Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  * * * * *

  I could have whipped myself for treating her the way I had seen myself treating her in the future. It must have been a mistake. There had to be a mistake somewhere. I couldn't have made myself do anything to hurt her.

  Her voice was husky and scared when she spoke. "Do you think it'll happen the way we saw it, Gerry?" she asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "They say that whatever you see always turns out to be the thing that happens."

  "Do you think we'll fight like that when--if we're married?"

  It was on the end of my tongue to talk common sense and logic to her, but then I realized that neither of us wanted to hear anything like that. We were in love and we didn't want to hear anything that conflicted with our emotions.

  Marge sat up in the hammock and made room for me to sit down beside her.

  "I just don't see how it could happen to us," I said. "I don't see how we could fight like that. There must have been some mistake. Maybe we looked in on the wrong people."

  Neither of us added anything to that. We both knew we weren't going to change so much that we couldn't recognize ourselves two years later.

  "Maybe it was some sort of alternative world we saw," I suggested, eagerly clutching at any straw, "showing us what could happen if we didn't work hard at our marriage. It could have been a sort of warning of what could happen to some people. But not us, of course!"

  Marge's lonely little hand crept into mine for comfort and I began to warm up to the subject.

  "Don't you worry about it," I assured her. "What would we ever find to quarrel about?"

  The idea seemed so preposterous, we both began to laugh.

  "I couldn't fight with you, Gerry," Marge said, snuggling closer.

  "Me, neither," I said. "Don't worry about what we saw. The scientific boys will probably have a rational explanation worked out for the whole thing. I'll bet it's happened to lots of people."

  Somehow, while we were talking, we had managed to get very close together in the hammock. Marge and I could never talk far apart for long.

  "I couldn't wait for you to come over," Marge said in a small voice.

  "I couldn't wait to get here," I lied. "I just don't believe that what we saw could possibly happen to us. What on Earth would we ever find to fight over?"

  That was the one basic mistake that we, and everyone else, made when we discussed the Bilbo Grundy Projector. When the Projector showed you something was going to happen, it happened.

  That night, Marge and I made plans to get married even sooner and the ceremony took place four weeks later.

  * * * * *

  Grundy's Projector had been a well-kept secret until it suddenly burst upon us with a carefully planned publicity campaign. There hadn't even been a hint of experiments in the time-travel field until the discovery had suddenly been made public in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the whole world.

  Grundy had discovered a way of projecting a person's view into the future and the equipment required turned out to be amazingly compact, simple and inexpensive. The average cost of a Projector was fifty-five dollars--well within practically anyone's price range.

  Grundy and his backers had lined up a large number of famous people beforehand, all of whom had tried the Projector and were only too willing to tell us how great it was. Terrific fun--the newest thrill since the first radio, or the first airplane, or the first space rocket. And absolutely harmless, too!

  All you had to do was set a dial and get into the cage and you could watch yourself an hour or a day or up to two years ahead of time. If you wanted to see if it was going to rain that weekend, all you did was climb in and take a look. If you wanted to see where you would be going for your annual vacation, just press a button and you would see yourself making the final plans. All for fifty-five dollars. What with all the advertising coming at us via every possible medium, Grundy sold a million in the first five days.

  Because he knew exactly how many he was going to sell--just by making use of his own invention--Grundy was fully prepared for the onslaught of customers.

  Everyone talked of nothing but the new sensation. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing about it. It seemed as if the rest of the world had stopped.

  Before long, there wasn't a thing about the next two years that we didn't know. We all jumped ahead in great leaps and found out all kinds of things that were due to happen to us and to the world. If the things were good, we waited happily for them to happen. If things didn't look too good, we shrugged it off, like Marge and me, and said it couldn't happen to us.

  * * * * *

  But that was the catch. Whatever we saw happening did take place exactly as we saw it--it was inescapable. The first instance I saw of this was in the accounting office where I operated an accounts analyzer. We advertised for a new operator to assist in my department and lined up interviews with thirty-two applicants. When the day of the interviews arrived, only one applicant turned up. He was found suitable and got the job.

  The president, Mr. Atkins, was pretty het up about the whole affair. "Why would thirty-one men not present themselves for interviews as they had arranged?" he kept asking me. "It's a good job, isn't it, Gerald?"

  I tried to explain to him that the Time Projector was probably involved in the affair, although I couldn't see how exactly. Mr. Atkins was an old man who didn't believe in new gadgets of any kind and he wasn't convinced. Finally, however, I managed to get him to call some of the applicants and ask them why they had not appeared for their interviews.

  He almost went apoplectic when he heard the reasons. Each of the thirty-one answered that he had flipped ahead to see what was going to happen on that particular day and each one had seen that he wasn't going to visit Mr. Atkins in search of a job, so he didn't go. Some of them even told him that they knew they were going to get jobs elsewhere on a certain date and that they were just taking a vacation until that day came.

