But Joe decided different. He said, ‘The trouble with you guys is you got wars and races on the mind. Me, I got .curiosity. Know what I’d do if I had a time machine?’

So right away we wanted to know, all ready to give him the old snicker whatever it was.

He said, ‘If I had one, I’d go back in time about a couple or five or fifty million years and find out what happened to the dinosaurs.’

Which was too bad for Joe, because Ray and I both thought there was just about no sense to that at all. Ray said who cared about a lot of dinosaurs and I said the only thing they were good for was to make a mess of skeletons for guys who were dopy enough to wear out the floors in museums; and it was a good thing they did get out of the way to make room for human beings. Of course Joe said that with some human beings he knew, and he gives us a hard look, we should’ve stuck to dinosaurs, but we pay no attention to that.

‘You dumb squirts can laugh and make like you know something, but that’s because you don’t ever have any imagination,’ he says. ‘Those dinosaurs were big stuff. Millions of all kinds – big as houses, and dumb as houses, too – all over the place. And then, all of a sudden, like that,’ and he snaps his fingers, ‘there aren’t any anymore.’

How come, we wanted to know.

But he was just finishing a beer and waving at Charlie for another with a coin to prove he wanted to pay for it and he just shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. That’s what I’d find out, though.’

That’s all. That would have finished it. I would’ve said something and Ray would’ve made a crack, and we all would’ve had another beer and maybe swapped some talk about the weather and the Brooklyn Dodgers and then said so long, and never think of dinosaurs again.

Only we didn’t, and now I never have anything on my mind but dinosaurs, and I feel sick.

Because the rummy at the next table looks up and hoIIers, ‘Hey!’

We hadn’t seen him. As a general rule, we don’t go around looking at rummies we don’t know in bars. I got plenty to do keeping track of the rummies I do know. This fellow had a bottle before him that was half empty, and a glass in his hand that was half full.

He said, ‘Hey,’ and we all looked at him, and Ray said, ‘Ask him what he wants, Joe.’

Joe was nearest. He tipped his chair backward and said, ‘What do you want?’

The rummy said, ‘Did I hear you gentlemen mention dinosaurs?’

He was just a little weavy, and his eyes looked like they were bleeding, and you could only tell his shirt was once white by guessing, but it must’ve been the way he talked. It didn’t sound rummy, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, Joe sort of eased up and said, ‘Sure. Something you want to know?’

He sort of smiled at us. It was a funny smile; it started at the mouth and ended just before it touched the eyes. He said, ‘Did you want to build a time machine and go back to find out what happened to the dinosaurs?’

I could see Joe was figuring that some kind of confidence game was coming up. I was figuring the same thing. Joe said, ‘Why? You aiming to offer to build one for me?’

The rummy showed a mess of teeth and said, ‘No, sir. I could but I won’t. You know why? Because I built a time machine for myself a couple of years ago and went back to the Mesozoic Era and found out what happened to the dinosaurs.’

Later on, I looked up how to spell ‘Mesozoic,’ which is why I got it right, in case you’re wondering, and I found out that the Mesozoic Era is when all the dinosaurs were doing whatever dinosaurs do. But of course at the time this is just so much double-talk to me, and mostly I was thinking we had a lunatic talking to us. Joe claimed afterward that he knew about this Mesozoic thing, but he’ll have to talk lots longer and louder before Ray and I believe him.

But that did it just the same. We said to the rummy to come over to our table. I guess I figured we could listen to him for a while and maybe get some of the bottle, and the others must have figured the same. But he held his bottle tight in his right hand when he sat down and that’s where he kept it.

Ray said, ‘Where’d you build a time machine?’

‘At Midwestern University. My daughter and I worked on it together.’

He sounded like a college guy at that.

I said, ‘Where is it now? In your pocket?’

He didn’t blink; he never jumped at us no matter how wise we cracked. Just kept talking to himself out loud, as if the whiskey had limbered up his tongue and he didn’t care if we stayed or not.

He said, ‘I broke it up. Didn’t want it. Had enough of it.’

