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Title: Miracle

Author: Ray Cummings

Release Date: October 13, 2022 [eBook #69150]

Language: English

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRACLE ***





                                MIRACLE

                            By Ray Cummings

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                  Astonishing Stories, October 1942.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


"But how can you possibly know that time traveling has never been
done?" the chemist protested. "Someone from our future may have gone
into the past many times."

"I should think they'd have created quite a commotion," the lawyer
observed. "Wouldn't we have heard of it from our historical records?"

"Of course." The chemist was smiling now. "We probably have. History
tells of many important occasions on which a 'vision' appeared. A
miraculous presence, such as Joan of Arc, for instance, or the Angel of
Mons."

"Or the appearance of the Sun God to the Aztecs. I get your point," one
of the other men interjected. "You think that there might have been a
time traveler who materialized just long enough to take a look--and the
superstitious natives took him for a god. Why not? That's probably just
what would happen."

Young Alan Dane sat in a corner of his grandfather's laboratory,
listening to the argument of the group of men. He was well over six
feet in height, a sun-bronzed, crisply blond young Viking. Beside him
sat Ruth Vincent, his fiancée, a slim girl of twenty. Alan's heart
was pounding. Somehow it seemed as though this bantering talk of time
traveling were something momentous to him, something requiring a great
and irrevocable decision.

Then abruptly old Professor Dane held up his hand and, quite casually,
said, "What you do not know, gentlemen, is that for half my life I have
been working to discover the secret of time travel."

His audience was suddenly tense. Professor Dane was loved and respected
by each of them, and his word in his chosen field of physics was final.
If he said a thing could be done there was no mistake.

The chemist broke the silence. "You've succeeded?" he asked. "You've
made experiments that show--"

The old man shook his head. "No, not yet. But I'm close to it. I know I
am." He was staring at some infinitely distant thing beyond the room in
which they were sitting. Staring as though he were trying to penetrate
the grim curtain of the future, or the past.

Almost as though to himself, he went on, "I've often wondered what
made me work on this thing all these years. It's been like an inner
urge driving me, a preordained destiny that is making me accomplish
something."

"Metaphysics!" the lawyer interrupted. "Do you believe in
predestination?"

"I believe there is a plan," Professor Dane said simply. "But what
it is, and what my part in it may be ... I don't know. That's the
queer part. I know instinctively that I must do something, something
connected with traveling through time. Some task I must accomplish. But
what it is, and how I am to do it ... I don't know. Yet I feel that
_if_ the moment came, I would know what to do." He was gently smiling
now at Alan and his fiancée. "But perhaps I am too old--I have thought
that is true," he continued. "So I sent for my grandson. And, as you
see, he brought his fiancée here with him."

The old professor was staring at the startled Ruth now. "And,
gentlemen," he added earnestly, "meeting her has somehow seemed to
intensify that feeling. There is something to be accomplished, in the
past or the future, and it concerns Ruth Vincent!"

Alan's hands were gripping the arms of his chair. These things which
his grandfather had been feeling--he was feeling them now. This urge,
this apprehension that something was left undone....

"I'm going to ask Alan now to carry on for me," his grandfather
finished abruptly. "He is young and strong, educated and able. I want
him to feel the things I've been feeling--"

"Oh, I do!" Alan exclaimed. "I'll do what I can, grandfather. I'd have
to do it, even if I didn't want to! Don't you see--I feel that same
urge!"

       *       *       *       *       *

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.

"Well," he said at last. "Do you speak English? I'm sorry I don't speak
Dutch--that's your language, isn't it? This is Dutch New Amsterdam?"
He checked himself and sighed. The Dutch boy and girl were gulping,
numbly staring at him. They didn't speak English, of course. It would
have been too much of a coincidence ... but so welcome, if they had.
"I'm sorry," Alan went on, not hopefully. "Look here, I don't want to
frighten you. I only want to know--"

He took a step forward. For a second the two looked utterly
incredulous, as though disbelieving the evidence of their eyes. And
then they shrank away with terror on their white faces. The youth
whirled the girl behind him, confronted Alan.

