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. 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. “We guarantee nothing,” said the official, “except the dinosaurs.” He turned. “Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?” 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. 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:Ī warm phlegm gathered in Eckels’ throat he swallowed and pushed it down. Bradbury painted that scenario in his 1952 story, A Sound of Thunder. In Ray Bradbury’s vision, reality was a fabric so delicate that the crushing of a butterfly could ripple up through 65 million years to change the results of an election.
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