could have whipped myself for treating her the way I had seen myself
treating her in the future. It must have been a mistake. There had to be
a mistake somewhere. I couldn't have made myself do anything to hurt
her.

Her voice was husky and scared when she spoke. "Do you think it'll
happen the way we saw it, Gerry?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "They say that whatever you see always turns out
to be the thing that happens."

"Do you think we'll fight like that when--if we're married?"

It was on the end of my tongue to talk common sense and logic to her,
but then I realized that neither of us wanted to hear anything like
that. We were in love and we didn't want to hear anything that
conflicted with our emotions.

Marge sat up in the hammock and made room for me to sit down beside her.

"I just don't see how it could happen to us," I said. "I don't see how
we could fight like that. There must have been some mistake. Maybe we
looked in on the wrong people."

Neither of us added anything to that. We both knew we weren't going to
change so much that we couldn't recognize ourselves two years later.

"Maybe it was some sort of alternative world we saw," I suggested,
eagerly clutching at any straw, "showing us what _could_ happen if we
didn't work hard at our marriage. It could have been a sort of warning
of what could happen to some people. But not us, of course!"

Marge's lonely little hand crept into mine for comfort and I began to
warm up to the subject.

"Don't you worry about it," I assured her. "What would we ever find to
quarrel about?"

The idea seemed so preposterous, we both began to laugh.

"I couldn't fight with you, Gerry," Marge said, snuggling closer.

"Me, neither," I said. "Don't worry about what we saw. The scientific
boys will probably have a rational explanation worked out for the whole
thing. I'll bet it's happened to lots of people."

Somehow, while we were talking, we had managed to get very close
together in the hammock. Marge and I could never talk far apart for
long.

"I couldn't wait for you to come over," Marge said in a small voice.

"I couldn't wait to get here," I lied. "I just don't believe that what
we saw could possibly happen to us. What on Earth would we ever find to
fight over?"

That was the one basic mistake that we, and everyone else, made when we
discussed the Bilbo Grundy Projector. When the Projector showed you
something was going to happen, it happened.