awfully sad to see and dangerous
besides.

"That was in the sixties," he says. "Or will be in the sixties. Only I
got it figured out so it won't be, Mike."

It's over my head; I just keep on waiting.

He explains that he made a pile of dough in the near future by betting
on horse races and cleaning out a few bookies and investing his
winnings in stocks he knew were going up (and in fact they wouldn't
have gone up if he hadn't looked into the future and known they would
so he could go back and buy them) and anyway, he figured the exact day
it would be safe to start and so he did.

"Only," he says, "we made a mistake by making you mayor and then
congressman. I have it figured out for you to be congressman right
from the start--in fifty-four. That gives you two extra years of
seniority on Congress and so when the chips are down you have a little
more pull."

"Fine," I says and start to take off my apron.

"The thing is," he explains, "there are a couple of lunkheads in
Congress that get super-patriotic and they're the ones who cause the
trouble with the bomb getting loose." He leans over the bar and looks
real serious at me. "And you," he goes on, "are the one who stops them
before they get started."

"Me? Me, Mike Murphy?"

"You," he says. "We just go on a different time track from the one we
tried before. And this one ought to work." He gives me his grin. "You
should see the history books about the year 2000. You're a real
national hero, Mike."

I throw my apron into a corner and roll down my sleeves. I'm ready.

And it goes just like Rabelais says. I pass up the mayor's job and go
straight to Congress. In my third term I get a chance to cool those
two excitable characters--cool them politically, that is, and I do.

The only thing wrong is that Rabelais never lets me go into the future
to read the history books that tell what a great guy I was and the
things I did. So I'm never sure I'm doing the right thing. Like I tell
him, how can I be sure what to do if he won't let me read about what I
did?

... THE END

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Probability, by Louis Trimble

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROBABILITY ***

***** This file should be named 32739.txt or 32739.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/7/3/32739/

Produced by Greg Weeks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Te