Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don't know. We're guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we're being damned careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilised, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can't introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere.” “How do we know which animals to shoot?” “They're marked with red paint,” said Travis. “Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals.” “Studying them?” “Right,” said Lesperance. “I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest. Very few.

How many times they mate. Not often. Life's short. When I find one that's going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his hide. We can't miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet -the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?” “But if you came back this morning in Time,” said Eckels eagerly, “you must've bumped into us, our Safari] How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get throughalive?” Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.

“That'd be a paradox,” said the latter. “Time doesn't permit that sort of mess a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There's no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our monster, or whether all of us meaning you, Mr. Eckels, got out alive.” Eckels smiled palely.