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. All gone. Those little demons were chasing the little, scurrying ones, and probably crying their hearts out for the good old days.”
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?”
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.
My stay in Boston quickly proved to be no barrier to my literary career. (In fact, nothing since my concentration on my doctoral research in 1947 has proved to be a barrier.)
After two months in a small sublet apartment (of slum quality) very close to the school, we moved to the suburbs – if you want to call it that. Neither my wife nor I could drive a car when we came to Boston so we had to find a place on the bus lines. We got one in the rather impoverished town of Somerville – an attic apartment of primitive sort that was unbelievably hot in the summer.
There I wrote my secondnovel, THE STARS, LIKE DUST (Doubleday, 1951), and while there a small, one-man publishing firm, Gnome Press, put out a collection of my positronic robot stories, I, ROBOT, in 1950, and the first portion of my Foundation stories as FOUNDATION in 1951. [Gnome Press did not do well with these books or with FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE and SECOND FOUNDATION, which they published in 1951 and 1952. To my great relief, therefore, Doubleday, playing the role of White Knight on my behalf, pressured Gnome Press into relinquishing these books in 1962. Doubleday handled them thereafter and succeeded in earning (and is still continuing to earn) very substantial sums out of all of them for myself and for themselves.]
In 1950 I learned to drive an automobile, and in 1951 we even had a son, rather to our surprise. After nine years of marriage we had rather come to the opinion that we were doomed to he childless. Late in 1950, however, it turned out that the explanation to some rather puzzling physiological manifestations was that my wife was pregnant. The first person to tell me that that must be so, I remember, was Evelyn Gold (she was then Mrs. Horace Gold). I laughed and said, “No, no,” but it was yes, yes, and David was horn on August 20, 1951.