"You're going out to get drunk, sir," the new man answered.
And that's exactly what Mr. Atkins did.
Crazy situations like that became commonplace in no time. The newspapers were filled with them every day, though it still took us quite a while to understand that there was nothing we could do to avoid the inevitable. It was all pretty staggering and naturally we protested like madmen. Naturally it didn't do a bit of good. It was in the cards that we would protest without results.
Even when we did get quieted down, we were still in a daze because of the weird things that were happening. For instance, there was this fellow on our street who suddenly became famous for writing a best-selling novel.
For ten years, he had been writing without selling a word and then suddenly he broke into the big time with a best-seller. Everyone asked him how he had done it and he calmly explained that he looked into the future and saw himself with a popular novel to his credit. He found out what the novel was about and then came back to his own time and wrote it and his success worked out exactly as he had seen it on his time trip. No one could say that he hadn't written the book himself.
My kid brother Willy was in first year medicine when he looked ahead and saw that he wasn't going to be present at the term-end exams, so he just didn't bother to attend. He stayed in bed that day. He didn't want to be a doctor, anyway—I think he only started it for my mother's sake. A lot of people argued with him and said if he had only gotten out of bed that morning and gone to school, the prediction would have been proven false.
The only answer to that, of course, is that Willy just didn't get out of bed that morning, thus proving the prediction true.
We argued for weeks over that one. It doesn't matter now—Willy is a 'copter mechanic and crazy about the work. After all, he didn't have the slightest difficulty getting a job. He simply looked ahead to see where he would be working and then applied.
Inevitably, some people found out when they were going to die. Even when they took steps to forestall the grim event, they often discovered that their plans actually helped them arrive at their demise right on the button. But most people died of old age anyway, what with all the latest developments in safety engineering and medicine.