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