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.’
‘Really?’ The professor laughed to himself, as if all this was so simple and obvious, it was just a crying shame to waste time on it. ‘You judge everything from the type of brain human beings have managed to develop. Evolution has different ways of doing things. Birds fly one way; bats fly another way. Life has plenty of tricks for everything. – How much of your brain do you think you use. About a fifth. That’s what the psychologists say. As far as they know, as far as anybody knows, eighty percent of your brain has no use at all. Everybody just works on way-low gear, except maybe a few in history. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance. Archimedes, Aristotle, Gauss, Galois, Einstein—’
I never heard of any of them except Einstein, but I didn’t let on. He mentioned a few more, but I’ve put in all I can remember. Then he said, ‘Those little reptiles had tiny brains, maybe quarter-size, maybe even less, but they used it all – every bit of it. Their bones might not show it, but they were intelligent; intelligent as humans. And they were boss of all Earth.’
And then Joe came up with something that was really good. For a while I was sure that he had the professor and I was awfully glad he came out with it. He said, ‘Look, P’fessor, if those lizards were so damned hot, why didn’t they leave something behind? Where are their cities and their buildings and all the sort of stuff we keep finding of the cavemen, stone knives and things. Hell, if human beings got the heck off of Earth, think of the stuff we’d leave behind us. You couldn’t walk a mile without falling over a city. And roads and things.’
But the professor just couldn’t be stopped. He wasn’t even shaken up. He just came right back with, ‘You’re still judging other forms of life by human standards. We build cities and roads and airports and the rest that goes with us – but they didn’t. They were built on a different plan. Their whole way of life was different from the ground up. They didn’t live in cities. They didn’t have our kind of art. I’m not sure what they did have because it was so alien I couldn’t grasp it – except for their guns. Those would be the same. Funny, isn’t it. – For all I know, maybe we stumble over their relics every day and don’t even know that’s what they are.’
I was pretty sick of it by that time. You just couldn’t get him. The cuter you’d be, the cuter he’d be.
I said, ‘Look here. How do you know so much about those things? What did you do; live with them? Or did they speak English? Or maybe you speak lizard talk. Give us a few words of lizard talk.’
I guess I was getting mad, too. You know how it is. A guy tells you something you don’t believe because it’s all cockeyed, and you can’t get him to admit he’s lying.
But the professor wasn’t mad. He was just filling the glass again, very slowly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t talk and they didn’t talk. They just looked at me with their cold, hard, staring eyes – snake’s eyes – and I knew what they were thinking, and I could see that they knew what I was thinking. Don’t ask me how it happened. It just did. Everything. I knew that they were out on a hunting expedition and I knew they weren’t going to let me go.’
And we stopped asking questions. We just looked at him, then Ray said, ‘What happened? How did you get away?’
‘That was easy. An animal scurried past on the hilltop. It was long – maybe ten feet-and narrow and ran close to the ground. The lizards got excited. I could feel the excitement in waves. It was as if they forgot about me in a single hot flash of blood lust – and off they went. I got back in the machine, returned, and broke it up.’
