"The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury

Oh, dear. Spoiled children: others, but not yours, yes?
After all, we know what happens when children are indulged in, yes?
Well, let's see if it agrees with your expectations (Cause) and results (Effect) if you have children who have their own special holographic room for fun and escape. You can be a welcome guest.

Yes, I think the parents of my generation--and the generation after ours--spoiled their children--in a lot of ways, especially about respect for their elders, their attitude toward authority, and in regard to academic values. Certainly in this story, Mr. and Mrs. Hadley have spoiled their two children--and that's not good parenting technique.  I have my reasons for my displeasure, among which are my years in teaching--and a little reminder from a friend, Mr. Ray Bradbury, whom we met earlier on a dinosaur hunt. This time, Mr. Bradbury has a different prey in mind: parents--and they're being stalked in the holographic children's nursery room that has been programmed to...The Veldt.

So, for your literary response: is there a connection to not raising children with responsibilities for their actions? How does this reflect in your life? Children as young as 3 aren't the only ones--so are many young adults. Is there really a reason to insist on not treating everyone so special so that they get whatever they want? Just take a walk in the Veldt and think about your answer. And yes: there is every reason to know this story concept is real--but it's just told in a different way. Matricide and patricide is not unknown in our culture here in the U.S.

"The Veldt"

     "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

     "What's wrong with it?"

     "I don't know."

     "Well, then."

     "I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

     "What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

     "You know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

     "It's just that the nursery is different now than it was."

     "All right, let's have a look."
 

     They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand  dollars  installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang  and was good to  them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.
 

     "Well," said George Hadley.

     They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing's too good for our children," George had said.
 

     The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional.  Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline  distance, it  seemed, and presently  an African veldt appeared, in three  dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

     George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

     "Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong."

     "Wait a moment, you'll see," said his wife.
 

     Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at

the two people in the  middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden  water  hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley's upturned, sweating face.

     "Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.

     "The vultures."

     "You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they're on their way to the water hole. They've just been eating," said Lydia. "I don't know what."

     "Some animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."

     "Are you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

     "No, it's a little late to be sure," he said, amused. "Nothing over there I can  see but cleaned  bone, and the vultures dropping for what's left."

     "Did you hear that scream?" she asked.

     'No."

     "About a minute ago?"

     "Sorry, no."
 

     The lions were coming.  And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one.
 

Oh, occasionally they frightened  you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only  your own son and daughter, but for  yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!
 

     And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your  mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and  the  yellow  of  them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French  tapestry, the yellows of  lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.
 

     The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes.
 

     "Watch out!" screamed Lydia.

     The lions came running at them.

     Lydia bolted and ran. Instinctively, George sprang after her. Outside, in the hall, with the door slammed he was laughing and she was crying, and they both stood appalled at the other's reaction.

     "George!"

     "Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!"

     "They almost got us!"

     "Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that's all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit - Africa in your parlor - but it's all dimensional, super-reactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens.  It's all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia.  Here's my handkerchief."

     "I'm afraid." She came to him and put her body against him and cried steadily. "Did you see? Did you feel? It's too real."

     "Now, Lydia..."

     "You've got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa."

     "Of course - of course." He patted her.

     "Promise?"

     "Sure."

     "And lock the nursery for a few days until I get my nerves settled."

     "You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking the nursery for even a few hours - the tantrum he threw! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery."

     "It's got to be locked, that's all there is to it."

     "All right." 

Reluctantly he locked the huge door. "You've been working too hard. You need a rest."

     "I don't know - I don't know," she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a  chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. "Maybe I don't have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don't we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?"

     "You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?"

     "Yes." She nodded.

     "And darn my socks?"

     "Yes." A frantic, watery-eyed nodding.

     "And sweep the house?"

     "Yes, yes - oh, yes!''

     "But I thought that's why we bought this house, so we wouldn't have to do anything?"

     "That's just it. I feel like I don't belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can?  I cannot.  And it isn't just me. It's you. You've been awfully nervous lately."

     "I suppose I have been smoking too much."

     "You look as if you didn't know what to do with yourself in this house, either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon and need a little more sedative every night. You're beginning to feel unnecessary too."

     "Am I?" He paused and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there.

     "Oh, George!"  She looked beyond him, at the nursery door. "Those lions can't get out of there, can they?"

     He looked at the door and saw it tremble as if something had jumped against it from the other side.

     "Of course not," he said.

At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic carnival across town and had televised home to say they'd be late, to go ahead eating. So George Hadley, bemused, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes of food from its mechanical interior.

     "We forgot the ketchup," he said.

     "Sorry," said a small voice within the table, and ketchup appeared.
 

