In the Cards Part 3

"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."

Let me say right now that I thought the solution they came up with was nonsensical and I kept searching, all the time we talked, for ways of politely turning down the offer. Escaping to to the past was a ridiculous answer. But it was just the kind of notion that would appeal to an old-fas.h.i.+oned character like Mr. Atkins.

I didn't tell him so, of course. I thanked him for his consideration and shook hands and felt relieved when he finally left.

My mind was made up by then. I'd back out, quit if I had to, rather than take refuge in the past to evade the future.

It wasn't until I got out of the office that I realized there was no big decision to make; it was already made for me. Either I was going to die or I was going into the past--and I wasn't going to die if I could help it. But neither did I intend going into the past if I could really help _that_!

When Marge realized that I wasn't merely trying to take her mind off the fatal day, she pounced on me and hugged me as though I myself had invented the time machine just to save her life!

"It's wonderful, darling!" she cried. "You were right all along! Oh, how can you forgive me for making things so unbearable for you?"

"About this idea of going into the past--" I said.

"What's the difference when we go to," she cut in, "as long as we don't have to die?"

"But I figured on telling Mr. Atkins at the last minute that all I want is a transfer--"

"What's the sense of guessing?" she asked excitedly. "All we have to do is borrow a couple of Projectors and see!"

I began to feel myself being squeezed into a one-way trap. I put my foot down--but where it landed was in a Grundy Projector from the people next door--and where it figuratively emerged was eleven days later, when I couldn't shut my non-physical eyes to the way the whole situation would turn out.

Marge and I, with half a dozen others, were getting into a helicar. I followed them out to a house in the country. We handed in all the money we had saved and in return were given old-style clothes, ancient-looking money and a small amount of luggage. Then we all stepped into what looked like an oversized version of a Grundy Projector and vanished.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Fight? Argue? Scheme?

I didn't have a chance.

It was 1956 when we arrived in old New York. We were met by others who had pioneered the way before us and they looked after our group until we learned the ropes.

There was nothing easy about getting used to the era. I wished often that I could get back to my own time, Grundy Projector or no Grundy Projector. Still, Marge didn't complain; she was prepared to endure anything just because she thought her life had been saved. Occasionally, bothered by my blunders in adjusting to this past century, I'd start to reason with her, explain that her life hadn't been in danger at all. But then, luckily, I would realize that convincing her would leave an angry, dissatisfied wife on my hands and I always managed to stop in time.

I got a job working as a night janitor in a bank and studied accounting in the daytime until I was able to get a steady job. We've been here a few years now and I guess you could say we're pretty well a.s.similated.

We have a house and two small sons and I'm doing well at my job. We still see some of our friends from the 21st century and they've also managed to make the change successfully.

We get together now and then, and talk over old times, and laugh at some things and get nostalgic over other things. Now that there aren't any Grundy Projectors around, we've started feeling once more that our fates are in our own hands.

Rog Owens has an interesting viewpoint. He said one night, "It wasn't the future that was fixed; it was the Grundy Projectors that fixed the future! Whatever people saw would happen, they just let happen ... or even worked to make it happen. No matter what it was, including their own deaths. h.e.l.l, how's that any different than voodoo?"

That was pretty much how each of us had felt, only we hadn't figured it out so clearly. But Rog Owens has a special reason for thinking particularly hard about the problem. Mr. Atkins and his syndicate hadn't send us back for purely altruistic reasons; they learned that Rog's daughter Ann would marry a fellow (not one of us) named Jack Grundy and that they'd have a son named Bilbo, who would invent the Grundy Projector. Our a.s.signment was to keep that from happening.

Well, we couldn't prevent the marriage, but we could--and did--make sure their son would have a good, plain American name. It's William Grundy.

But today my younger boy told me their kindergarten teacher calls William "Billy Boy."