a
best-selling novel.

For ten years, he had been writing without selling a word and then
suddenly he broke into the big time with a best-seller. Everyone asked
him how he had done it and he calmly explained that he looked into the
future and saw himself with a popular novel to his credit. He found out
what the novel was about and then came back to his own time and wrote it
and 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 and
saw that he wasn't going to be present at the term-end exams, so he just
didn't bother to attend. He stayed in bed that day. He didn't want to be
a doctor, anyway--I think he only started it for my mother's sake. A lot
of people argued with him and said if he had only gotten out of bed that
morning 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 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. But most people died of old age anyway, what with all the latest
developments in safety engineering and medicine.

Nevertheless, it meant that fate was having its own way as usual, with
the difference that we knew everything beforehand and remained just as
helpless!

* * * * *

Once we all realized for sure that the predictions were one hundred per
cent accurate, all kinds of changes affected our lives.

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?

A few new jobs were created by others who looked ahead an