     As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won't hurt for the children to be locked out of it awhile. Too much of anything isn't good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa.  That sun. He could feel it on his neck, still, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children's minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought  zebras, and there were zebras. Sun - sun. Giraffes - giraffes. Death and death.
 

     That last. He chewed tastelessly on the meat that the table had cut for him. Death thoughts.  They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts.  Or, no, you were never too young, really.  Long before you knew what death was, you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with cap pistols.

     But this - the long, hot African veldt--the awful death in the jaws of a lion. And repeated again and again.
 

     "Where are you going?"

     He didn't answer Lydia. Preoccupied, he let the lights glow softly on ahead of him, extinguish behind him as he padded to the nursery door. He listened against it. Far away, a lion roared.

     He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which subsided quickly.
 

     He stepped into Africa. How many  times in the last year had he opened this door and found Wonderland, Alice, the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very real-appearing moon--all the delightful contraptions of a make-believe world. How often had he seen Pegasus flying in the sky ceiling, or seen fountains of red fireworks, or heard angel voices singing. But now, this yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too  real for ten-year-old children.  It was all right to exercise one's mind with gymnastic fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern...  ? It seemed that, at a  distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and smelled their strong odor seeping as far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.
 

     George Hadley stood on the African grassland alone. The lions looked up from their feeding, watching him. The only flaw to the illusion was the open door through which he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture, eating her dinner abstractedly.

     "Go away," he said to the lions.

     They did not go.
 

     He knew the principle of the room exactly.  You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear.  "Let's have Aladdin and his lamp," he snapped. The veldtland remained; the lions remained.

     "Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!" he said.

     Nothing happened. The lions mumbled in their baked pelts.

     "Aladdin!"

     He went back to dinner. "The fool room's out of order," he said. "It won't respond."

     "Or--"

     "Or what?"

     "Or it can't respond," said Lydia, "because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room's in a rut."

     "Could be."

     "Or Peter's set it to remain that way."

     "Set it?"

     "He may have got into the machinery and fixed something."

     "Peter doesn't know machinery."

     "He's a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his -"

     "Nevertheless -"

     "Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad."
 

     The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming in the front door, cheeks like  peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone on their jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.

     "You're just in time for supper," said both parents.

     "We're full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs," said the children, holding hands. "But we'll sit and watch."

     "Yes, come tell us about the nursery," said George Hadley.

     The  brother  and  sister  blinked  at  him  and then  at  each  other.

"Nursery?"

     "All about Africa and everything," said the father with false joviality.

     "I don't understand," said Peter.

     "Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa with rod and reel; Tom Swift and his Electric Lion," said George Hadley.

     "There's no Africa in the nursery," said Peter simply.

     "Oh, come now, Peter. We know better."

     "I don't remember any Africa," said Peter to Wendy. "Do you?"

     "No."

     "Run see and come tell."

     She obeyed.

     "Wendy, come back here!" said George Hadley, but she was gone.

  The house lights followed her like a flock of fireflies.  Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last inspection.

     "Wendy'll look and come tell us," said Peter.

     "She doesn't have to tell me. I've seen it."

     "I'm sure you're mistaken, Father."

     "I'm not, Peter. Come along now."

     But Wendy was back. "It's not Africa," she said breathlessly.

     "We'll see about this," said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the nursery door.

     There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her  long  hair. The African veldtland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

     
     George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. "Go to bed," he said to the children.

     They opened their mouths.

     "You heard me," he said.

     They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves up the flue to their slumber rooms.

     George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that lay in  the comer near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife.

     "What is that?" she asked.

     "An old wallet of mine," he said.

     He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides.

     He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.

     In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake. "Do you think Wendy changed it?" she said at last, in the dark room.

     "Of course."

     "Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?"

     "Yes."

     "Why?"

     "I don't know. But it's staying locked until I find out."

     "How did your wallet get there?"

     "I don't know anything," he said, "except that I'm beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room like that -"

     "It's supposed to help them work  off  their neuroses in a healthful way."

     "I'm starting to wonder." He stared at the ceiling.

     "We've given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward--secrecy, disobedience?"

     "Who was it said, 'Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally'? We've never lifted a hand. They're insufferable - let's admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring.

They're spoiled and we're spoiled."

     "They've been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New York a few months ago."

     "They're not old enough to do that alone, I explained."

     "Nevertheless, I've noticed they've been decidedly cool toward us since."

     "I think I'll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa."

     "But it's not Africa now, it's Green Mansions country and Rima."

     "I have a feeling it'll be Africa again before then."
 

     A moment later they heard the screams.

     Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

     "Wendy and Peter aren't in their rooms," said his wife.

