"Would you like it?" He was suddenly looking at me with the shrewd, out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye expression he had when he was handling some wealthy client's intricate income tax problems.
"I mean it," I told him. "I'm tired of living among people who know 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?"