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?"