'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?