least in general outline, for the next five thousand years. Whitburn
thinks I'm crazy, mainly because I get confused at times and forget
that something I know about hasn't happened yet."

Weill snatched the cigarette from his mouth to keep from swallowing
it. As it was, he choked on a mouthful of smoke and coughed violently,
then sat back in the booth-seat, staring speechlessly.

"It started a little over three years ago," Chalmers continued. "Just
after New Year's, 1970. I was getting up a series of seminars for some
of my postgraduate students on extrapolation of present social and
political trends to the middle of the next century, and I began to
find that I was getting some very fixed and definite ideas of what the
world of 2050 to 2070 would be like. Completely unified world,
abolition of all national states under a single world sovereignty,
colonies on Mars and Venus, that sort of thing. Some of these ideas
didn't seem quite logical; a number of them were complete reversals of
present trends, and a lot seemed to depend on arbitrary and
unpredictable factors. Mind, this was before the first rocket landed
on the Moon, when the whole moon-rocket and lunar-base project was a
triple-top secret. But I knew, in the spring of 1970, that the first
unmanned rocket would be called the _Kilroy_, and that it would be
launched some time in 1971. You remember, when the news was released,
it was stated that the rocket hadn't been christened until the day
before it was launched, when somebody remembered that old
'Kilroy-was-here' thing from the Second World War. Well, I knew about
it over a year in advance."

Weill had been listening in silence. He had a naturally skeptical
face; his present expression mightn't really mean that he didn't