And we all kept quiet and looked at our empty beer bottles and thought about it. All those dinosaurs – big as houses – killed by little lizards with guns. Killed for fun.
Then Joe leaned over and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder, easylike, and shook it. He said, “Hey, P’fessor, but if that’s so, what happened to the little lizards with the guns? Huh? – Did you ever go back to find out?”
The professor looked up with the kind of look in his eyes that he’d have if he were lost.
“You still don’t see! It was already beginning to happen to them. I saw it in their eyes. They were running out of big game- the fun was going nut of it. So what did you expect them to do? They turned to other game – the biggest and most dangerous of all – and really had fun. They hunted that game to the end.”
“What game?” asked Ray. He didn’t get it, but Joe andI did.
“Themselves,” said the professor in a loud voice. “They finished off all the others and began on themselves – till not one was left.”
And again we stopped and thought about those dinosaurs – big as houses – all finished off by little lizards with guns. Then we thought about the little lizards and how they had to keep the guns going even when there was nothing to use them on but themselves.
Joe said, “Poor dumb lizards.”
“Yeah,” said Ray, “poor crackpot lizards.”
And then what happened really scared us. Because the professor jumped up with eyes that looked as if they were trying to climb right out of their sockets and leap at us. He shouted, “You damned fools. Why do you sit there slobbering over reptiles dead a hundred million years. That was the first intelligence on Earth and that’s how itended. That’s done. But we’re the second intelligence – and how the devil do you think we ’ re going to end?”