A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (25 page)
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 arena 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 his 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 one 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.
Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and remote from the events behind.
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 boulder-stone 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 at the very atoms of the air itself, at the way the sun poured 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 sublimal 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 TAEKYUTHAIR.
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.
T
he rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.
“How much farther, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know. A mile, ten miles, a thousand.”
“Aren’t you sure?”
“How can I be sure?”
“I don’t like this rain. If we only knew how far it is to the Sun Dome, I’d feel better.”
“Another hour or two from here.”
“You really think so, Lieutenant?”
“Of course.”
“Or are you lying to keep us happy?”
“I’m lying to keep you happy. Shut up!”
The two men sat together in the rain. Behind them sat two other men who were wet and tired and slumped like clay that was melting.
The lieutenant looked up. He had a face that once had been brown and now the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes and they were white, as were his teeth, and as was his hair. He was all white. Even his uniform was beginning to turn white, and perhaps a little green with fungus.
The lieutenant felt the rain on his cheeks. “How many million years since the rain stopped raining here on Venus.”
“Don’t be crazy,” said one of the two other men. “It never stops raining on Venus. It just goes on and on. I’ve lived here for ten years and I never saw a minute, or even a second, when it wasn’t pouring.”
“It’s like living under water,” said the lieutenant, and rose up, shrugging his guns into place. “Well, we’d better get going. We’ll find that Sun Dome yet.”
“Or we won’t find it,” said the cynic.
“It’s an hour or so.”
“Now you’re lying to me, Lieutenant.”
“No, now I’m lying to myself. This is one of those times when you’ve got to lie. I can’t take much more of this.”
They walked down the jungle trail, now and then looking at their compasses. There was no direction anywhere, only what the compass said. There was a gray sky and rain falling and jungle and a path, and, far back behind them somewhere, a rocket in which they had ridden and fallen. A rocket in which lay two of their friends, dead and dripping rain.
They walked in single file, not speaking. They came to a river which lay wide and flat and brown, flowing down to the great Single Sea. The surface of it was stippled in a billion places by the rain.
“All right, Simmons.”
The lieutenant nodded and Simmons took a small packet from his back which, with a pressure of hidden chemical, inflated into a large boat. The lieutenant directed the cutting of wood and the quick making of paddles and they set out into the river, paddling swiftly across the smooth surface in the rain.
The lieutenant felt the cold rain on his cheeks and on his neck and on his moving arms. The cold was beginning to seep into his lungs. He felt the rain on his ears, on his eyes, on his legs.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” he said.
“Who could? Who has? When? How many nights have we slept? Thirty nights, thirty days! Who can sleep with rain slamming their head, banging away.... I’d give anything for a hat. Anything at all, just so it wouldn’t hit my head anymore. I get headaches. My head is sore; it hurts all the time.”
“I’m sorry I came to China,” said one of the others.
“First time I ever heard Venus called China.”
“Sure, China. Chinese water cure. Remember the old torture? Rope you against a wall. Drop one drop of water on your head every half-hour. You go crazy waiting for the next one. Well, that’s Venus, but on a big scale. We’re not made for water. You can’t sleep, you can’t breathe right, and you’re crazy from just being soggy. If we’d been ready for a crash, we’d have brought waterproofed uniforms and hats. It’s this beating rain on your head gets you, most of all. It’s so heavy. It’s like BB shot. I don’t know how long I can take it.”
“Boy, me for the Sun Dome! The man who thought
them
up, thought of something.”
They crossed the river, and in crossing they thought of the Sun Dome, somewhere ahead of them, shining in the jungle rain. A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house forty feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in a space at the top of the building where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops or drinking something else. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as you stayed in that house and idled your time.
The lieutenant turned and looked back at the three men using their oars and gritting their teeth. They were as white as mushrooms, as white as he was. Venus bleached everything away in a few months. Even the jungle was an immense cartoon nightmare, for how could the jungle be green with no sun, with always rain falling and always dusk? The white, white jungle with the pale cheese-colored leaves, and the earth carved of wet Camembert, and the tree boles like immense toadstools—everything black and white. And how often could you see the soil itself? Wasn’t it mostly a creek, a stream, a puddle, a pool, a lake, a river, and then, at last, the sea?
“Here we are!”
They leaped out on the farthest shore, splashing and sending up showers. The boat was deflated and stored in a cigar-box packet. Then, standing on the rainy shore, they tried to light up a few smokes for themselves, and it was five minutes or so before, shuddering, they worked the inverted fighter and, cupping their hands, managed a few drags upon cigarettes that all too quickly were limp and beaten away from their lips by a sudden slap of rain.
They walked on.
“Wait just a moment,” said the lieutenant. “I thought I saw something ahead.”
“The Sun Dome?”
“I’m not sure. The rain closed in again.”
Simmons began to run. “The Sun Dome!”
“Come back, Simmons!”
“The Sun Dome!”
Simmons vanished in the rain. The others ran after him.
They found him in a little clearing, and they stopped and looked at him and what he had discovered.
