"So," said Peter harshly, "I plan that this goldfish shall try to live in air." He plunged his hand into the aquarium and dropped a flipping fish onto the table. "I direct that this goldfish shall try to live. See, it strives hard to live in an unfriendly medium. It fails—of course, because the goldfish is incapable of following my dictate."
Peter's face took on an angry expression. "It has failed to obey me," he thundered. "Ergo it must be punished!"
He lifted a heavy letter opener and chopped down, cutting off the head of the still-gasping fish.
"And that," he said bitterly, "is predestiny!"
"All of which proves—?" asked Marie.
"Hedgerly exists," said Peter. "But suppose Hedgerly exists only as a probability. A probability that he himself has made high. You see, there is always the probability that any man will meet any woman. Suppose the outcome of this probability was strong enough for the outcome—Hedgerly—to invent time travel, and then come back here to insure the probability?"
"I think I see," said Joan with a twinge of doubt.
"Well, all we have to do is to be darned sure that his own particular probability does not occur. Then he won't occur, and all of this will not occur, and we—"
"Look," said Tony excitedly, "it may be grasping at straws, but it seems to me that anything that is as certain as your friend ... your, ah, grandson ... Hedgerly claims shouldn't require a lot of outside aid."
Marie brightened, and then looked glum. "There's one thing that we all forget," she said unhappily. "We're speaking of predestiny as though we were a bunch of people going through the lines of a play. That may or may not be so. Let's face it, predestiny means that we may or may not know what our next move may be. We do not know, and there seems to be no way of finding out. Therefore whether or not our acts are all written need not take any of the fun out of life."