"The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of slid-
ing warm water, Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare,
and the sign burned in this momentary darkness:
TIME SAFABI, INC.
SAFABIS TO ANY YEAB IN THE PAST.
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.
WE TAKE YOU THEBE.
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 instruc-
tions, 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 tan-
gle, 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 in-
stant, 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, rab-
bits in hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death,
the seed death, the green death, to the time before the be-
ginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch
of a hand.
"Hell and damn," Eckels breathed, the light of the Ma-
chine on his thin face. "A real Time Machine." He shook his
head. "Makes you think. If the election had gone badly yes-
terday, 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. "Were lucky. If
Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of dic-
tatorship. There's an anti-everything man for you, a mili-