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.