Miracle

The gray moving shadows all around Alan Dane were blurred, formless. He was seated hunched on what had been the ground. It was the ground no longer, but now an undulant gray surface that was under him, supporting his weight, but imperceptible to his touch. He couldn't feel it; he couldn't feel anything but the racking strain of his headlong drive through the vast infinities of time.

He alone, of all things in this great gray monochrome of scene, seemed substantial. Everything else flowed invisibly away into emptiness. The thin skeleton of the metal headgear clamped on his forehead so that his temples throbbed; the wires to his wrists and ankles were luminous glowing strands. The electroidal current from the batteries lashed across his back was throbbing and pulsing into every fiber of his tingling body.

Alan shifted restlessly and glanced at the little time-dial on his wrist. The needle was creeping slowly back, showing a hurtling progression through time to the past. He closed his strained eyes, glad of the relief from the impossible attempt to focus his gaze on the weirdly distorted scene before him.

Where should he stop? And what would he find?

Alan's imagination went back to the scene when his grandfather had first told others of his fantastic creation that would permit voyaging through the years. What had the old man said then? Something about a purpose--

Alan was almost on fire with the consciousness of that set purpose now. Something within him, something that could not be denied, was guiding his hand on the control switch of the time traveler.

He was voyaging backward into time! So strange a thing--and so simple in fundamental conception. He recalled how his grandfather had explained it, back in the laboratory. Everything had been created at once. On the scroll of time everything is permanent. We live our infinitesimal lifetime progressing forward through ordained, predetermined events. All the past and all the future exist--but we can only be aware of that forward-moving instant which we call the present.

And old Professor Dane's fundamental conception--certainly it could now be considered finally proven, with his grandson actually applying it to really travel through time. He had thought that all material things, strewn in sequence on the scroll of time, were of different physical characteristics.

Different states of matter; a different vibration-rate, so that to change the vibratory frequency of any object would be to change its position on the time-scroll!

Alan had started from his grandfather's laboratory, near Riverside Drive in mid-town New York. The date had been May of 1942. His watch, set above the other time-recording instrument on his wrist, told him that his start had been made only a scant half hour before, by his personal consciousness of time. How long ago--how far away that seemed now! There had been a reeling of his senses, the soundless clapping of swiftly alternating light and darkness at the shadowy laboratory windows. Then as his rate of change accelerated, the days and nights had merged into this flat, dead emptiness of gray.

Then the house had abruptly dwindled, thinned out, and disappeared from around him! He had reached a time-era before its construction. Still with greater speed, the shadowy shifting outlines of the great city were in motion, shrinking into smaller and smaller buildings, narrower, shorter roads.

More shadowy open spaces appeared, then were replaced by towering giants of trees. 1850 he reached and passed--then 1800, and 1750. The city had been long gone by then--the little village of British New York was a shrunken settlement of a few thousand persons clustered down about the Battery, four miles from where Alan Dane was. He could see that he was poised now on what seemed a little wooded hill, sloping down to the broad Hudson River a few hundred feet away.

It was a strange transition indeed. And yet to Alan Dane, the strangeness of his own emotions seemed not the least of it. Three years of his life had passed since that night when he had promised his grandfather he would carry on the experiments--three years in which he had lost his grandfather, but gained a wife and son. Ruth Vincent had married him and together they had worked on the fragile thing that he bore now on his back--fragile, but more potent in a strange, incredible way than any other device.

Alone Alan would have failed. Even with Ruth helping him he could not have hoped to succeed so soon. But his grandfather had left researches only a hair's-breadth from completion ... and the young couple had finished them.

Even so, the thing had come almost by accident. Alan was far from sure that he could again compound the strange, unstable mixture of rare chemicals from which his nameless alloys were made--alloys which formed the plates in the time-batteries. But at least he had enough for this one brief trip.

Alan was curiously sure that this one trip was all he needed to make--that, after it was done, the curious driving compulsion that had seized him three years before would leave him, his task completed.

Alan glanced again at the time-dial. The transition was slowing now; he had hardly been aware that a moment ago he had decreased the current. 1699-98-97.... The retardation was progressive. It was almost as though the apparatus itself were dictating his stopping point.

And then the date 1650 flashed into his mind. That was when he had to stop. It was as though he'd always known it....

Was this a cave, here at his back? He was aware that he was sitting at its entrance, facing the shadowy declivity and the deep woods through which he could see the broad, gray river.

An instant later he shoved the lever to shut off the current. The shock of the halt made his senses swoop. Then, as he steadied, with the ground solid under him, he was aware that it was night. The hum of the throbbing electroidal current was gone. But there was still a pulsing note in the air--the throbbing voice of the deep forest through which the river was shimmering, pallid in the moonlight.

Alan staggered to his feet, steadied himself. A shaft of moonlight was on him; and abruptly in the dimness of the cave he heard a sound. A man's muttered, astonished exclamation blended with the startled high gasp of a girl.

As he turned, he saw them. The man was hardly more than a boy--twenty, perhaps, and garbed curiously in gray blouse and brown, baggy pantaloons, knitted brown stockings and thick, clumsy shoes. The girl was even younger, a slim little thing in a quaint bodiced dress with her braided flaxen hair tumbling forward over her shoulders in double strands.

Terrified, wide-eyed with utter astonishment, they mutely gaped at Alan.