Sunspot Purge

fellow jumped, and I needed that beer.

Jake, one of the copy boys, yelled at me just as I was going out the door.

'J.R. wants to see you, Mike.'

So I turned around and walked toward the door behind which J.R. sat rubbing his hands and figuring out some new stunts to shock the public into buying the Globe .

'Mike,' said J.R. when I stepped into his office, 'I want to congratulate you on the splendid job you did this morning. Mighty fine story, my boy, mighty fine.'

'Thanks, J.R.,' I said, knowing the old rascal didn't mean a word of it.

Then J.R. got down to business.

'Mike,' he said, 'I suppose you've been reading this stuff about Dr. Ackerman's time machine.'

'Yeah,' I told him, 'but if you think you're going to send me out to interview that old publicity grabber, you're all wrong. I saw a guy spatter himself all over Fifth Street this morning, and I been listening to Billy Larson telling about sunspots, and I can't stand much more. Not in one day, anyhow.'

Then J.R. dropped the bombshell on me.

'The Globe,' he announced, 'has bought a time machine.'

That took me clear off my feet.

The Globe, in my time, had done a lot of wacky things, but this was the worst.

'What for?' I asked weakly, and J.R. looked shocked; but he recovered in a minute and leaned across the desk.

'Just consider, Mike. Think of the opportunities a time machine offers a newspaper. The other papers can tell them what has happened and what is happening, but, by Godfrey, they'll have to read the Globe to know what is going to happen.'

'I have a slogan for you,' I said. 'Read the News Before It Happens.'

He didn't know if I was joking or was serious and waited for a minute before going on.

'A war breaks out,' he said. 'The other papers can tell what is happening at the moment. We can do better than that. We can tell them what will happen. Who will win and lose. What battles will be fought. How long the war will last-'

'But, J.R.,' I yelled at him, 'you can't do that! Don't you see what a hell of a mess you'll make of things. If one side knew it was going to lose-'

'It doesn't apply merely to wars,' said J.R. 'There's sports. Football games. Everybody is nuts right now to know if Minnesota is going to lick Wisconsin. We jump into our time machine, travel ahead to next Saturday. Day before the game we print the story, with pictures and everything.'

He rubbed his hands and purred.

'I'll have old Johnson down at the Standard eating out of my hand,' he gloated. 'I'll make him wish he never saw a newspaper. I'll take the wind out of his sails. I'll send my reporters out a day ahead-'

'You'll have every bookie on your neck,' I shouted. 'Don't you know there's millions of dollars bet every Saturday on football games? Don't you see what you'd do?

You'd put every jackpot, every betting window out of business. Tracks would close down. Nobody would spend a dime to see a game they could read about ahead of time. You'd put organized baseball and college football, boxing, everything else out of business. What would be the use of staging a prize fight if the public knew in advance who was going to win?'

But J.R. just chortled gleefully and rubbed his hands.

'We'll publish stock-market quotations for the coming month on the first of every month,' he planned. 'Those papers will sell for a hundred bucks apiece.'

Seeing him sitting there gave me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. For I knew that in his hands rested a terrible power, a power that he was blind to or too stubborn to respect.

The power to rob every human being on Earth of every bit of happiness. For if a man could look ahead and see some of the things that no doubt were going to happen, how could he be happy?

Power to hurl the whole world into chaos. Power to make and break any man, or thing, or institution that stood before him.

I tried another angle.

'But how do you know the machine will work?'

'I have ample proof,' said J.R. 'The other papers ridiculed Dr. Ackerman, while we presented his announcement at face value. That is why he is giving us an exclusive franchise to the purchase and use of his invention. It's costing us plenty of money – a barrel of money – but we're going to make two barrels of money out of it.'

I shrugged my shoulders.

'O.K.,' I said. 'Go ahead. I don't see why the hell you called me in.'

'Because,' beamed J.R., 'you're going to make the first trip in the time machine!'

'What!' I yelled.

J.R. nodded. 'You and a photographer. Herb Harding. I called you in first. You leave tomorrow morning. Five hundred years into the future for a starter. Get pictures. Come back and write your story. We'll spring it in the Sunday paper. Whole front-page layout. What does the city look like five hundred years from now? What changes have been made? Who's mayor? What are the women wearing in the fall of 2450?'

He grinned at me.

'And you might say, too, that the Standard no longer is published. Whether it's the truth or not, you know. Old Johnson will go hog wild when he reads that in your story.'

I could have refused, of course, but if I had, he would have sent somebody else and tied the can on me. Even in 1950, despite a return to prosperity that beggared the flushest peak of 1929, good jobs in the newspaper field were not so easy to pick up.

So I said I'd go, and half an hour later I found myself getting just a bit excited about being one of the first men to travel into time. For I wouldn't be the very first. Doc Ackerman had traveled ahead a few years in his own machine, often enough and far enough to prove the thing would work.

But the prospect of it gave me a headache when I tried to reason it out. The whole thing sounded wacky to me. Not so much the idea that one could really travel in time, for I had no doubt one could. J.R. wasn't anybody's fool. Before he sunk his money in that time machine he would have demanded ironclad, gilt-edged proof that it would operate successfully.

But the thing that bothered me was the complications that might arise. The more I thought of it, the sicker and more confused I got.

Why, with a time machine a reporter could travel ahead and report a man's death, get pictures of his funeral. Those pictures could be taken back in time and published years before his death. That man, when he read the paper, would know the exact hour that he would die, would see his own face framed within the casket.

A boy of ten might know that some day he would be elected president of the United States simply by reading the Globe . The present president, angling for a third term, could read his own political fate if the Globe chose to print it.

A man might read that the next day he would meet death in a traffic accident. And if that man knew he was going to die, he would take steps to guard against it. But could he guard against it? Could he change his own future? Or was the future fast in a rigid mold? If the future said something was going to happen, was it absolutely necessary that it must happen?

The more I thought about it, the crazier it sounded. But somehow I couldn't help but think of it. And the more I thought about it, the worse my head hurt.

So I went down to the Dutchman's.

Louie was back of the bar, and when he handed me my first glass of beer, I said to him: 'It's a hell of a world, Louie.'

And Louie said tome: 'It sure as hell is, Mike.'

I drank a lot of beer, but I didn't get drunk. I stayed cold sober. And that made me sore, because I figured that by rights I should take on a load. And all the time my head swam with questions and complicated puzzles.