Hall of Mirrors

In 1954, Norman Hastings, a young mathematics professor, wakes naked and bewildered in a strange, windowless room that seems impossibly advanced. A note warns him not to leave for an hour, and as he struggles to understand his surroundings, he realizes he may be trapped inside a time experiment with consequences beyond anything he can imagine. When he opens the unsigned letter addressed to him, the truth becomes even stranger: the room is a time machine that has carried him fifty years into the future, to 2004. The letter's author explains that the machine does not simply transport people through time; it alters whatever is inside it relative to time itself. Norman is the first major test subject, and the writer—revealed to be his own seventy-five-year-old self—has used the machine to restore his body to youth while stripping away fifty years of memory. As Norman reads on, he confronts the erased life he once lived, including the loss of Barbara, and faces a haunting moral dilemma: should such a discovery be shared as a cure for aging, hidden from the world, or destroyed before it can reshape civilization through overpopulation and misuse? This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.