A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

so quick—I’m scared!”
    “Our last night on Earth.”
    Now they really knew and accepted it; now the knowledge had found them out. They were going away, and they might never come back. They were leaving the town of Independence in the state of Missouri on the continent of North America, surrounded by one ocean which was the Atlantic and another the Pacific, none of which could be put in their traveling cases. They had shrunk from this final knowledge. Now it was facing them. And they were struck numb.
    “Our children, they won’t be Americans, or Earth people at all. We’ll all be Martians, the rest of our lives.”
    “I don’t want to go!” cried Janice suddenly.
    The panic froze her.
    “I’m afraid! The space, the darkness, the Rocket, the meteors! Everything gone! Why should I go out there?”
    Leonora took hold of her shoulders and held her close, rocking her. “It’s a new world. It’s like the old days. The men first and the women after.”
    “Why, why should I go, tell me!”
    “Because,” said Leonora at last, quietly, seating her on the bed, “Will is up there.”
    His name was good to hear. Janice quieted.
    “These men make it so hard,” said Leonora. “Used to be if a woman ran two hundred miles for a man it was something. Then they made it a thousand miles. And now they put a whole universe between us. But that can’t stop us, can it?”
    “I’m afraid I’ll be a fool on the Rocket.”
    “I’ll be a fool with you.” Leonora got up. “Now, let’s walk around town, let’s see everything one last time.”
    Janice stared out at the town. “Tomorrow night this’ll all be here, but we won’t. People’ll wake up, eat, work, sleep, wake again, but we won’t know it, and they’ll never miss us.”
    Leonora and Janice moved around each other as if they couldn’t find the door.
    “Come on.”
    They opened the door, switched off the lights, stepped out, and shut the door behind them.
     
    In the sky there was a great coming-in and coming-in. Vast flowering motions, huge whistlings and whirlings, snowstorms falling. Helicopters, white flakes, dropping quietly. From west and east and north and south the women were arriving, arriving. Through all the night sky you saw helicopters blizzard down. The hotels were full, private homes were making accommodations, tent cities rose in meadows and pastures like strange, ugly flowers, and the town and the country were warm with more than summer tonight. Warm with women’s pink faces and the sunburnt faces of new men watching the sky. Beyond the hills rockets tried their fire, and a sound like a giant organ, all its keys pressed upon at once, shuddered every crystal window and every hidden bone. You felt it in your jaw, your toes, your fingers, a shivering.
    Leonora and Janice sat in the drugstore among unfamiliar women.
    “You ladies look very pretty, but you sure look sad,” said the soda-fountain man.
    “Two chocolate malteds.” Leonora smiled for both of them, as if Janice were mute.
    They gazed at the chocolate drink as if it were a rare museum painting. Malts would be scarce for many years on Mars.
    Janice fussed in her purse and took out an envelope reluctantly and laid it on the marble counter.
    “This is from Will to me. It came in the Rocket mail two days ago. It was this that made up my mind for me, made me decide to go. I didn’t tell you. I want you to see it now. Go ahead, read the note.”
    Leonora shook the note out of the envelope and read it aloud:
     
    “ Dear Janice: This is our house if you decide to come to Mars. Will. ”
     
    Leonora tapped the envelope again, and a color photograph dropped out, glistening, on the counter. It was a picture of a house, a dark, mossy, ancient, caramel-brown, comfortable house with red flowers and green cool ferns bordering it, and a disreputably hair ivy on the porch.
    “But, Janice!”
    “What?”
    “This is a picture of your house, here on Earth, here on Elm Street!”
    “No. Look