     He lay in his bed with his beating heart. "No," he said.  "They've broken into the nursery."

     "Those screams - they sound familiar."

     "Do they?"

     "Yes, awfully."

     And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn't be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

     "Father?" said Peter.

     "Yes."

     Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. "You aren't going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?"

     "That all depends."

     "On what?" snapped Peter.

     "On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little variety - oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China -"

     "I thought we were free to play as we wished."

     "You are, within reasonable bounds."

     "What's wrong with Africa, Father?"

     "Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?"

     "I wouldn't want the nursery locked up," said Peter coldly. "Ever."

     "Matter of fact, we're thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence."

     "That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?"

     "It would be fun for a change, don't you think?"

     "No, it would be horrid. I didn't like it when you took out the picture painter last month."

     "That's because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son."

     "I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?"

     "All right, go play in Africa."

     "Will you shut off the house sometime soon?"

     "We're considering it."

     "I don't think you'd better consider it any more, Father."

     "I won't have any threats from my son!"

     "Very well." And Peter strolled off to the nursery.

     "Am I on time?" said David McClean.

     "Breakfast?" asked George Hadley.

     "Thanks, had some. What's the trouble?"

     "David, you're a psychologist."

     "I should hope so."

     "Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?"

     "Can't say  I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing."

     They walked down the hall.  "I locked the nursery up," explained the father, "and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see."

     There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

     "There it is," said George Hadley. "See what you make of it."
 

     They walked in on the children without rapping.

     The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.

     "Run outside a moment, children," said George Hadley. "No, don't change the mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!"

     With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.

     "I wish I knew what it was," said George  Hadley.  "Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and -"

    
 David McClean laughed dryly. "Hardly." He turned to study all four walls. "How long has this been going on?"

     "A little over a month."

     "It certainly doesn't feel good."

     "I want facts, not feelings."

     "My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about  feelings; vague things.  This doesn't feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad.  This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment."

     "Is it that bad?"

     "I'm afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child's mind, study at our leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel toward destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them."

     "Didn't you sense this before?"

     "I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you're letting them down in some way. What way?"

     "I wouldn't let them go to New York."

     "What else?"

     "I've taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business."

     "Ah, ha!"

     "Does that mean anything?"

     "Everything.  Where before they had a Santa Claus, now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You've let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children's affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along  and want to shut it off. No wonder there's hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you'll have to change your life.  Like too many others, you've built it around creature comforts. Why, you'd starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn't know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It'll take time. But we'll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see."

     "But won't the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?"

     "I don't want them going any deeper into this, that's all."
 

     The lions were finished with their red feast.

     The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

     "Now I'm feeling persecuted," said McClean. "Let's get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous."

     "The lions look real, don't they?" said George Hadley. I don't suppose there's any way -"

     "What?"

     "- that they could become real?"

     "Not that I know."

     "Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?"

     "No."

     They went to the door.

     "I don't imagine the room will like being turned off," said the father.

     "Nothing ever likes to die - even a room."

     "I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?"

     "Paranoia is thick around here today," said David McClean. "You can follow it like a spoor. Hello." He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. "This yours?"

     "No." George Hadley's face was rigid. "It belongs to Lydia."

     They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

     The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.

     "You can't do that to the nursery, you can't!''

     "Now, children."

     The children flung themselves onto a couch, weeping.

     "George," said Lydia Hadley, "turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can't be so abrupt."

     "No."

     "You can't be so cruel..."

     "Lydia, it's off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we've put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We've been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!"

     And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and  every other machine be could put his hand to.
 

     The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

     "Don't let them do it!" wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. "Don't let Father kill everything." He turned to his father. "Oh, I hate you!"

     "Insults won't get you anywhere."

     "I wish you were dead!"

     "We were, for a long while. Now we're going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we're going to live."

     Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. "Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery," they wailed.

     "Oh, George," said the wife, "it can't hurt."

     "All right - all right, if they'll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever."

     "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

     "And then we're going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I'm going to dress.

You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you."

     And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself.  A minute later Lydia appeared.
 

     "I'll be glad when we get away," she sighed.

     "Did you leave them in the nursery?"

     "I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?"

     "Well, in five minutes we'll be on our way to Iowa.  Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?"

     "Pride, money, foolishness."

     "I think we'd better  get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again."

     Just then they heard the children calling, "Daddy, Mommy, come quick -

quick!"

     They went  downstairs in the air flue and ran down the  hall. The children were nowhere in sight. "Wendy? Peter!"

     They ran into the nursery. The veldtland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. "Peter, Wendy?"

     The door slammed.

     "Wendy, Peter!"