"What--what do you want?" he faltered. It was English, curiously and
quaintly intoned. "Are you real? Where do you come from?" The lad was
recovering rapidly. "You speak English, but not like the traders or my
teacher. What are you?"

Alan tried to smile. "I won't hurt you," he repeated. "I'm a friend.
A visitor, from--from a far-off place," he floundered. It would never
do to say that he came from 1942. Already they were staring at him as
though he were mad, huddled back against the wall of the cave.

Abruptly behind Alan there was a whiz; a thud; and the cave was lighted
by a flickering, yellow-red glare. It made the youth momentarily
overlook his astonishment, his terror at Alan, so that he gasped to the
girl:

"Oh, Greta--a fire-arrow! They are out there just as we feared."

Alan turned. An Indian fire-arrow had whizzed into the cave-mouth from
the forest outside. It quivered, sticking upright in the guano floor of
the cave--a little torch of flame with thick, resinous smoke surging
up from it. With a sidewise kick Alan's foot knocked it loose and he
trampled on it. He swung around with a leap so that he was close to his
cowering companions.

"Indians are out there?" he demanded. "Is that what you were afraid of,
before you saw me?"

The girl was coughing with the drifting smoke already choking her a
little in the fetid air of the cave.

"Yes," the lad muttered. "That is it. They saw us in the woods as we
came up from the Bouwerij. So we ran in here."

Another arrow came flaming. It barely missed Alan, struck against the
rockwall and fell nearby, still flaming. He and the lad rushed at it;
they stamped it out together.

"You have no guns?" Alan demanded.

"Guns?"

"To shoot with. To fight our way out of here."

"Oh, not guns on a ship--you mean fowling pieces? No, we have none."
Despite his terror at the flaming arrows of the Indians outside the
cave, the frightened Dutch boy was forcing himself to answer Alan's
questions, but still both he and the girl were incredulously staring at
their miraculously appearing companion.

"Greta was showing me the way up from the town," the Dutch boy was
murmuring. "She has a boat at the river bank. Then I was going up with
the tide. In the fog last night, an English frigate got past our forts
at the Bowling Green. It is up the river now, and Stuyvesant has sent
me--"

       *       *       *       *       *

Under Alan's urging questions, the boy and girl swiftly explained. This
was a Dutch boy, born here in Nieuw Amsterdam, but he had lived most
of his life in London. His name was Peter Van Saant. She was Greta
Dykeman; her father was one of Governor Stuyvesant's burghers of the
Town Council. The English fleet was here off the Hook, and yesterday,
Nichols, emissary of the Duke of York, had come ashore to demand that
the Dutch surrender the city. Henceforth, according to the demands of
the Duke, this would not be Nieuw Amsterdam, but New York--a British
settlement with a destiny of greatness, here in the New World.

As he mutely listened, Alan's mind again swept to his own time-world of
1942. This same space! And he envisioned the huge city of 1942, when
this cave and forested glade were mid-Manhattan, where giant buildings
towered and the great ramp of the automobile highway bordered the river.

Another flaming arrow came whizzing into the mouth of the cave. Peter
rushed for it, stamped it out. The woods beyond the cave-mouth now
were lighted with torch glare, and echoing with the warwhoops of the
Indians, emboldened because no fowling pieces of the trapped palefaces
were exploding to hurl lead at them. Outside the cave, arrows were
continuously striking; the brush was on fire, with a red-yellow glare
that came in here and painted Alan and his two confused, terrified
companions with its lurid sheen.

"I've got to get up the river to that frigate," the lad was muttering.
"If I got killed here--or even Greta got killed--what matter? But I've
got to reach the frigate."

He was a secret emissary of Stuyvesant, this momentous night--sent to
the English commander of the frigate--sent because he spoke English so
well and they would trust him.

