Ray Bradbury. A Sound of Thunder

                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                A Sound of Thunder
                1952

    

    
     The  sign  on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water.
Eckels  felt  his  eyelids  blink  over  his  stare, and the sign burned in this
momentary darkness:

    
    

     TIME SAFARI, INC.
     SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.
     YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.
     WE TAKE YOU THERE.
     YOU SHOOT IT.
    

    
    
     Warm  phlegm  gathered  in Eckels' throat; he swallowed and pushed it down.
The  muscles  around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon
the  air,  and  in  that  hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man
behind the desk.
     "Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?"
     "We  guarantee  nothing,"  said  the  official,  "except the dinosaurs." He
turned.  "This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He'll tell you what
and  where  to  shoot.  If  he  says  no  shooting,  no shooting. If you disobey
instructions,  there's  a  stiff  penalty  of another ten thousand dollars, plus
possible government action, on your return."
     Eckels  glanced  across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and
humming  of  wires  and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now
silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time,
all  the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set
aflame.
     A  touch  of  the  hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully
reverse  itself.  Eckels  remembered  the  wording  in the advertisements to the
letter.  Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders,
the  old  years,  the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair
turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death,
rush  down  to  their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious
easts,  moons  eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping
one  in  another  like  Chinese  boxes,  rabbits  into  hats, all and everything
returning  to  the  fresh  death,  the  seed death, the green death, to the time
before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.
     "Unbelievable." Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face.
"A  real Time Machine." He shook his head. "Makes you think, If the election had
gone  badly  yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank
God Keith won. He'll make a fine President of the United States."
     "Yes,"  said the man behind the desk. "We're lucky. If Deutscher had gotten
in, we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for
you,  a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us
up,  you  know,  joking  but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they
wanted  to  go live in 1492. Of course it's not our business to conduct Escapes,
but  to  form Safaris. Anyway, Keith's President now. All you got to worry about
is-"
     "Shooting my dinosaur," Eckels finished it for him.
     "A  Tyrannosaurus  Rex.  The  Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in
history.  Sign  this  release.  Anything  happens to you, we're not responsible.
Those dinosaurs are hungry."
     Eckels flushed angrily. "Trying to scare me!"
     "Frankly,  yes.  We don't want anyone going who'll panic at the first shot.
Six  Safari  leaders  were  killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We're here to
give  you  the  severest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back
sixty  million  years  to  bag  the  biggest  game in all of Time. Your personal
check's  still  there.  Tear  it up."Mr. Eckels looked at the check. His fingers
twitched.
     "Good luck," said the man behind the desk. "Mr. Travis, he's all yours."
     They  moved  silently  across the room, taking their guns with them, toward
the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.
     First  a  day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was
day-night-day-night.  A  week,  a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019.
1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.
     They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.
     Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the
trembling  in  his  arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new
rifle.  There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his
assistant,  Lesperance,  and  two  other  hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat
looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.
     "Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?" Eckels felt his mouth saying.
     "If  you  hit them right," said Travis on the helmet radio. "Some dinosaurs
have  two  brains,  one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay
away from those. That's stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes,
if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain."
     The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million
moons fled after them. "Think," said Eckels. "Every hunter that ever lived would
envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois."
     The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.
     The sun stopped in the sky.
     The  fog  that  had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old
time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue
metal guns across their knees.
     "Christ  isn't born yet," said Travis, "Moses has not gone to the mountains
to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and
put up. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler-none of them exists."
The man nodded.
     "That"  - Mr. Travis pointed - "is the jungle of sixty million two thousand
and fifty-five years before President Keith."
     He  indicated  a  metal  path  that  struck off into green wilderness, over
streaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.
     "And that," he said, "is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use,
     It  floats  six  inches above the earth. Doesn't touch so much as one grass
blade,  flower,  or tree. It's an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you
from  touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don't go off
it.  I repeat. Don't go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there's a penalty.