  I had a hard time soothing Mr. Atkins that afternoon. He wouldn't stop talking about it. Finally, just to satisfy himself, he re-interviewed the sole successful applicant. As we should have expected, the new man answered that he had looked ahead to see that he was going to get the job and had dutifully made his appearance.

  Mr. Atkins was flabbergasted and he spluttered and fumed for minutes on end. Then he looked crafty. "What am I going to do now?" he asked the new man.

  "You're going out to get drunk, sir," the new man answered.

  And that's exactly what Mr. Atkins did.

  * * * * *

  Crazy situations like that became commonplace in no time. The newspapers were filled with them every day, though it still took us quite a while to understand that there was nothing we could do to avoid the inevitable. It was all pretty staggering and naturally we protested like madmen. Naturally it didn't do a bit of good. It was in the cards that we would protest without results.

  Even when we did get quieted down, we were still in a daze because of the weird things that were happening. For instance, there was this fellow on our street who suddenly became famous for writing a best-selling novel.

  For ten years, he had been writing without selling a word and then suddenly he broke into the big time with a best-seller. Everyone asked him how he had done it and he calmly explained that he looked into the future and saw himself with a popular novel to his credit. He found out what the novel was about and then came back to his own time and wrote it and his success worked out exactly as he had seen it on his time trip. No one could say that he hadn't written the book himself.

  My kid brother Willy was in first year medicine when he looked ahead and saw that he wasn't going to be present at the term-end exams, so he just didn't bother to attend. He stayed in bed that day. He didn't want to be a doctor, anyway--I think he only started it for my mother's sake. A lot of people argued with him and said if he had only gotten out of bed that morning and gone to school, the prediction would have been proven false.

  The only answer to that
, of course, is that Willy just didn't get out of bed that morning, thus proving the prediction true.

  We argued for weeks over that one. It doesn't matter now--Willy is a 'copter mechanic and crazy about the work. After all, he didn't have the slightest difficulty getting a job. He simply looked ahead to see where he would be working and then applied.

  Inevitably, some people found out when they were going to die. Even when they took steps to forestall the grim event, they often discovered that their plans actually helped them arrive at their demise right on the button. But most people died of old age anyway, what with all the latest developments in safety engineering and medicine.

  Nevertheless, it meant that fate was having its own way as usual, with the difference that we knew everything beforehand and remained just as helpless!

  * * * * *

  Once we all realized for sure that the predictions were one hundred per cent accurate, all kinds of changes affected our lives.

  For a start, a lot of people automatically found their jobs had disappeared overnight--weather forecasters, news analysts, pollsters, stock-market speculators, and all the people connected with any form of racing, betting, lotteries or raffles, to name only a few. Gambling, respectable or otherwise, requires someone to win and someone to lose--and who'd be willing to lose on a result he already knew?

  A few new jobs were created by others who looked ahead and foresaw such things as earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanic eruptions and violent storms. They set up special teams for handling these disasters, evacuating people and removing valuable property beforehand.

  This explained why, as we looked ahead, we saw fewer and fewer deaths occurring from these tragedies. The growing efficiency of the rescue services worked wonders--which were part of the future, as you'd expect, not successful attempts to change it--although there were always a small number of deaths, mainly the kind of people who never used to pay any attention to the news, didn't look at road signs, and the like.

  Some of them belonged to the crowd who opposed Bilbo Grundy's fabulous invention. They were strictly a minority but, as is usually the case, they were a pretty noisy and outspoken bunch. They were a mixed lot, too, made up of people who had foreseen their deaths or personal disaster, those who had lost their jobs through the invention, a number of cranks who habitually were against everything, plus a few, like myself, who just didn't feel easy about the Projector.

  I couldn't see that time travel was evil or sinful the way some of them described it and I never attended any of their protest meetings, but I did sympathize with them to a certain extent. Everyone called them the 'Diehards' and the stock remark was that they should look into the future to see if their movement was going to be a success before they got too involved in it.

  That drove them wild.

  * * * * *

  Marge spent a lot of time with her Projector. The device was very popular with women, mainly, I guess, because it was the absolutely perfect fortune-telling device and it was much more fun than either video or visiphone conversations.

  I put my own Grundy Projector away in the basement shortly after I got married and I never used it any more. To my way of thinking, it made life pretty dull. I had just been married and I was also starting to get ahead at my job--Mr. Atkins had put me in charge of a whole department full of accounts analyzers. I went around with all sorts of wild plans and dreams of a rosy future for us. I hoped someday to form my own company and I was also interested in finding a better place to live. The dome housing development was only temporary as far as I was concerned and I wanted something bigger for when we could afford a family.

  I suppose we all have those dreams of success when we're young, and though most of us have fairly predictable futures, I still can't help thinking that it's those wild dreams and schemes that keep us slugging away and add a little zest to life. Anyway, I soon found that Marge was knocking all the zest out of my life because she knew the future for both of us and she kept telling me about it.

