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 kno