And don't shoot any animal we don't okay."
     "Why?" asked Eckels.
     They  sat  in  the ancient wilderness. Far birds' cries blew on a wind, and
the  smell  of  tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of
blood.
     "We  don't want to change the Future. We don't belong here in the Past. The
government doesn't like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise.
A  Time  Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important
animal,  a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link
in a growing species."
     "That's not clear," said Eckels.
     "All  right,"  Travis  continued, "say we accidentally kill one mouse here.
That  means  all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed,
right?"
     "Right"
     "And  all  the  families of the families of the families of that one mouse!
With  a  stamp  of  your  foot,  you  annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a
thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!"
     "So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"
     "So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need
those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a
lion  starves.  For  want  of  a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite
billions  of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all
boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on
the  entire  world,  goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But
you,  friend,  have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one
single  mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just
any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have
sprung  ten  sons.  From  their  loins  one  hundred  sons, and thus onward to a
civilization.  Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire
history  of  life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam's grandchildren. The
stomp  of  your  foot,  on  one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of
which  could  shake  our  earth  and  destinies down through Time, to their very
foundations. With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are
throttled  in  the  womb.  Perhaps  Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps
Europe  is  forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step
on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print,
like  a  Grand  Canyon,  across  Eternity.  Queen Elizabeth might never be born,
Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at
all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!"
     "I  see,"  said  Eckels.  "Then  it  wouldn't  pay for us even to touch the
grass?"
     "Correct.  Crushing  certain  plants could add up infinitesimally. A little
error  here  would  multiply  in  sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of
course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time can't be changed by us. Or maybe it
can  be  changed  only  in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an insect
imbalance  there,  a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a
depression,  mass  starvation,  and  finally,  a change in social temperament in
far-flung  countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft
breath,  a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that
unless  you  looked  close you wouldn't see it. Who knows? Who really can say he
knows?  We  don't know. We're guessing. But until we do know for certain whether
our  messing  around  in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history,
we're  being  careful.  This  Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were
sterilized,  as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we
can't introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere."
     "How do we know which animals to shoot?"
     "They're  marked  with red paint," said Travis. "Today, before our journey,
we  sent  Lesperance  here back with the Machine. He came to this particular era
and followed certain animals."
     "Studying them?"
     "Right,"  said  Lesperance.  "I  track them through their entire existence,
noting  which  of  them  lives  longest. Very few. How many times they mate. Not
often.  Life's  short,  When I find one that's going to die when a tree falls on
him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second.
I  shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his side. We can't miss it. Then
I  correlate  our  arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than
two  minutes  before  he  would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals
with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?"
     "But  if  you  come  back  this  morning in Time," said Eckels eagerly, you
must've  bumped into us, our Safari! How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did
all of us get through-alive?"
     Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.
     "That'd  be  a paradox," said the latter. "Time doesn't permit that sort of
mess-a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like
an  airplane  hitting  an  air  pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we
stopped?  That  was  us  passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw
nothing.  There's  no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got
our monster, or whether all of us - meaning you, Mr. Eckels - got out alive."
     Eckels smiled palely.
     "Cut that," said Travis sharply. "Everyone on his feet!"
     They were ready to leave the Machine.
     The  jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire
world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled
the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic
bats of delirium and night fever.
     Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully.
     "Stop  that!" said Travis. "Don't even aim for fun, blast you! If your guns
should go off - - "
     Eckels flushed. "Where's our Tyrannosaurus?"
     Lesperance  checked  his  wristwatch.  "Up ahead, We'll bisect his trail in
sixty  seconds.  Look for the red paint! Don't shoot till we give the word. Stay
on the Path. Stay on the Path!"
     They moved forward in the wind of morning.
     "Strange,"  murmured  Eckels.  "Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day
over.  Keith  made  President.  Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million
