‘A Sound of Thunder’ is one of the best-known time-travel stories in all of science fiction, and the tale shows Ray Bradbury’s gift for economical yet lyrical prose, tight narrative structure, and sharp delineation of character. In his panic, he veers off the specially designated path on which they have been instructed to remain, and steps into the jungle. When they arrive in the past and spot the Tyrannosaurus rex targeted for their hunt, it is such a fearsome and majestic beast that Eckels grows terrified, claiming they will be unable to kill it.
And eventually, when early cavemen evolved, they would have starved, too, and so a whole nation which that one man might have sired would never exist.Įckels is dismissive that such small changes in the past could have such colossal ramifications. The lions which prey on the foxes would starve. The foxes which depend on the mice for food would die out. Millions of potential mice would then never exist, if one of the men trod on it back in the distant past. That one dead mouse, had it lived, might have had a whole family of mice, who would each have produced their own families, and so on. This is because, especially over such a vast period of time, little things add up. When Travis tells them that even stepping on and killing a mouse so far in the past could alter the future – and their present from which they have travelled – in all sorts of ways. have to pay them a lot of money to keep them sweet and take all sorts of precautions. The US government doesn’t like them travelling back in time, so Time Safari Inc. Travis is very firm when hammering home the importance of sticking to instructions to ensure they don’t interfere with the past. The Tyrannosaurus rex targeted for the hunt originally would have died just a few minutes later in any case, so they know that, in killing it, they aren’t interfering with the past. This dinosaur has been specially chosen and marked by Lesperance with red paint earlier that day, so they make sure they kill the right animal and nothing else. They are going to shoot and kill a Tyrannosaurus rex once they arrive over sixty million years in the past. Travis tells him and his fellow hunters – there are two other men travelling back with Travis and his assistant, Lesperance – to stick to the path and only shoot where he tells them to shoot. Eckels is inquisitive, asking his safari guide, Travis, about the way the safari works.
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