Time Travel Omnibus, page 411
“Bomb?” he asked. Enoch Dwight nodded, almost purring.
He said, “Sorry, young man, but I can’t afford to take chances. And you can build yourself another one later.” He might have been talking of some child’s plaything rather than the most remarkable invention yet achieved by man.
With the destruction of the time vessel Enoch Dwight and his countess seemed to relax. They pulled linen dust-covers from some of the furniture and began to tackle the brandy seriously. At intervals the billionaire grumbled audibly at the continued absence of the staff. Then, with the passing of time, he grew more and more engrossed in the countess.
Finally in disgust Houghton led a shivering but grateful Alison into the compound. The girl’s whole manner was of defeat. She said, “He’s won—he always wins. If we could only do some thing—but the age of miracles is past, except for your time machine. And now he’s destroyed that!”
“Don’t give up the ship, darling,” Houghton told her. “Contrary to both your fond beliefs, your esteemed parent does not know all the factors involved.” He looked toward the pale northeast sky and added, “We’ve been here over four hours. It’s about time.”
“Time for what?” she asked, a spark of hope in her voice.
“Shut up—and listen,” he said rudely, cocking an ear. From somewhere far away came a faint humming sound—a hum that grew steadily louder and more distinct. Houghton squinted to see further and Alison’s eyes widened incredulously at sight of a silver speck that rapidly took on size and shape as it sped toward them.
“GOOD old Bart!” said Houghton. He smiled and his smile grew and he waved frantically as the air-vehicle roared low above them, stopped and hovered with incredible abruptness to descend toward them slowly with an unlocking of whirling helicopter vanes.
“It is—it’s Bart!” cried the girl as a head and waving arm appeared through a window in the side of the ship.
“We worked a tracer system out ourselves,” Houghton shouted to Alison to be heard above the roar of the plane. “The minute we came down here instead of at Base, Bart had orders to move in with the new ship. Oh-oh—trouble!”
Roused by the sound of the heliplane Enoch Dwight and the countess burst out of one of the french windows of the Lodge. The billionaire was yelling and waving his arms incoherently and the countess was brandishing her revolver.
“In you go,” cried Houghton as the heliplane hovered a scant foot above the compound floor. He gave the girl a shove through the door, scrambled in after her as a bullet pinged past only inches from his head.
He slammed the door quickly shut behind him and said to Bart, “Get us out of here—quick!” Another bullet smacked into the tough thin metal of which the heliplane was built.
“Don’t worry—we’re off. Brace yourselves,” said Bart. They were barely fifty feet above the ground and the countess was still firing wildly when he cut in the jets. The whirling vanes were all but stripped loose as they folded and the plane roared away, rising with incredible speed above the rolling desert sands.
“What’s your hurry?” gasped Houghton, gasping from the acceleration as he straightened in his seat to give quick physical assurance to a pea-green Alison. “We’re out of range of that popgun.”
“Yeah?” said Bart, lifting his voice above the roar of the jets, which, was loud even in the soundproofed cabin. “Don’t you know what day this is?”
“The old so-and-so wouldn’t let me look at the date he rigged the time vessel for,” he called back as he assisted a rapidly-recovering Alison toward comfort across the aisle.
“Well, it’s May twenty-first,” Bart informed him.
Houghton opened his mouth for a so-what, then closed it abruptly. It was his turn to pale. He did not need to ask the year—the fact of Bart Forsythe’s panic told him all he had to know. He said, “We’ve got to go back and get them out, Bart.”
“Not a chance—it’s too late,” Forsythe called. “We’ll be lucky if we’re not shot down when we hit the rim of the area. The Military raised hell about my coming in just now.”
He gave the experimental craft another notch as he spoke and the miles unreeled below them even faster. Miles and miles of desolate desert brush and sand, dotted only rarely with an occasional mote representing ghost ranch or ghost mine or ghost town—but never a sign of human or even animal life.
“What is it—what’s wrong?” a bewildered Alison inquired.
“Look back,” said Houghton grimly, craning his own neck as the heliplane gave a sudden lurch, like a surfboard picked up from behind by a Pacific roller.
Far behind them, slightly to the south, the heavens were livid with a tremendous rapidly-rising cloud. It gleamed and twisted evilly as it rose and spread toward the zenith. The swift little heliplane did a dance that had Bart wrestling the controls.
“What is it?” the girl asked again. The fear in her eyes told Houghton that she had guessed at least part of what had happened. He pulled her hand into his and held it before he spoke.
“Your father wouldn’t tell me his date of return to the future,” he said. “That’s why his servants failed to get to the Lodge. This whole area has been blocked off by the Army. You see, while you were in Europe, I turned it over to the Government. That was the first experimental H-bomb that just went up. Burberry Lodge, and your father, have ceased to exist.”
Alison covered her face with her hands and wept.
THE END
A SOUND OF THUNDER
Ray Bradbury
They were going back sixty million years, to kill a dinosaur. And they mustn’t step on one single blade of grass, or all of future civilization might be destroyed
The sign on the wall read:
TIME SAFARI, INC.
SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL
WE TAKE YOU THERE
YOU SHOOT IT
Mr. Eckels smiled nervously and handed 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 don’t follow directions, there’s a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return.”
Eckels looked across the vast office at an arrangement of wires, golden boxes and an aurora that flickered like a great bonfire.
“Hell and damn,” 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 Lyman had gotten in, we’d have the worst kind of dictatorship. There’s an anti-everything man for you—a militarist, anti-Christ, antihuman, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Lyman got elected 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 said.
“A Tyrannosaurus rex. The damnedest 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 damnedest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Taking you back sixty million years to bag the biggest damned game in all time. Your personal check’s still there. Tear it up.”
Mr. Eckels looked at the check for a long time. 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-day. A week, a month, a year, a decade! 2056 A.D., 2019 A.D., 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 one another, and the years blazed around them.
“Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?” Eckels felt his mouth saying.
“If you hit them right,” Travis said on the helmet radio. “Some dinosaurs have the equivalent of two brains, one in the head, another—a nerve plexus—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. “Good God,” 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 mountain 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 men nodded.
“That,” Mr. Travis said, pointing, “is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith.”
He indicated a metal path that wandered into green wilderness, over steaming 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 antigravity 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 damn’ finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower, 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.”
TRAVIS said, “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 a fox, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Sixty million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen in the entire world, goes hunting wild boars or saber-toothed tigers, for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse.
“So the cave man starves. And the cave man, 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. 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 destinies down through Time, to their very foundations.
“With the death of that one cave man, a billion unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest. Step on a mouse and leave your print, a Grand Canyon across eternity. Washington might not cross the Delaware. There might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path!”
“Then,” said Eckels, “it would be dangerous 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 more subtle, like that. But until we know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big or little change in history, we’re being careful. This machine, the Path, your clothing and bodies, were made sterile, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can’t introduce our bacteria into an ancient era.”
“How do we know which animals to shoot?”
“They’re marked with red paint,” said Travis. “Today, before our trip, we sent Lesperance here 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 live long. 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 hide. 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 animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?”
“But if you came 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 Lesperance. “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 flying with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats out of a delirium and a night fever. Eckels, balanced on the narrow path, aimed his rifle playfully.
“Forbidden!” said Travis. “Don’t even aim for fun. If your gun should go off—” Eckels flushed. “Where’s our Tyrannosaurus?”
Lesperance checked his wrist watch. “Up ahead. We’ll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint, for God’s sake. 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. Secom Billings. Third, Kramer.”
“I’ve hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo elephant, but 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 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.
“Great God,” whispered Eckels.
“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, a ton of sculptured stone itself, 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 arena warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.
