Nevertheless, it meant that fate was having its own way as usual, with the difference that we knew everything beforehand and remained just as helpless!
Once we all realized for sure that the predictions were one hundred per cent accurate, all kinds of changes affected our lives.
For a start, a lot of people automatically found their jobs had disappeared overnight—weather forecasters, news analysts, pollsters, stock-market speculators, and all the people connected with any form of racing, betting, lotteries or raffles, to name only a few. Gambling, respectable or otherwise, requires someone to win and someone to lose—and who'd be willing to lose on a result he already knew?
A few new jobs were created by others who looked ahead and foresaw such things as earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanic eruptions and violent storms. They set up special teams for handling these disasters, evacuating people and removing valuable property beforehand.
This explained why, as we looked ahead, we saw fewer and fewer deaths occurring from these tragedies. The growing efficiency of the rescue services worked wonders—which were part of the future, as you'd expect, not successful attempts to change it—although there were always a small number of deaths, mainly the kind of people who never used to pay any attention to the news, didn't look at road signs, and the like.
Some of them belonged to the crowd who opposed Bilbo Grundy's fabulous invention. They were strictly a minority but, as is usually the case, they were a pretty noisy and outspoken bunch. They were a mixed lot, too, made up of people who had foreseen their deaths or personal disaster, those who had lost their jobs through the invention, a number of cranks who habitually were against everything, plus a few, like myself, who just didn't feel easy about the Projector.
I couldn't see that time travel was evil or sinful the way some of them described it and I never attended any of their protest meetings, but I did sympathize with them to a certain extent. Everyone called them the 'Diehards' and the stock remark was that they should look into the future to see if their movement was going to be a success before they got too involved in it.
That drove them wild.