     George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.

     "Open the door!" cried George Hadley, trying the knob.  "Why, they've locked it from the outside! Peter!" He beat at the door. "Open up!"

     He heard Peter's voice outside, against the door.

     "Don't let them switch off the nursery and the house," he was saying.

     Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. "Now, don't be ridiculous, children. It's time to go. Mr. McClean'll be here in a minute and..."

     And then they heard the sounds.
 

     The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veldt grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.

     The lions.

     Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and  they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward crouching, tails stiff.

     Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

     And  suddenly they  realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

     "Well, here I am," said David McClean in the nursery doorway, "Oh, hello." He stared at the two children seated in the center of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow veldtland; above was the hot sun. He began to  perspire.  "Where are your father and mother?"

     The children looked up and smiled. "Oh, they'll be here directly."

     "Good, we must get going."  At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the shady trees.

     He squinted at the lions with his hand tip to his eyes.

     Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink.

     A shadow flickered over Mr. McClean's hot face. Many shadows flickered.

The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.

     "A cup of tea?" asked Wendy in the silence.

Ray Bradbury - "The Sound of Thunder"

 

There is something about Ray Bradbury that defies reality; 

he challenges Time as a concept...and does things 

that somehow...become true in ways that we dream and see through movies--like Jurrasic Park. 

Suppose...you COULD find a dinosaur because 

you were a hunter, but it was hunting you too?

You might hear..."The Sound of Thunder."

And that's the Cause-and-Effect composition query: can just a butterfly make a global difference in time? (The answer is yes, by the way. Even by fluttering its wings, but more so by its very existence as a species.)

So this is the point: how much does "follow directions!" really matter in the Prehistoric World of C/E? Can the consequences be THAT real? Why can't the desire for destruction have a happy ending? Isn't it fair?

=======================

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:

TIME SAFARI, INC.

SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST. YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

WE TAKE YOU THERE. YOU SHOOT IT.

A warm phlegm gathered in Eckels' throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. 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.

   "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 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. 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.

   

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant,   beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits in hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning.  A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.

      "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 Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President 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 finished it for him.

"A Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Thunder Lizard, 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. Traveling 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! A.D. 2055. A.D. zoic). 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 jaws 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 each other, and the years blazed around them.

     "Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?" Eckels felt his mouth saying.

     "If you hit them right," said Travis on the helmet radio. "Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another 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 pointed, "is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith." He indicated a metal path that struck off 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 anti- gravity 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 colour 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 even, 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."

"And all 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 ten foxes, a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a cave man, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-tooth tiger 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 of life. 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 earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one cave man, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. 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. So be careful. Stay on the Path, Never step off!"

    

 "I see," said Eckels. "Then it wouldn't pay 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 much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn't see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don't know. We're guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we're being damned careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can't introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere."

     "How do we know which animals to shoot?"

"They're marked with red paint," said Travis. "Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back 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 lives longest. 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 only 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 the latter. "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 soaring with cavernous grey wings, gigantic bats out of a delirium and a night fever. Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully. "Stop that!" said Travis. "Don't even aim for fun, damn it! 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 Christ'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 life-time, not even born or thought about yet."

     "Safety catches off, everyone!" ordered Travis. "You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Billings. Third, Kramer."

     "I've hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but Jesus, 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's 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.

     "Jesus God," whispered Eckels. "Shit!"

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It lowered 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 beautiful reptile hands feeling the air.

     "My God!" Eckels twitched his mouth. "It could reach up and grab the moon."

"Shit." Travis jerked angrily. "He hasn't seen us yet."

     "It   can't   be   killed." Eckels   pronounced   this   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 Thunder Lizard raised itself. Its armoured 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 four 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 lever of the reptile's tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweller'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, Tyrannosaurs 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 armoured 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 armour.

     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' arm. "Wait"

"Stay out of this!" Travis shook his hand away. "This son of a bitch nearly killed us. But it isn't that so much. Hell, no. It's his shoes Look at them! He ran off the Path. My God, that ruins us--Christ knows how much we'll forfeit. Tens of thousands of dollars of insurance We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the damn fool! I'll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. God 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 damn mystery! Get out there, Eckels!"

     Eckels fumbled his shirt. "Ill pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!"

     Travis glared at Eckels' chequebook 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 yellow bastard. The bullets! The bullets can't be left behind. They don't belong in the Past; they might change something. 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 that 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 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 subliminal senses warned him it was there. Thecolours, white, grey, 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 YEEH EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.

WEE TAEK YOU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT.

Eckels felt himself tall 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 won the presidential election yesterday?"

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know damn well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that damn weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts, by God!" 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.