Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
I climbed out of my Grundy Projector, glad to be back in the relative
calm of my body, although it still took me a long time to get settled
down. I felt like smashing the Projector there and then, and I guess I
should have done it.
The problem that had me all tied in knots was whether or not I should go
ahead and marry Marge after what I had seen. I know it looked as though
I was going to marry her anyway, but in my innocence I figured I could
beat that.
I soon realized I was going to get nowhere sitting all by myself in my
room, so I went over to Marge's place. She was waiting for me, swinging
quietly to and fro on the hammock on the dark patio. Normally I would
have sat right down beside her, but this time I just stood back
sheepishly and waited.
Neither of us said anything for a while and I just watched as the
hammock floated in the faint bluish light from some nearby lamps. Marge
seemed to shine almost angelically as the glow caught her dark eyes and
her softly tanned arms and legs.
* * * * *
I 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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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