  It took me a few weeks to finally persuade her that I'd rather not know what was going to happen. But it was too late then, because she'd told me everything that was important.

  For instance, I knew I was going to be living in the dome house for another two years and probably more. I knew I was still going to be working for Mr. Atkins and I knew just how much money I was going to have in the bank at the end of two years. I even knew that my paunch would get bigger and my hair would start falling out.

  Life got to be just a matter of sitting around waiting for the expected to happen.

  * * * * *

  I tried hard to break Marge of the time projection habit, but it was useless. She was as addicted as everyone else and the Grundy Projector looked as though it was going to be here for good and no one was going to stop it.

  After all, who could prevent an expectant mother from jumping ahead a year or so to find out whether she is going to have a boy or girl? I know the doctors can tell with one hundred per cent accuracy in the second month, but the parents-to-be still want to find out if Junior will look like Mom or Dad.

  Or who could prevent a young boy and girl from finding out whom they were going to marry? New methods of courting appeared--if you could call it courting. A boy would merely look ahead and find out who the lucky girl was going to be and then call on her. She was usually sitting at the front door waiting for him, too. I kind of liked the old-fashioned way, when Marge and I met by chance one day and then spent months getting to know each other.

  Of course it was impossible to avoid knowing future news whether you wanted to hear it or not. The newspapers, in trying to beat each other to scoops, could only find good headline material among the Diehards; the rest of us all knew what would happen to us. Most of the papers carried two separate sections--one for future events and the other for present "news."

  We still had crime with us. The crooks who knew they were going to jail always went there at the appointed time, regardless of their elaborate precautions and so-called foolproof systems. Others who knew they were going to stay free for a couple of years at least led fabulously successful lives of crimes, made more daring by the fact that they knew they were temporarily safe from the law. The police, on the other hand, never bothered to chase these characters, knowing in advance that they weren't going to catch them anyway.

  This naturally set the Diehards to hollering. For a time, they talked of forming vigilante groups to do their own policing, but nobody worried about this. It was in the cards, you see, that they weren't going to do it.

  The final blow to the Diehards came during the Federal Elections of 2017, when the Neo-Republicans just got up and walked out of office and the United North-South Democrats walked in without a single election speech being made. I know a few votes were cast, but everyone knew what the results would be long before it happened.

  The part that annoyed the Diehards so much was that it was their handful of votes that decided the results.

  * * * * *

  Toward the end of the first two years, Marge and I began to have our first samples of that bitter quarrel we had both witnessed on our first time trip. I had almost forgotten about what I had seen, but soon I saw how I was going to be taking part in such quarrels quite frequently.

  Marge just wouldn't stop making those time trips and it seemed to me she spent hours every day in her Projector. There was something in the future that worried her and, naturally that worried me, too. I was almost tempted to get my own Projector out of the basement and find out for myself. Marge was beginning to look sick and pale all the time. She got much thinner and weaker and I knew she cried a lot when I wasn't around.

  I tried my best to find the cause of the trouble, but I got nowhere. Trying to cheer her up with little surprises was a waste of time. It's no fun trying to surprise anyone who knows better than yourself what the surprise is going to be.

  Finally, when out of desperation I had almost decided to take my first time trip in nearly two years, I came
home from the office to find Marge sobbing hysterically beside the Projector.

  "We're going to die, Gerry!" she said, when I managed to get her fairly coherent. "I've been looking ahead for months now and I just don't see us anywhere in the future!"

  So there it was. I didn't know what to do or say. I was scared and mad and sorry for Marge for keeping such a secret bottled up inside herself for so long.

  The first thing I said was, "There must be a mistake--" until I remembered that there were never any mistakes with Grundy Projectors.

  * * * * *

  Nevertheless, I still tried to find a way out of the situation. "Maybe you couldn't find us because we moved," I said quickly. "Maybe I got another job and left town or was transferred to the Boston office. Mr. Atkins has mentioned it a couple of times."

  "I looked," Marge said miserably. "I looked everywhere and I just couldn't see us anywhere."

  "But how do you know we're going to die?" I argued. "Did you see it happen?"

  She shook her head. "I didn't dare look that close. I got it pinned down to somewhere in the next month and I didn't dare look any closer, afraid I might have to see something horrible. All I know is we just won't be around sometime after the next four or five weeks."

  "Has anyone mentioned anything to you about our death?" I asked. It was considered improper to even hint at another person's death just in case that person hadn't found out. Still, you know how tactless some people can be.

  Marge just shook her head and went right on sobbing.

  "Listen," I said, "I'll bet you're getting all worked up for nothing. Anything--absolutely anything--could happen in the next few weeks. There's probably a perfectly simple explanation for the whole thing."

  I guess I wasn't very convincing because Marge just stared dumbly at me, tears spilling out of her eyes. "Gerry, would--would you go and look? If it's something harmless, you can come right back and tell me. If it's something awful, I won't ask about it."