"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.