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.”

It was the flattest sort of ending you ever heard. Joe made a noise in his throat. “Well, what happened to the dinosaurs?”

“Oh, you don’t see? I thought it was plain enough. – It was those little intelligent lizards that did it. They were hunters – by instinct and by choice. It was their hobby in life. It wasn’t for food; it was for fun.”

“And they just wiped out all the dinosaurs on the Earth?”

“All that lived at the time, anyway; all the contemporary species. Don’t you think it’s possible? How long did it take us to wipe out bison herds by the hundred million? What happened to the dodo in a few years? Supposing we really put our minds to it, how long would the lions and the tigers and the giraffes last? Why, by the time I saw those lizards there wasn’t any big game left – no reptile more than fifteen feet maybe.