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 darn. 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 a11 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.