"Stuyvesant will yield to the Duke of York in a day or two," Peter
was swiftly saying. "But he is afraid the frigate's men will land and
attack the city from the north. If they do that, Stuyvesant's prestige
before his own people will make him fight. Without it, he will try to
drive a bargain for his own self-respect, and then yield. I am to tell
the frigate's commander that if only he will but have patience and
wait--Stuyvesant will surrender."

Upon that mission, tonight, might depend the whole course of history in
the New World!

"There's no back way out of here?" Alan demanded.

"No. Just this one entrance. And if we should try to run, out there
into that glare--"

"We'd get arrows in us," Alan finished wryly. "Those Indians are pretty
close now."

       *       *       *       *       *

The shouts of the savages were audible, where they crouched in
the brush just beyond the line of fire. They were whooping with
anticipatory triumph and showering the cave-mouth with their flaming
missiles. Acrid yellow smoke was welling into the cave in clouds. Peter
had shoved Greta to the floor where the air, so far, was a little
purer. He too was coughing; and Alan felt the clutch of the resin-smoke
in his own throat. To stay here another five or ten minutes would be
death.

If only his time-traveling mechanism would take more than one person!
But it would not. He himself was safe, of course.... He had taken
a step toward the cave-mouth, and abruptly he recoiled as an arrow
whizzed narrowly past his shoulder.

Nothing safe about this!

And then he knew what he must try to do. "You two stay here, just a few
minutes," he said swiftly. "Keep down by the floor, both of you--air's
still much better down there. I'm going away, but I'll be back."

He gazed down at them from his stalwart, six foot height as they
crouched terrified at his feet. He was smiling a little as his fingers
shoved the lever of the time-mechanism on his chest to the first stop.

He could see the astonished horror and awe on their faces as slowly he
faded, vanished before them.

A little movement forward in time. Just about twenty-four hours. The
blurred and shadowy cave briefly was filled with daylight, and then
with the darkness of night again.

Alan switched off the current. Night was here, deep and silent,
enshrouding the forest. No warwhoops; no glare of flaming arrows and
burning brush. That had been last night. From the empty cave Alan
walked slowly out into the woods. A northward vista of the broad river
for a moment was visible. A little blob was out there in the river--an
English frigate awaiting the outcome of the parley of Nichols, emissary
of the Duke of York, with Governor Stuyvesant.

Alan selected a flat-topped rock which stood about a hundred feet off
to one side of the cave-mouth--a rock whose top was some twenty feet
above the surrounding rocks and thickets. He climbed it; stood on its
summit.

If only this would work! Despite his efforts at calmness, he was
shuddering inside. Not for his own safety--was it for his wife and
their little son, out there in 1942? Absurd thought; but somehow it was
turning him cold with apprehension.

He set his tiny time-dial for the moment of his departure from the
smoke-filled cave, last night, and turned the current on again.
Twenty-four hours backward into time. A retrogression of that same
swift daylight again. Then the previous dawn, swiftly fading into
night....

Again his time-movement stopped; and the forest sprang into ringing
warwhoops and crackling yellow-red glare of torchlight and burning
brush. On the top of the little butte Alan stood poised. An amazing
figure, he came out of nothingness, solidifying before the astounded
eyes of the stricken savages. The warwhoops died into a tense,
terrified silence. To Alan it was a breathless moment of apprehension.
His fingers went to the time-lever; alert to shove it if necessary. And
then in the wave of silence which flooded the pallid forest glade he
flung out his arms. Drawn to his full height, with arms outstretched
as though in benediction he stood gazing down upon the silent savages.
A pale cathedral shaft of moonlight was filtering through the overhead
branches and it struck upon him, illumined him with its eerie glow.

       *       *       *       *       *

The tense moment passed. The Indians, their war-painted bodies
glistening in the glare of the burning brush, were all silently
staring. There seemed a hundred or more of them. Then one of them, with
a faint awed cry, flung himself prostrate with forehead to the ground
in terrified homage to this shining god of the rock who had appeared so
suddenly.