years  lost,  and  they  don't  exist. The things we worried about for months, a
lifetime, not even born or thought of yet."
     "Safety  catches  off, everyone!" ordered Travis. "You, first shot, Eckels.
Second, Billings, Third, Kramer."
     "I've  hunted  tiger,  wild  boar, buffalo, elephant, but now, this is it,"
said Eckels. "I'm shaking like a kid."
     "Ah," said Travis.
     Everyone stopped.
     Travis  raised  his hand. "Ahead," he whispered. "In the mist. There he is.
There's His Royal Majesty now."
     The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.
     Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.
     Silence.
     A sound of thunder.
     Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.
     "It," whispered Eckels. "It......
     "Sh!"
     It  came  on  great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet
above  half  of  the  trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's
claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand
pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of
pebbled  skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat,
ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those
two  delicate  arms  dangled  out front, arms with hands which might pick up and
examine  men  like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton
of  sculptured  stone,  lifted  easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a
fence  of  teeth  like  daggers.  Its  eyes  rolled,  ostrich eggs, empty of all
expression  save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic
bones  crushing  aside  trees  and  bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth,
leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.
     It  ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten
tons.  It  moved  into  a  sunlit  area  warily, its beautifully reptilian hands
feeling the air.
     "Why,  why,"  Eckels  twitched  his  mouth. "It could reach up and grab the
moon."
     "Sh!" Travis jerked angrily. "He hasn't seen us yet."
     "It  can't  be killed," Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there
could  be  no  argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered
opinion.  The  rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. "We were fools to come. This
is impossible."
     "Shut up!" hissed Travis.
     "Nightmare."
     "Turn  around," commanded Travis. "Walk quietly to the Machine. We'll remit
half your fee."
     "I  didn't  realize  it  would be this big," said Eckels. "I miscalculated,
that's all. And now I want out."
     "It sees us!"
     "There's the red paint on its chest!"
     The  Tyrant  Lizard  raised  itself.  Its  armored  flesh  glittered like a
thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny
insects  wriggled,  so  that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even
while  the  monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew
down the wilderness.
     "Get  me  out  of here," said Eckels. "It was never like this before. I was
always sure I'd come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety.
This time, I figured wrong. I've met my match and admit it. This is too much for
me to get hold of."
     "Don't run," said Lesperance. "Turn around. Hide in the Machine."
     "Yes." Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make
them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.
     "Eckels!"
     He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.
     "Not that way!"
     The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It
covered  one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire.
A  windstorm from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old
blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.
     The  rifles  cracked  again,  Their  sound  was  lost  in shriek and lizard
thunder.  The great level of the reptile's tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees
exploded  in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler's hands
down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to
cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes leveled
with  the  men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids
and the blazing black iris,
     Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.
     Thundering,  it  clutched  trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore
the  metal  Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons
of  cold  flesh  and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armored tail,
twitched  its  snake  jaws,  and  lay  still.  A fount of blood spurted from its
throat.  Somewhere  inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the
hunters. They stood, red and glistening.
     The thunder faded.
     The  jungle  was  silent.  After  the  avalanche,  a green peace. After the
nightmare, morning.
     Billings  and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance
stood  with  smoking rifles, cursing steadily. In the Time Machine, on his face,
Eckels  lay  shivering.  He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the
Machine.
     Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box,
and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.
     "Clean up."
     They  wiped  the  blood  from  their  helmets. They began to curse too. The
Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs
as  the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running
a  final  instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing
up  forever.  It  was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at
quitting  time,  all  valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the
tonnage  of  its  own  flesh,  off  balance,  dead  weight, snapped the delicate
forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.
     Another  cracking  sound.  Overhead,  a gigantic tree branch broke from its
heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.
     "There."  Lesperance  checked  his  watch. "Right on time. That's the giant
tree  that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally." He glanced at
the two hunters. "You want the trophy picture?"
     "What?"
     "We can't take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here
where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can get
at  it,  as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays. But we