We didn’t believe him. We didn’t believe him worth a dam. You better get that straight. It stands to reason, because if a guy invented a time machine, he could clean up millions – he could clean up all the money in the world, just knowing what would happen to the stock market and the races and elections. He wouldn’t throw all that away, I don’t care what reasons he had. – Besides, none of us were going to believe in time travel anyway, because what if you did kill your own grandfather.

Well, never mind.

Joe said, ‘Yeah, you broke it up. Sure you did. What’s your name?’

But he didn’t answer that one, ever. We asked him a few more times, and then we ended up calling him ‘Professor.’

He finished off his glass and filled it again very slow. He didn’t offer us any, and we all sucked at our beers.

So I said, ‘Well, go ahead. What happened to the dinosaurs?’

But he didn’t tell us right away. He stared right at the middle of the table and talked to it.

‘I don’t know how many times Carol sent me back – just a few minutes or hours – before I made the big jump. I didn’t care about the dinosaurs; I just wanted to see how far the machine would take me on the supply of power I had available. I suppose it was dangerous, but is life so wonderful? The war was on them – One more life?’

He sort of coddled his glass as if he was thinking about things in general, then he seemed to skip a part in his mind and keep right on going.

‘It was sunny,’ he said, ‘sunny and bright; dry and hard. There were no swamps, no fems. None of the accoutrements of the Cretaceous we associate with dinosaurs,’ – anyway, I think that’s what he said. I didn’t always catch the big words, so later on I’ll just stick in what I can remember. I checked all the spellings, and I must say that for all the liquor he put away, he pronounced them without stutters.

That’s maybe what bothered us. He sounded so familiar with everything, and it all just rolled off his tongue like nothing.

He went on, ‘It was a late age, certainly the Cretaceous. The dinosaurs were already on the way out – all except those little ones, with their metal belts and their guns.’

I guess Joe practically dropped his nose into the beer altogether. He skidded halfway around the glass, when the professor let loose that statement sort of sadlike.

Joe sounded mad. ‘What little ones, with whose metal belts and which guns?’

The professor looked at him for just a second and then let his eyes slide back to nowhere. ‘They were’little reptiles, standing four feet high. They stood on their hind legs with a thick tail behind, and they had little forearms with fingers. Around their waists were strapped wide metal belts, and from these hung guns. – And they weren’t guns that shot pellets either; they were energy projectors.’

‘They were what?’ I asked. ‘Say, when was this? Millions of years ago?’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘They were reptiles. They had scales and no eyelids and they probably laid eggs. But they used energy guns. There were five of them. They were on me as soon as I got out of the machine. There must have been rriillions of them all over Earth – millions. Scattered all over. They must have been the Lords of Creation then.’

I guess it was then that Ray thought he had him, because he developed that wise look in his eyes that makes you feel like conking him with an empty beer mug, because a full one would waste beer. He said, ‘Look, P’fessor, millions of them, huh? Aren’t there guys who don’t do anything but find old bones and mess around with them till they figure out what some dinosaur looked like. The museums are full of these here skeletons, aren’t they? Well, where’s there one with a metal belt on him. If there were millions, what’s become of them? Where are the bones?’

The professor sighed. It was a real, sad sigh. Maybe he realized for the first time he was just speaking to three guys in overalls in a barroom. Or maybe he didn’t care.

He said, ‘You don’t find many fossils. Think how many animals lived on Earth altogether. Think how many billions and trillions. And then think how few fossils we find. – And these lizards were intelligent. Remember that. They’re not going to get caught in snow drifts or mud, or fall into lava, except by big accident. Think how few fossil men there are – even of these subintelligent apemen of a million years ago.’

He looked at his half-full glass and turned it round and round.

He said, ‘What would fossils show anyway? Metal belts rust away and leave nothing. Those little lizards were warm-blooded. I know that, but you couldn’t prove it from petrified bones. What the devil? A million years from now could you tell what New York looks like from a human skeleton? Could you tell a human from a gorilla by the bones and figure out which one built an atomic bomb and which one ate bananas in a zoo?’

‘Hey,’ said Joe, plenty objecting, ‘any simple bum can tell a gorilla skeleton from a man’s. A man’s got a larger brain. Any fool can tell which one was intelligent.’