by Alan Cogan
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 whatwe saw could possibly happen to us. What on Earth would we ever find tofight over?"
That was the one basic mistake that we, and everyone else, made when wediscussed the Bilbo Grundy Projector. When the Projector showed yousomething was going to happen, it happened.
That night, Marge and I made plans to get married even sooner and theceremony took place four weeks later.
* * * * *
Grundy's Projector had been a well-kept secret until it suddenly burstupon us with a carefully planned publicity campaign. There hadn't evenbeen a hint of experiments in the time-travel field until the discoveryhad suddenly been made public in the newspapers and on the TV screens ofthe whole world.
Grundy had discovered a way of projecting a person's view into thefuture and the equipment required turned out to be amazingly compact,simple and inexpensive. The average cost of a Projector was fifty-fivedollars--well within practically anyone's price range.
Grundy and his backers had lined up a large number of famous peoplebeforehand, all of whom had tried the Projector and were only toowilling to tell us how great it was. Terrific fun--the newest thrillsince 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 couldwatch yourself an hour or a day or up to two years ahead of time. If youwanted to see if it was going to rain that weekend, all you did wasclimb in and take a look. If you wanted to see where you would be goingfor your annual vacation, just press a button and you would see yourselfmaking the final plans. All for fifty-five dollars. What with all theadvertising coming at us via every possible medium, Grundy sold amillion in the first five days.
Because he knew exactly how many he was going to sell--just by makinguse of his own invention--Grundy was fully prepared for the onslaught ofcustomers.
Everyone talked of nothing but the new sensation. You couldn't goanywhere without hearing about it. It seemed as if the rest of the worldhad stopped.
Before long, there wasn't a thing about the next two years that wedidn't know. We all jumped ahead in great leaps and found out all kindsof things that were due to happen to us and to the world. If the thingswere good, we waited happily for them to happen. If things didn't looktoo good, we shrugged it off, like Marge and me, and said it couldn'thappen to us.
* * * * *
But that was the catch. Whatever we saw happening did take place exactlyas we saw it--it was inescapable. The first instance I saw of this wasin the accounting office where I operated an accounts analyzer. Weadvertised for a new operator to assist in my department and lined upinterviews with thirty-two applicants. When the day of the interviewsarrived, only one applicant turned up. He was found suitable and got thejob.
The president, Mr. Atkins, was pretty het up about the whole affair."Why would thirty-one men not present themselves for interviews as theyhad 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 involvedin the affair, although I couldn't see _how_ exactly. Mr. Atkins was anold man who didn't believe in new gadgets of any kind and he wasn'tconvinced. Finally, however, I managed to get him to call some of theapplicants and ask them why they had not appeared for their interviews.
He almost went apoplectic when he heard the reasons. Each of thethirty-one answered that he had flipped ahead to see what was going tohappen 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 ofthem even told him that they knew they were going to get jobs elsewhereon a certain date and that they were just taking a vacation until thatday came.
I had a hard time soothing Mr. Atkins that afternoon. He wouldn't stoptalking about it. Finally, just to satisfy himself, he re-interviewedthe sole successful applicant. As we should have expected, the new mananswered that he had looked ahead to see that he was going to get thejob and had dutifully made his appearance.
Mr. Atkins was flabbergasted and he spluttered and fumed for minutes onend. Then he looked crafty. "What am I going to do now?" he asked thenew 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 newspaperswere filled with them every day, though it still took us quite a whileto understand that there was nothing we could do to avoid theinevitable. It was all pretty staggering and naturally we protested likemadmen. Naturally it didn't do a bit of good. It was in the cards thatwe would protest without results.
Even when we did get quieted down, we were still in a daze because ofthe weird things that were happening. For instance, there was thisfellow on our street who suddenly became famous for writing abest-selling novel.
For ten years, he had been writing without selling a word and thensuddenly he broke into the big time with a best-seller. Everyone askedhim how he had done it and he calmly explained that he looked into thefuture and saw himself with a popular novel to his credit. He found outwhat the novel was about and then came back to his own time and wrote itand 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 andsaw that he wasn't going to be present at the term-end exams, so he justdidn't bother to attend. He stayed in bed that day. He didn't want to bea doctor, anyway--I think he only started it for my mother's sake. A lotof people argued with him and said if he had only gotten out of bed thatmorning 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 outof 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 theslightest difficulty getting a job. He simply looked ahead to see wherehe would be working and then applied.
Inevitably, some people found out when they were going to die. Even whenthey took steps to forestall the grim event, they often discovered thattheir plans actually helped them arrive at their demise right on thebutton. But most people died of old age anyway, what with all the latestdevelopments in safety engineering and medicine.
Nevertheless, it meant that fate was having its own way as usual, withthe difference that we knew everything beforehand and remained just ashelpless!
* * * * *
Once we all realized for sure that the predictions were one hundred percent accurate, all kinds of changes affected our lives.
For a start, a lot of people automatically found their jobs haddisappeared overnight--weather forecasters, news analysts, pollsters,stock-market speculators, and all the people connected with any form ofracing, betting, lotteries or raffles, to name only a few. Gambling,respectable or otherwise, requires someone to win and someone tolose--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 suchthings as earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanic eruptions and violentstorms. 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 deathsoccurring from these tragedies. The growing efficiency of the rescueservices worked wonders--which were part of the future, as you'd expect,not successful attempts to change it--although there were always a smallnumber of deaths, mainly the kind of people who never used to pay anyattention to the news, didn't look at road signs, and the like.
Some of them belonged to the crowd who opposed Bilbo Grundy's fabulousinventio
n. 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 personaldisaster, those who had lost their jobs through the invention, a numberof cranks who habitually were against everything, plus a few, likemyself, who just didn't feel easy about the Projector.
I couldn't see that time travel was evil or sinful the way some of themdescribed it and I never attended any of their protest meetings, but Idid sympathize with them to a certain extent. Everyone called them the'Diehards' and the stock remark was that they should look into thefuture to see if their movement was going to be a success before theygot too involved in it.
That drove them wild.
* * * * *
Marge spent a lot of time with her Projector. The device was verypopular