by Anthology
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 off
ice 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.”
“No,” I said. “That would be just the same as telling you what’s going to happen. Besides, I don’t want to know.”
We just sat around the house for the rest of that evening. After Marge had gone to bed, I went down to the basement and smashed both our Bilbo Grundy Time Projectors into little pieces. I’d seen the hopelessness and despair in people who had learned just how and when they would die. Smashing the things wouldn’t change the future—I realized that—but I didn’t want Marge obeying the impulse to find out. Or myself, for that matter.
Shortly after that, the quarreling started in earnest. Marge wouldn’t let up on the business of dying, and as well as being scared, I was also sick of hearing about our short and questionable future. Marge was furious with me for destroying her Projector and blamed me constantly for making her suffer by preventing her from looking into the future.
“Now we won’t know what’s going to happen until it’s too late!” she shrieked at me.
“That’s right!” I yelled back. “And that’s just the way I want it! What’s the use of knowing and worrying in advance if there’s no way of doing anything about it?”
Then, one night, we had the identical fight that we had watched two years earlier, on our first time trip. Marge, as usual, was crying hysterically about not having long to live and I was shouting at her about wishing herself into the grave. She seemed to have forgotten that I was going to go, too, and had taken all the suffering on her own shoulders.
When I was hollering and stamping about the room, I had a funny, eerie feeling as I suddenly remembered that my younger unmarried self had watched—or was watching—the same scene.
I just stopped doing anything for a moment and stared around the room. Naturally I saw nothing, because there was nothing to see, and I remembered how quickly my younger self had fled when I had looked up like that. Ashamed, I tried to soothe Marge, but she was too far gone to be comforted.
I was glad to get out of the house every day and spend a few hours at the office. I must admit that I was scared to be with Marge because it looked as though we were going to go together and I felt safer away from her. I know it’s nothing to be proud of, but it helped ease the tension, for Marge as well as myself.
One day, Mr. Atkins stopped in at my office and sat down to talk. There was nothing unusual about this; he often visited me for a chat, even though he wasn’t so friendly with the other employees.
We talked for a while about the usual things, department business and some of the staff members.
Then Mr. Atkins turned the conversation away from business matters. “Do you have one of those newfangled Time Projector things, Gerald?” he asked. Mr. Atkins was getting on in years and called everything introduced in the last thirty years “newfangled.”
“No,” I said. “I did have one, but I stopped using it soon after I got it.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t that. I just preferred to find out for myself what would happen to me.” I didn’t want to tell him the true story or my other troubles.
Mr. Atkins sat back in his chair and sighed. “Ah, yes. I don’t suppose you remember too much about the old days, not after the last two years we’ve been through. People had problems in those days and they used to have to solve them for themselves. People don’t have to make decisions any more, you know. Do you think you could still make a decision, Gerald?”
I got a little excited and found it difficult to stop fidgeting and stay quietly seated. I began to suspect that he was leading up to something important. It could have been the transfer to another branch or an out-of-town assignment which would explain our disappearance in the future.
“I still try to make plans and direct my own future whenever I can,” I stalled.
“It’s difficult, I know,” Mr. Atkins went on, “especially when all the news is about something that’s going to happen a day or a week or a year from now. It’s not so bad for an old man like me, but it must be tough on you young fellows. Too bad this Bilbo—uh—”
“Grundy,” I said. “Bilbo Grundy.” Mr. Atkins knew the name as well as I did, but it was one of his little tricks to pretend he was getting old and forgetful, although he really wasn’t. It used to be a good business tactic before the Grundy Projector came out. It wasn’t any more—not with people being able to see outcomes of dealings—but he couldn’t get rid of the habit.
“It’s too bad he had to invent that fool time gadget,” he went on. “I suppose your wife uses it all the time. They seem to be very popular with women.”
“Marge gave it up a short time ago,” I lied. “She got bored with it.”
Mr. Atkins nodded thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t it be nice to live in an age again when none of us knew what was going to happen? When life had lots of surprises—both good and bad? When you could get up in the morning and not be sure what was going to happen before night? Would you like that, Gerald?”
I didn’t know what to say. He was off on that wandering-mind routine and I didn’t know for sure whether he was really rambling or not.
“I think I’d like it, Mr. Atkins,” I said. “As long as everyone else was in the same boat.”
“Would you like it?” He was suddenly looking at me with the shrewd, out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye expression he had when he was handling some wealthy client’s intricate income tax problems.
“I mean it,” I told him. “I’m tired of living among people who know my business two years ahead of time.”
“I can get you to a world like that,” he said quietly.
I didn’t say anything in reply. Who could?
“I have some friends,” he went on, “who make a practice of helping people like yourself to better things.”
“What do you mean by ‘better things’?” I asked warily.
“I’m talking about time travel, Gerald. The real thing—not the Bilbo Grundy toy, but real physical time travel. These friends have gone a lot further than Grund
y did with his invention and they perform the service of transporting people to a better age.”
“You mean the future?”
“The past!” said Mr. Atkins. “The chances are the future will be even worse. I’m talking about the middle of the last century, around the nineteen-fifties or thereabouts.”
I began to laugh. “The nineteen-fifties! What would I do to earn a living in those days?”
He gave me a thin smile. “I guess that would be your first unsolved problem. After all, you said you wanted problems and the chance to make plans and try to make them come true.”
“But why pick me?” I wanted to know.
“I like you, Gerald,” he said. “I would like to see you have a decent chance. And don’t flatter yourself—you wouldn’t be the first one to go. You’d be in good company.”
I just sat staring vacantly at him.
“I guess you could say this is your first big decision in two years,” he added. “There’s no hurry. You can think it over for a while.”
I asked questions—lots of them—but I didn’t get too many answers. Mr. Atkins explained that naturally the affair was hush-hush. After the way the Grundy Projector had been thrust so irresponsibly upon us, no one wanted any further complications. But there were some answers I could piece together both from what I already knew and the hints he dropped.
I’d been in on conferences and listened to Mr. Atkins try to figure out ways of expanding, building up our business. Each time, he’d been stymied by the Grundy Projector. If he’d bull some idea through, his competitors would see exactly how it worked out. If he didn’t, they’d know that, too. And I had heard him rant when the accountants—using the Grundy Projectors, of course—would make up their inventory, sales, profit-and-loss and tax statements two years or more in advance.
That was actually what galled him. Mr. Atkins was used to making plans, calculating risks and gains, taking his chances. With the Grundy Projectors in existence, nobody could do that any more. I gathered from what he told me that there was a syndicate of men like himself backing the inventor of a genuine time machine. They didn’t condemn the Grundy invention on any moral or religious or even selfish grounds. They just resented very bitterly the same thing that annoyed me—the sense of repetition.