iness of dying, and as well as being scared, I was also
sick of hearing about our short and questionable future. Marge was
furious with me for destroying her Projector and blamed me constantly
for making her suffer by preventing her from looking into the future.

"Now we won't know what's going to happen until it's too late!" she
shrieked at me.

"That's right!" I yelled back. "And that's just the way I want it!
What's the use of knowing and worrying in advance if there's no way of
doing anything about it?"

Then, one night, we had the identical fight that we had watched two
years earlier, on our first time trip. Marge, as usual, was crying
hysterically about not having long to live and I was shouting at her
about wishing herself into the grave. She seemed to have forgotten that
I was going to go, too, and had taken all the suffering on her own
shoulders.

When I was hollering and stamping about the room, I had a funny, eerie
feeling as I suddenly remembered that my younger unmarried self had
watched--or was watching--the same scene.

I just stopped doing anything for a moment and stared around the room.
Naturally I saw nothing, because there was nothing to see, and I
remembered how quickly my younger self had fled when I had looked up
like that. Ashamed, I tried to soothe Marge, but she was too far gone to
be comforted.

I was glad to get out of the house every day and spend a few hours at
the office. I must admit that I was scared to be with Marge because it
looked as though we were going to go together and I felt safer away from
her. I know it's nothing to be proud of, but it helped ease the tension,
for Marge as well as myself.

One day, Mr. Atkins stopped in at my office and sat down to talk. There
was nothing unusual about this; he often visited me for a chat, even
though he wasn't so friendly with the other employees.

We talked for a while about the usual things, department business and
some of the staff members.

Then Mr. Atkins turned the conversation away from business matters. "Do
you have one of those newfangled Time Projector things, Gerald?" he
asked. Mr. Atkins was getting on in years and called everything
introduced in the last thirty years "newfangled."

"No," I said. "I did have one, but I stopped using it soon after I got
it."

"Didn't you like it?"

I shrugged. "It wasn't that. I just preferred to find out for myself
what would happen to me." I didn't want to tell him the true story