Part 3 (1/2)

”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 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. 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 compet.i.tors 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, n.o.body 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 repet.i.tion.

As Mr. Atkins put it, ”It's no different than reading a story and then having to relive the whole thing, antic.i.p.ating each action and bit of dialogue. And that's precisely what this is. Only it's our lives, not fiction. We didn't like it, Gerald. We didn't like it at all! But we did something about the problem instead of merely complaining.”