"You see? It worked as I knew it would work! I'm fifty million years ahead of the rest of humanity in evolutionary development!"
"Pollard!" My lips moved with difficulty. "Pollard, this is terrible — this change—"
His radiant eyes flashed. "Terrible? It's wonderful! Do you two realize what I now am, can you realize it? This body of mine is the kind of body all men will have in fifty million years, and the brain inside it is a brain fifty million years ahead of yours in development!"
he swept his hand about. "Why, all this laboratory and former work of mine seems infinitely petty, childish, to me! The problems that I worked on for years I could solve now in minutes. I could do more for mankind now than all the men now living could do together!"
"Then you're going to stop at this stage?" Dutton cried eagerly. "You're not going further with this?"
"Of course I am! If fifty million years' development makes this much change in man, what will a hundred million years, two hundred million make? I'm going to find that out."
I grasped his hand. "Pollard, listen to me! Your experiment has succeeded, has fulfilled your wildest dreams. Stop it now! Think what you can accomplish, man! I know your ambition has always been to be one of humanity's great benefactors — by stopping here you can be the greatest! You can be a living proof to mankind of what your process can make it, and with that proof before it all humanity will be eager to become the same as you!"
He freed himself from my grasp. "No, Arthur — I have gone part of the way into humanity's future and I'm going on."
He stepped back into the chamber, while Dutton and I stared helplessly. It seemed half a dream, the laboratory, the cubical chamber, the godlike figure inside that was and still was not Pollard.
"Turn on the rays, and let them play for fifteen minutes more," he was directing. "It will project me ahead another fifty million years."