Jeff sat alone at a table for two in the UFO-shaped Polaris bar atop the Hyatt Regency, watching the denuded Atlanta skyline rotate past him every
forty-five minutes. The cab driver hadn't been ignorant, after all: The seventy-story cylinder of the Peachtree Plaza didn't exist. Gone, too, were the
towers of the Omni International, the grey stone bulk of the Georgia Pacific Building, and Equitable's great black box. The most commanding structure
in all of downtown Atlanta was this one, with its widely copied atrium lobby. A brief conversation with the waitress, though, had made it clear that
the hotel was new and as yet unique.
The hardest moment had come when Jeff had looked into the mirror behind the bar. He'd done so purposefully, knowing full well by then what he would
see, but still he was shocked to confront his own pale, lanky, eighteen-year-old reflection.
Objectively, the boy in the mirror looked somewhat more mature than that; he'd seldom had problems being served liquor at that age, as with the
waitress just now, but Jeff knew that was merely an illusion caused by his height and his deep-set eyes. To his own mind, the image in the mirror was
of an untried and unscarred youth.
And that youth was himself. Not in memory, but here, now: these unlined hands with which he held his drink, these sharply focused eyes with which he
saw. "You ready for another one yet, honey?"
The waitress smiled prettily at him, lips bright red beneath her heavily mascaraed eyes and antiquated beehive hairdo. She wore a "futuristic" costume,
an iridescent blue mini-dress of the sort that would be worn by young women everywhere in another two or three years.
Two or three years from now. The early sixties.
Jesus Christ.
He could no longer deny what had happened, couldn't hope to rationalize it away. He had been dying of a heart attack, but had survived; he had been in
his office, in 1988, and now was … here. Atlanta, 1963.
Jeff groped without success for an explanation, something that would make even the vaguest sort of sense. He'd read a fair amount of science fiction as
an adolescent, but his current situation bore no resemblance to any of the time-travel scenarios he'd ever encountered. There was no machine, no
scientist, mad or otherwise; and, unlike the characters in the stories he'd read so eagerly, his own body had regenerated to its youthful state. It was
as if his mind alone had made the leap across the years, obliterating his earlier consciousness to inhabit the brain of his own eighteen-year-old self.
Had he escaped death, then, or merely sidestepped it? In some alternate stream of future time was his lifeless body lying in a New York mortuary, being
sliced and dissected by a pathologist's scalpel?
Maybe he was in a coma: hopelessness twisted into an imaginary new life, at the behest of a ravaged, dying brain. And yet, and yet—
"Honey?" the waitress asked. "You want me to freshen that up or not?"
"I, uh, I think I'll have a cup of coffee instead, if that's all right." "Sure thing. Maybe an Irish coffee?"
"No, just plain. A little cream, no sugar."
The girl from the past brought his coffee, and Jeff stared out at the scattered lights of the half-built city as they came on beneath the fading sky.
The sun had disappeared beyond the red-clay hills that stretched toward Alabama, toward the years of sweeping and chaotic change, of tragedy and
dreams.
The steaming coffee burned his lips, and he cooled them with a sip of ice water. The world beyond those windows was no dream; it was as solid as it was
innocent, as real as it was blindly optimistic.
Spring 1963.
There were so many choices to be made.