And then they were all prostrate in groveling worship until one of
them, who might have been their leader, abruptly leaped to his feet and
dashed away through the thickets. The others in another second were up
after him. It was a frightened scramble, a terrified rush to escape the
wrath of this stalwart god who so silently was poised above them in the
forest.

For a moment the woods resounded with the cries and the tramp of the
escaping savages; distant cries until at last there was only silence....

Alan leaped from the rock and dashed for the burning brush outside the
cave-mouth. If only he had calculated his time correctly! Then at the
cave entrance Greta and Peter appeared. His arm held her as she sagged
against him, with the yellow-red glare painting them and the turgid
smoke swirling around them.

"Here--I'll carry her," Alan exclaimed.

He caught the girl up in his arms--slim, frail little thing, fighting
in terror with him for an instant, and then relaxing. Peter staggered
after them as Alan led the way down into the silent forest where the
night air was pure and all the fire and smoke were above them with the
silent shimmering river gleaming there ahead.

"You're better now?" he murmured to the girl.

"Yes. Oh yes--I'm all right. Oh, who--what are you?"

He did not answer. Holding her in his arms suddenly made him think
of Ruth, out there waiting for him in 1942. And a new apprehension
struck at him--would his time-current last to get him back home? He was
not using it now, but still, he knew, the volatile chemicals in the
batteries were subject to evaporation.

He set little Greta on her feet. "Your boat is near here?" he demanded.

"Oh, yes, right here at the bank."

"Well, you find it for Peter. Start him up for the frigate, and then
you get back home."

"Yes, I will. It is not far to the north stockade."

They were both staring at him, confused, numbed with awe. "I--we must
thank you," Peter muttered. "We saw the Indians as they fled."

"Oh, that's all right. Glad to do it. But I've got to get--away now.
I've got to get back where--where I came from--"

Then Greta took a step toward him.

"Oh, please, who--what are you? This thing you have done for us--"

Alan was gently smiling. "Hard to explain. You'd better just call it
a miracle," he said. His finger pressed the time-lever. He could see
Peter grip the girl as they shrank away with terror, staring at him
while slowly he faded into nothingness....

       *       *       *       *       *

May, 1942. In a dim, quiet room of the New York Historical Society Alan
sat poring over an old Dutch chronicle of Nieuw Amsterdam. And then
he found what he was after--an account of Stuyvesant's surrender to
the Duke of York. It was a modern English translation of an account by
someone who had lived in the little Dutch city.

Alan read it, awed. Here was mention of young Peter Van Saant, who had
gone up the river to the _Queen Catherine_--the English frigate which
had slipped past the forts in the fog that night. And it told of Greta
Dykeman who had shown him the way to where her rowboat was hidden. And
then--the miracle!

Greta Dykeman and Peter Van Saant--so the chronicle stated--had been
attacked by Indians that night. They had taken refuge in a cave, where
a great shining presence in the guise of a strange man had come and
frightened away the Indians. He had led Peter and Greta to safety--and
then had vanished.

Silently Alan left the Historical Society. Why had it seemingly been
his destiny to rescue that Dutch boy and girl? That strange urge which
both he and his grandfather before him had felt so strongly--why
was that? Van Saant--why, that suggested the name Vincent! The one,
Dutch--and the other just its English, modernized equivalent?

Alan hurried to the Genealogical Room at the Public Library; and there
he found it. Ruth's family--the Vincents--and before that, the Van
Saants.

Then he came to 1656. The marriage of Peter Van Saant, to Mistress
Greta Dykeman....

Alan sat numbly, staring in awe.

If they had died in that smoke-filled cave, this son of theirs,
recorded here as Hans Van Saant, born 1657, would never have been born,
nor any of his descendants. No Ruth Vincent, now in 1942; no little son
of hers and Alan's....

Alan was smiling to himself, a whimsical, awed smile. He certainly had
had no cause to be apprehensive that his mission back into time would
fail. It was ordained--predestined--a million events down from Peter
and Greta to Ruth were recorded, with his own action fitting into them.
Nothing else was possible!

Miracle ... there is so much that none of us will ever understand!

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MIRACLE ***

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