can take a picture of you standing near it."
     The two men tried to think, but gave up, shaking their heads.
     They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the
Machine  cushions.  They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound,
where  already  strange  reptilian  birds  and  golden  insects were busy at the
steaming  armor. A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them. Eckels
sat there, shivering.
     "I'm sorry," he said at last.
     "Get up!" cried Travis.
     Eckels got up.
     "Go out on that Path alone," said Travis. He had his rifle pointed, "You're
not coming back in the Machine. We're leaving you here!"
     Lesperance seized Travis's arm. "Wait-"
     "Stay  out  of  this!" Travis shook his hand away. "This fool nearly killed
us.  But it isn't that so much, no. It's his shoes! Look at them! He ran off the
Path.  That  ruins  us!  We'll  forfeit!  Thousands  of dollars of insurance! We
guarantee  no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the fool! I'll have to report
to  the government. They might revoke our license to travel. Who knows what he's
done to Time, to History!"
     "Take it easy, all he did was kick up some dirt."
     "How  do  we  know?"  cried  Travis.  "We  don't  know anything! It's all a
mystery! Get out of here, Eckels!"
     Eckels fumbled his shirt. "I'll pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!"
     Travis  glared  at Eckels' checkbook and spat. "Go out there. The Monster's
next  to  the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can
come back with us."
     "That's unreasonable!"
     "The  Monster's  dead,  you  idiot.  The bullets! The bullets can't be left
behind.  They  don't  belong  in the Past; they might change anything. Here's my
knife. Dig them out!"
     The  jungle  was  alive  again,  full of the old tremorings and bird cries.
Eckels  turned  slowly  to  regard  the  primeval  garbage  dump,  that  hill of
nightmares  and  terror.  After  a long time, like a sleepwalker he shuffled out
along the Path.
     He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to the
elbows.  He  held  out  his  hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then he
fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.
     "You didn't have to make him do that," said Lesperance.
     "Didn't  I?  It's  too early to tell." Travis nudged the still body. "He'll
live.  Next  time he won't go hunting game like this. Okay." He jerked his thumb
wearily at Lesperance. "Switch on. Let's go home."
     1492. 1776. 1812.
     They  cleaned  their  hands and faces. They changed their caking shirts and
pants.  Eckels was up and around again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for a
full ten minutes.
     "Don't look at me," cried Eckels. "I haven't done anything."
     "Who can tell?"
     "Just  ran  off  the Path, that's all, a little mud on my shoes-what do you
want me to do-get down and pray?"
     "We  might need it. I'm warning you, Eckels, I might kill you yet. I've got
my gun ready."
     "I'm innocent. I've done nothing!"
     1999.2000.2055.
     The Machine stopped.
     "Get out," said Travis.
     The  room  was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left
it.  The  same  man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit
behind  the  same desk. Travis looked around swiftly. "Everything okay here?" he
snapped.
     "Fine. Welcome home!"
     Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking through the one high window.
     "Okay, Eckels, get out. Don't ever come back." Eckels could not move.
     "You heard me," said Travis. "What're you staring at?"
     Eckels  stood  smelling  of  the  air,  and there was a thing to the air, a
chemical  taint  so  subtle,  so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal
senses  warned  him  it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the
wall,  in  the  furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . .
And  there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking
the  oddness  with  the  pores  of  his  body. Somewhere, someone must have been
screaming  one  of  those  whistles  that only a dog can hear. His body screamed
silence  in  return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was
not  quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . .
.  lay  an  entire  world  of streets and people. What sort of world it was now,
there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost,
like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind ....
     But  the  immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same
sign  he  had  read  earlier  today  on  first  entering.  Somehow, the sign had
changed:

    
    

     TYME SEFARI INC.
     SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
     YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
     WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
     YU SHOOT ITT.

    
    
     Eckels  felt  himself  fall  into  a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick
slime  on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, "No, it can't be. Not
a little thing like that. No!"
     Embedded  in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly,
very beautiful and very dead.
     "Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!" cried Eckels.
     It  fell  to  the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset
balances  and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then
gigantic  dominoes,  all  down  the  years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It
couldn't  change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could
it?
     His  face  was  cold.  His  mouth  trembled,  asking:  "Who  -  who won the
presidential election yesterday?"
     The  man  behind  the  desk  laughed.  "You  joking?  You  know  very well.
Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man
now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?"
     Eckels  moaned.  He  dropped  to  his  knees.  He  scrabbled  at the golden
butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself,
to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it back, can't we make it alive
again? Can't we start over? Can't we-"
     He  did  not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe
loud  in  the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and
raise the weapon.
     There was a sound of thunder.