"Sound of Thunder" Short Story

The short story “Sound of Thunder” shows what can happen when time travel goes bad. The story is about a Time Travel Safari that goes back in time to when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. The safari goes back people are allowed to shoot and kill a dinosaur. The people who run the program are very careful that you don’t go back and screw up the timeline. They have made a path, and you can only walk on it because if you step and kill something in the past, it affects the whole future. They also go back before the safari to know which dinosaurs die and shoot a red paintball at it so when the safari comes; you know what you can shoot. One safari goes back and a man named Eckels goes on a safari hoping to kill a T-Rex. He sees a T-Rex and freaks out of the size of it. The two guides then go and shoot the dinosaur. Eckels accidently steps off the path and gets dirt on the bottom of his shoe. The guide Travis wanted to leave him with the dinosaurs because Eckels has stepped off the path and they don’t know if the future will change or not. Travis then orders Eckels to remove the bullets from the T-Rex because they cannot be left behind. The group then travels back to the future and finds that the future has changed, like the spellings of English words have changed. Eckels looks at his muddy boots and finds a crushed butterfly.  Eckels begs Travis to bring him back to the past so he can undo what he did. The next thing that happens is that Eckels closes his eyes and hears Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon. The last words of the story are “There was a sound of thunder” This is an ambiguous ending because the reader isn’t sure if Travis kills Eckels or himself. This short story makes the reader think that would this really happen if humans tried to mess up the timeline of all time. Would we have the animals we know and love? Or would they have ever exsisted? What if we went back to the dinosaur age and humans were killed there? How would that affect the future? Blog post ya later! J