He pushed the chair over and headed for the door. But then he stood there just before leaving altogether and said: “Poor dumb humanity! Go ahead and cry about that.”

The story, alas, seems to have a moral, and, in fact, ends by pounding that moral over the reader’s head. That is bad. Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can’t resist the impulse to improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly.

Occasionally I overflow and forget this good maxim. DAY OF THE HUNTERS was written not long after the Soviet Union had exploded its first fission bomb. It had been bad enough till then, knowing that the United States might be tempted to use fission bombs if sufficiently irritated (as in 1945). Now, for the first time, the possibility of a real nuclear war, one in which both sides used fission bombs, had arisen.

We’ve grown used to that situation now and scarcely think of it, but in 1950 there were many who thought a nuclear war was inevitable, and in short order, too. I was pretty bitter about that – and the bitterness shows in thestory.* [*Mankind's suicide seems now, a quarter century after DAY OF THE HUNTERS was written, to be more likely than ever, but for different reasons.]

DAY OF THE HUNTERS is also told in the framework of a conversation, by the way. This one takes place in a bar. Wodehouse’s stories about Mulliner, the stories set in Gavagan’s Bar by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and Clarke’s stories about the White Hart were all set in bars, and I’d read them a11 and loved them.

It was inevitable, therefore, that someday I would tell a story in the form of a bar conversation. The only trouble is that I don’t drink and have hardly ever sat in a bar, so I probably have it all wrong.