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....