As I started for the projection booth I heard Mike say,
“You’re no more tired of it than I am.”
From the booth I could see what was showing on the downstairs screen, but nothing else.
I ran through the reel, rewound, and went back down.
I said, “One more thing, before we go any further read this.
It’s a certified and notarized transcript of what has been read from the lips of the characters you just saw.
They weren’t, incidentally, ‘characters,’ in that sense of the word.” I handed the crackling sheets around, a copy for each. “Those ‘characters’ are real people.
You’ve just seen a newsreel.
This transcript will tell you what they were talking about.
Read it.
In the trunk of the car Mike and I have something to show you.
We’ll be back by the time you’ve read it.”
Mike helped me carry in the machine from the car.
We came in the door in time to see Kessler throw the transcript as far as he could.
He bounced to his feet as the sheets fluttered down. He was furious. “What’s going on here?”
We paid no attention to him, nor to the excited demands of the others until the machine had been plugged into the nearest outlet.
Mike looked at me.
“Any ideas?”
I shook my head and told Johnson to shut up for a minute.
Mike lifted the lid and hesitated momentarily before he touched the dials.
I pushed Johnson into his chair and turned off the Ughts myself.
The room went black.
Johnson, looking over my shoulder, gasped.
I heard Bernstein swear softly, amazed.
I turned to see what Mike had shown them.
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!