I’ve written before about my love of time travel stories, and how it was sparked at a very young age by TV shows like VOYAGERS! and movies like Time Bandits. But my love of time travel also extends to books (and comic books), not just live-action. And today I’m going to talk about one of my earliest literary examples of time travel. I think I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine first, that would be some time after I saw the 1960 film adaptation, so this story was probably the second time travel I ever read, as a young child.

In addition to horror, my mother always loved to read science fiction, and she had all the classic Ray Bradbury books, including The Golden Apples of The Sun, which was a collection of short stories that he wrote, which was originally published in 1953. So one day I read it, and this is the only story I remember from it.

What’s impressive is that it’s just an 11-page story, yet Bradbury packs in just enough world-building details and history that it feels like a full novel. Set in the far future of 2055 (which is not so far now, but probably seemed like the 31st century when this was written in 1952), our lead character is a man simply known as Eckles (everyone in this story is only identified by one name, I don’t know if that’s just a story convention to save space, or if Bradbury is implying that people only actually have one name in the future). Eckles shows up at the headquarters of Time Safari Inc., which has a time machine that takes people back into the past to hunt dinosaurs for sport.

What could go wrong?

There’s an exchange that seems out of place at first but becomes very important later. When Eckles signs in with the unnamed man who runs the front desk, they have a brief conversation about the U.S. presidential election that just took place the day before. They’re both very glad that “Keith” won, instead of his opponent “Deutscher.” Apparently, Deutscher was so bad (he’s described as “militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual”) that the man at the desk said that in recent weeks they’d been getting calls from customers wanting to know if they could book one-way trips to the past if he won, just to escape the dictatorship that he was sure to enforce on the nation (and possibly the whole world).

Then Eckles meets Travis, his safari guide, who will accompany him into the past along with his colleague Lesperance, and two other hunters named Billings and Kramer. Travis explains to them (and us) how these hunts work and how important the rules are.

Time travel is obviously very risky, and Travis mentions the huge amount of money the company has to pay the government in order to be allowed to operate. In order to avoid negatively impacting the timeline, they only hunt dinosaurs who were about to die anyway. That’s Lesperance’s job, he’s a scout who goes back in and finds certain dinosaurs and observes the time of their death. Then he brings the hunters back with him to two minutes before the dinosaur is about to die, so the hunters can shoot them and kill them, to enjoy the thrill of the hunt, but it won’t change anything since the dinosaur was going to die anyway. The hunters can get a picture of them posing next to the dead dinosaur as a souvenir and proof of their safari, but can’t take any part of the bodies back to the present with them. On this trip, they’re going to be hunting and killing a Tyrannosaurus Rex, just as it was about to be crushed to death by a large falling tree.

Lesperance also sets up a special pathway, made up of some futuristic anti-gravity metal, which levitates 6 inches off the ground. Travis tells the crew that they must stay on the path, and never step off it because they can’t touch anything in the past, not even a blade of grass because they have no idea how that could screw up the timeline. Eckles doesn’t understand so, in a clever bit of foreshadowing, that admittedly practically gives away the ending of this story, Travis gives a hypothetical example of how even killing a single mouse in the past could drastically change the present.

To paraphrase: Kill one mouse, you kill all the descendants of that mouse, which could be as much as a billion possible mice that now never exist. So, in the future, a fox that could count on mice to live could now starve to death, and then a lion could starve because of no fox, keep going up a few centuries until a caveman can’t find an animal to eat and he starves, which wipes out all of his descendants.

“Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life.”

Travis goes on to speculate that something like this could lead to hypothetical scenarios like the pyramids never getting built or the Roman Empire never being formed. Thus, no matter what, they all must stay on the pathway.

The group arrives 65 million years in the past. They exit the machine wearing something similar to astronaut suits, complete with helmets and oxygen masks since they can’t even risk introducing any of their bacteria into the air, and start walking on the path to where Lesperance has checked that the T-Rex will be. But Eckles panics when he actually sees the dinosaur in person, It’s even bigger than he’s ever imagined how it would be, and it’s terrifying. And when the T-Rex sees them and roars at them as it starts to approach, Eckles totally freaks the fuck out and ends up running away in the wrong direction.

Travis, Lesperance, Billings and Kramer fire their guns and kill the T-Rex, and then head back to the machine, where they find Eckles waiting for them, still in a panic from what he saw. Travis is pissed off, as he sees that Eckles boots are covered in mud, indicating that he’s stepped off of the pathway on his way back to the time machine. Travis is so angry that he’s ready to leave Eckles there in the past, although Lesperance talks him out of it (as that would just make things potentially worse anyway). As they all ride the time machine back to 2055, Travis continues to glare at Eckles, who insists that he didn’t do anything wrong. So he stepped in some mud, what’s the big deal, that couldn’t possibly affect anything. Right?

My favorite of the story is the way Bradbury reveals that things have changed when they return to 2055 and stop back in the office. He writes:

“The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left it. The same man sat behind the desk,. But the same man did not quite sit behind the desk.”

As Travis orders Eckles to get out, it’s Eckles who pauses as he’s the first to notice that something is not right. The air smells a little different, and the colors of the walls and furniture in the office look a little different, although he can’t really determine exactly what’s different. But then he noticed the sign on the wall, which had sai Time Safari Inc., Safaris To Any Year In The Past, but it now says Tyme Sefari Inc., Sefaris Tu Any Yeer In The Past. Then he asks the man behind the desk who won the presidential election, and the man replies that it was Deutscher, and he’s very happy that he won instead of “that weakling Keith.”

In shock, Eckles checks the bottom of his boots, and embedded in the mud he finds one dead butterfly, and he can’t believe that “a little thing like that” could really cause these major changes in history. He turns to Travis to plead if they could use the time machine to go back again and fix things, but Travis simply aims his rifle at Eckles and pulls the trigger, with the sound of the gunshot being described as “a sound of thunder.”

What a great story. And, again, it’s only 11 pages! It could have easily been stretched out into a full-length novel, or novella, but it would have been unnecessary. No extra details or dialog are needed.

While not the first time travel story, this was the first to really address the possible dangers of changing the past, and introduce the concept that even one small event in the past (in this case, stepping on a butterfly) could change significant events in the present. Thus this is probably the most influential time travel story as many many stories that followed it have used this concept.

Regarding the Keith/Deutscher election, I remember back in late 2016 after Donald Trump got elected, I thought of this story and joked to my mother that I wondered if some time traveler was responsible for that.

This story has been adapted for television and a movie, but neither is as satisfying as reading this little short story.