It was impressive, all right. He had started just over the roof of the laboratory and continued straight up in the air. Up, up, up, until the city of Los Angeles was a tiny dot on a great ball. On the horizon were the Rockies. Johnson grabbed my arm. He hurt.
“What’s that? What’s that? Stop it!” He was yelling. Mike turned off the machine.
You can guess what happened next. No one believed their eyes, nor Mike’s patient explanation. He had to twice turn on the machine again, once going far back into Kessler’s past. Then the reaction set in.
Marrs smoked one cigarette after another, Bernstein turned a gold pencil over and over in his nervous fingers, Johnson paced like a caged tiger, and burly Kessler stared at the machine, saying nothing at all. Johnson was muttering as he paced. Then he stopped and shook his fist under Mike’s nose.
“Man! Do you know what you’ve got there? Why waste time playing around here? Can’t you see you’ve got the world by the tail on a downhill pull? If I’d ever known this—”
Mike appealed to me. “Ed, talk to this wildman.”
I did. I can’t remember exactly what I said, and it isn’t important. But I did tell him how we’d started, how we’d plotted our course, and what we were going to do. I ended by telling him the idea behind the reel of film I’d run off a minute before.
He recoiled as though I were a snake. “You can’t get away with that! You’d be hung—if you weren’t lynched first!”
“Don’t you think we know that? Don’t you think we’re willing to take that chance?”
He tore his thinning hair. Marrs broke in. “Let me talk to him.” He came over and faced us squarely.