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.
That night, Marge and I made plans to get married even sooner and the ceremony took place four weeks later.
Grundy's Projector had been a well-kept secret until it suddenly burst upon us with a carefully planned publicity campaign. There hadn't even been a hint of experiments in the time-travel field until the discovery had suddenly been made public in the newspapers and on the TV screens of the whole world.
Grundy had discovered a way of projecting a person's view into the future and the equipment required turned out to be amazingly compact, simple and inexpensive. The average cost of a Projector was fifty-five dollars—well within practically anyone's price range.
Grundy and his backers had lined up a large number of famous people beforehand, all of whom had tried the Projector and were only too willing to tell us how great it was. Terrific fun—the newest thrill since the first radio, or the first airplane, or the first space rocket. And absolutely harmless, too!
All you had to do was set a dial and get into the cage and you could watch yourself an hour or a day or up to two years ahead of time. If you wanted to see if it was going to rain that weekend, all you did was climb in and take a look. If you wanted to see where you would be going for your annual vacation, just press a button and you would see yourself making the final plans. All for fifty-five dollars. What with all the advertising coming at us via every possible medium, Grundy sold a million in the first five days.