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
competitors 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 i