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.