Alan Cogan

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first thing I did when I bought my Grundy Projector was take a trip to about two years ahead and see what was going to happen to me. Everyone was doing it around that time; students were taking short trips into the future to learn whether or not they would pass their exams, married couples were looking ahead to see how many kids they were going to have, businessmen were going into the future to size up their prospects.
I took the trip because I was getting married and I couldn't resist the temptation of finding out how things would work out with my fiancee Marge and myself. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The real thing—not the Bilbo Grundy toy, but real physical time travel. These friends have gone a lot further than Grundy 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”