A Sound Of Thunder Sparknotes

The story “A Sound of Thunder,” by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), opens when a man named Eckels enters the offices of Time Safari, Inc., a company that offers safaris that take hunters to any time in the past to hunt any animals they wish to shoot. Eckels presents a check for $10,000 to the clerk and asks if the company guarantees that hunters return alive from the past. The clerk replies that the company guarantees nothing but encounters with dinosaurs. Hunters must strictly obey their guides, shooting only what and when they are instructed to shoot. Any disobedience will result in a $10,000 fine plus possible government-imposed penalties.

Eckels contemplates the nearby time machine and remarks that if Keith, the progressive candidate he favored in yesterday’s presidential election, had lost the contest, Eckels might be in the office now, trying to go to some other time to escape the outcome. The clerk agrees that it would indeed have been awful if Deutscher, Keith’s opponent, had been elected. The two men quickly return, however, to discussing the opportunity Eckels will have to shoot a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The clerk warns that if Eckels is attacked and eaten by a dinosaur, the company is not liable. Six safari guides died last year, along with twice as many hunters. The clerk wants Eckels to be sure that he really wants to make the trip.

Travis, the experienced guide who will lead this safari. Travis and Eckels, carrying rifles, enter the time machine, which is already occupied by Travis’s assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters (Billings and Kramer). The machine kicks into operation and the nights, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, and millennia whiz by. Leaving A.D. 2055, the men soon arrive in the midst of a jungle that existed 60,002,055 years