The rest of it is little more than pro forma plotting for the sake of a beginning and end. What he sees is the great strength of this story, an inspired vision of gray dust. And Fletcher sees things he shouldn't have seen. Somebody on the "adjustment team" botched their assignment. In the way that things happen in stories by Philip Dick, a random person named Ed Fletcher is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obviously these folks have extraordinary powers, as supernatural or divine or at least superior beings. In Dick's story there are figures behind the scenes, pulling the strings to keep things on track according to some master plan-basically, making sure the butterfly is where it's supposed to be and that it's flapping its wings. The famous example is the butterfly in Brazil that causes a hurricane in Texas through a chain of random cause-and-effect events. Dick works from a premise that is essentially chaos theory, though it didn't have the name yet in 1954.
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