Ray Cummings

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”