The rocket ship.
It was lying where they had left it. Somehow they had circled back and were where they had started. In the ruin of the ship green fungus was growing out of the mouths of the two dead men. As they watched, the fungus took flower, the petals broke away in the rain, and the fungus died.
“How did we do it?”
“An electrical storm must be nearby. Threw our compasses off. That explains it.”
“You’re right.”
“What’ll we do now?”
“Start out again.”
“Good Lord, we’re not any closer to anywhere!”
“Let’s try to keep calm about it, Simmons.”
“Calm, calm! This rain’s driving me wild!”
“We’ve enough food for another two days if we’re careful.”
The rain danced on their skin, on their wet uniforms; the rain streamed from their noses and ears, from their fingers and knees. They looked like stone fountains frozen in the jungle, issuing forth water from every pore.
And, as they stood, from a distance they heard a roar.
And the monster came out of the rain.
The monster was supported upon a thousand electric blue legs. It walked swiftly and terribly. It struck down a leg with a driving blow. Everywhere a leg struck a tree fell and burned. Great whiffs of ozone filled the rainy air, and smoke blew away and was broken up by the rain. The monster was a half mile wide and a mile high and it felt of the ground like a great blind thing. Sometimes, for a moment, it had no legs at all. And then, in an instant, a thousand whips would fall out of its belly, white-blue whips, to sting the jungle.
“There’s the electrical storm,” said one of the men. “There’s the thing ruined our compasses. And it’s coming this way.”
“Lie down, everyone,” said the lieutenant.
“Run!” cried Simmons.
“Don’t be a fool. Lie down. It hits the highest points. We may get through unhurt. Lie down about fifty feet from the rocket. It may very well spend its force there and leave us be. Get down!”
The men flopped.
“Is it coming?” they asked each other, after a moment.
“Coming.”
“Is it nearer?”
“Two hundred yards off.”
“Nearer?”
“Here she is!”
The monster came and stood over them. It dropped down ten blue bolts of lightning which struck the rocket. The rocket flashed like a beaten gong and gave off a metal ringing. The monster let down fifteen more bolts which danced about in a ridiculous pantomime, feeling of the jungle and the watery soil.
“No, no!” One of the men jumped up.
“Get down, you fool!” said the lieutenant.
“No!”
The lightning struck the rocket another dozen times. The lieutenant turned his head on his arm and saw the blue blazing flashes. He saw trees split and crumple into ruin. He saw the monstrous dark cloud turn like a black disk overhead and hurl down a hundred other poles of electricity.
The man who had leaped up was now running, like someone in a great hall of pillars. He ran and dodged between the pillars and then at last a dozen of the pillars slammed down and there was the sound a fly makes when landing upon the grill wires of an exterminator. The lieutenant remembered this from his childhood on a farm. And there was a smell of a man burned to a cinder.
The lieutenant lowered his head. “Don’t look up,” he told the others. He was afraid that he too might run at any moment.
The storm above them flashed down another series of bolts and then moved on away. Once again there was only the rain, which rapidly cleared the air of the charred smell, and in a moment the three remaining men were sitting and waiting for the beat of their hearts to subside into quiet once more.
They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man’s life. They couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not accepted death until they have touched it and turned it over and made plans to bury it or leave it there for the jungle to bury in an hour of quick growth.
The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.
“He shouldn’t have jumped up.” They said it almost at the same time.
Even as they stood over the body it began to vanish, for the vegetation was edging in upon it, little vines and ivy and creepers, and even flowers for the dead.
At a distance the storm walked off on blue bolts of lightning and was gone.
They crossed a river and a creek and a stream and a dozen other rivers and creeks and streams. Before their eyes rivers appeared, rushing, new rivers, while old rivers changed their courses—rivers the color of mercury, rivers the color of silver and milk.
They came to the sea.
The Single Sea. There was only one continent on Venus. This land was three thousand miles long by a thousand miles wide, and about this island was the Single Sea, which covered the entire raining planet. The Single Sea, which lay upon the pallid shore with little motion …
“This way.” The lieutenant nodded south. “I’m sure there are two Sun Domes down that way.”
“While they were at it, why didn’t they build a hundred more?”
“There’re a hundred and twenty of them now, aren’t there?”
“One hundred and twenty-six, as of last month. They tried to push a bill through Congress back on Earth a year ago to provide for a couple dozen more, but oh no, you know how
that
is. They’d rather a few men went crazy with the rain.”
They started south.
The lieutenant and Simmons and the third man, Pickard, walked in the rain, in the rain that fell heavily and lightly, heavily and lightly; in the rain that poured and hammered and did not stop falling upon the land and the sea and the walking people.
Simmons saw it first. “There it is!”
“There’s what?”
“The Sun Dome!”
The lieutenant blinked the water from his eyes and raised his hands to ward off the stinging blows of the rain.
At a distance there was a yellow glow on the edge of the jungle by the sea. It was, indeed, the Sun Dome.
The men smiled at each other.
“Looks like you were right, Lieutenant.”