A short story on time travelling
Answers
Answer:
He opened his eyes. He couldn't see anyone else in the room. The room was dark.
He crept to the curtain by the bed. Slowly, he pulled it apart.
Bright sunlight breezed into the room, making his eyes flinch. He smiled widely.
The pink walls were now visible, decorated with his stuffed toys. He soon spotted his favourite bear on it. How he loved rolling on the lawn hugging it! The sudden urge made him creep on to the edge of the bed. Reaching there he saw his parents were sleeping on the floor, hugging each other. Though he was clumsy, he managed to get down from the bed without tripping on either them. Once on all fours, he crawled to the wall and leaning onto it, pulled the bear down. The bright sun played in his mind the dreamy vision of the green lawn. Excited and giggling, he crawled towards the door. He looked up. The door was open! Ecstatic, he crawled out, the bear towed along.
The fabric arm of the bear left a trail behind him, having brushed a thick stream of drying blood, a pitch-red stream that ran all the way down the floor, to the bodies of his parents.
Answer:
In Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," a hunter named Eckels pays $10,000 to travel with Time Safari, a time machine company that takes hunters back to the time of dinosaurs and allows them to hunt Tyrannosaurus Rex. The company guarantees nothing - neither your safety nor your return, and there are strict instructions and expectations for how the hunters should behave once they travel back in time. Eckels and the two other hunters, Billings and Kramer, are to obey their guide, Travis, at all times. Before they leave, Eckels reviews this information with the man behind the desk and they both engage in small talk. Everyone is happy because President Keith has just been elected, and many considered time travel as a way to escape the present day had Deutscher, the other candidate and potential dictator, won.
When they travel sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years back in time, Eckels is incredibly excited about the idea of conquering the beast Tyrannosaurus. He remarks, "Good God, every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois" (3). Before they exit the time machine, Travis points out the path laid by Time Safari. It floats six inches about the earth and is the only path that the hunters should travel upon. They are not to touch anything during their stay in the past, and they are only to shoot when the guide and his assistant instruct them to shoot.
When Eckels inquires about this particular rule, he is astounded by the gravity of Travis' response. Travis insists that interrupting any of the natural processes in the past could have irreparable repercussions for the future. He draws out the example of killing one mouse and articulates the potential aftershocks of it: "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" (4). Stepping on a mouse has a much broader reach than Eckels initially thought.
Together, the five of them depart on the path to find their prey. The Tyrannosaurus Rex has been carefully been scouted by Travis on a previous trip to the past, where he waited to see when one of the dinosaurs would die naturally and then timed the next hunting trip accordingly. In the case of this particular "monster," a tree limb was going to fall and kill it. Travis and Time Safari are very careful with leaving the past just as it was supposed to unfold. When they reach the clearing where the Tyrannosaurus is scheduled to appear, Eckels begins to have second thoughts, and he becomes increasingly more scared as the dinosaur comes into view. Eckels describes the encounter as, "a sound of thunder."
Eckels is paralyzed by fear, and Travis yells at him, telling him to go back to the time machine and wait for the others. Because Eckels was supposed to shoot first, he has now endangered the lives of the rest of the group, and Travis is furious with him. Dazed and confused, Eckels stumbles off of the Time Safari path and into the jungle, the grass giving way to his feet. Meanwhile, the rifles cracked furiously as the others tried to take down the giant beast. "Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell" (7). Caked in blood, the others return to the time machine, where they find Eckels shivering on the floor. He managed to find his way back to the time machine. They all hear a cracking sound - the tree branch has now fallen on top of the dinosaur as had been observed.
Upon seeing Eckels, Travis decrees that he cannot return to the future - he sees the mud on his boots and knows that he walked off the path. They have no idea how much damage Eckels has caused for future generations and species. Travis relents a bit though, and allows Eckels to return to the future as long as he removes the bullets from the monster's skull. Eckels returns drenched in blood and paßses out immediately after returning the bullets to Travis. Travis is still outraged and threatens to kill Eckels, but ultimately they clean up and begin to travel back to present day.