new bills are ugly," he answered. The dealer shrugged, tagging him for a nut but a harmless one. When he got to $150,000, he checked money off the list.
He got to the office very early the next morning. The security guard chuckled as he unlocked the door. "Old clothes and everything. Looks like you're moving in, pal."
"Seems like that sometimes, too, Bill."
Justin set down his suitcases for a moment. "But I'm going out of town this afternoon. I'd rather have this stuff indoors than sitting in the trunk of my car."
"Oh, yeah." Bill nodded. He had to be seventy, but his hair wasn't any lighter than iron gray. "I know that song." He knew lots of songs, many dating back to before Justin was born. He'd fought in Vietnam, and been a cop, and now he was doing this because his pension hadn't come close to keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Justin wondered if his own would, come the day.
But he had different worries now.
"Thanks," he said when the guard held the door for him.
He staggered up the stairs; thanks to the stash of cash (a new compact car here, nothing more, even with the premium he'd had to pay, but a young fortune before the turn of the century), some period clothes scrounged-like the Dilbert T-shirt and baggy jeans he had on-from secondhand stores, and the boots, those suitcases weren't light, and he'd never been in better shape than he could help. The backpack in which he carried his PowerBook and VR mask did nothing to make him more graceful, either.
Once he got up to the second floor, he paused and listened hard. "Yes!" he said when he heard nothing.
Except for Bill down below, he was the only person here.
He went into the men's room, piled one suitcase on the other, and sat down on them. Then he took the laptop out of its case. He plugged the VR mask into its jack, then turned on the computer. As soon as it came up, he put on the mask. The world went black, then neutral gray, then neutral… neutral: no color at all, just virtual reality waiting to be made real.
It all took too long. He wished he could do this back at his desk, with an industrial-strength machine. But he didn't dare take the chance. This building had been here nineteen years ago. This men's room had been here nineteen years ago. He'd done his homework as well as he could. But his homework hadn't been able to tell him where the goddamn cubicle partitions were back before the turn of the century.
And so… the john. He took a deep breath. "Run program superstrings-slash-virtual reality-slash-not so virtual," he said.
The PowerBook quivered, ever so slightly, on his lap. His heart thudded. Talk about your moments of truth.
Either he was as smart as he thought he was, or Garth or Sean or somebody would breeze in and ask, "Justin, what the hell are you doing?"
A string in space-time connected this place now to its earlier self, itself in 1999. As far as Justin knew, nobody but him had thought of accessing that string, of sliding along it, with VR technology. When the simulation was good enough, it became the reality-for a while, anyhow. That was what the math said. He thought he'd done a good enough job here.
And if he had… oh, if he had! He knew a hell of a lot more now, at forty, than he had when he was twenty-one. If he-now could be back with Megan for a while instead of his younger self, he could make things right. He could make things last. He knew it. He had to, if he ever wanted to be happy again.
I'll fix it, he thought. I'll fix everything. And when I slide back to here-and-now, I won't have this emptiness in my past.
Everything will be the way it could have been, the way it should have been.
An image began to emerge from the VR blankness. It was the same image he'd seen before slipping on the mask: blue tile walls with white grouting, acoustic ceiling, sinks with a mirror above them, urinals off to the left, toilet stalls behind him.
"Dammit," he muttered under his breath.
Sure as hell, the men's room hadn't changed at all.
"Program superstrings-slash-virtual reality-slash-not so virtual reality is done," the PowerBook told him.
He took off the mask. Here he sat, on his suitcases, in the men's room of his office building. 2018? 1999? He couldn't tell, not staying in here. If everything had worked out the way he'd calculated, it would be before business hours back when he'd arrived, too. All he had to do was walk out that front door and hope the security guard wasn't right there.
No. What he really had to hope was that the security guard wasn't Bill.
He put the computer in his backpack again. He picked up the suitcases and walked to the men's-room door.
He set down a case so he could open the door. His heart pounded harder than ever. Yes? Or no?
Justin took two steps down the hall toward the stairs before he whispered, "Yes!" Instead of the gray-green carpet he'd walked in on, this stuff was an ugly mustard yellow. He had no proof he was in 1999, not yet. But he wasn't in Kansas any more.
The place had the quiet-before-the-storm feeling offices get waiting for people to show up for work. That fit Justin's calculations. The air conditioner was noisier, wheezier, than the system that had been-would be-in his time. But it kept the corridor noticeably cooler than it had been when he lugged his stuff into the men's room. The 90s had ridden an oil glut. They burned lavishly to beat summer heat. His time couldn't.
There was the doorway that led to the stairs. Down he went. The walls were different: industrial yellow, not battleship gray. When he got to the little lobby, he didn't recognize the furniture. What was there seemed no better or worse than what he was used to, but it was different.
If there was a guard, he was off making his rounds. Justin didn't wait for him. He opened the door. He wondered if that would touch off the alarm, but it didn't. He stepped out into the cool, fresh early-morning air of… when?
He walked through the empty lot to the sidewalk, then looked around. Across the street, a woman out power-walking glanced his way, but didn't stop. She wore a cap, a T-shirt, and baggy shorts, which proved nothing. But then he looked at the parked cars, and began to grin a crazy grin. Most of them had smooth jelly-bean lines, which, to his eyes, was two style changes out of date. If this wasn't 1999, it was damn close.
With a clanking rumble of iron, a MetroLink train pulled into the little station behind his office. A couple of people got off; a handful got on. In his day, with gas ever scarcer, ever costlier, that commuter train would have far more passengers.