The sign on the wall seemed to shimmer and glare,
A promise of wonders beyond all compare:
TIME SAFARI, INC. read the bold, golden text,
WE TAKE YOU TO ANY YEAR, THIS ONE OR NEXT.
Eckels stood with his check, feeling nervous and bold,
To hunt the great beasts in the centuries old.

“You guarantee nothing,” the clerk warned the man,
“Except for the dinos and paths that we plan.
A check of ten thousand, or death in the wild,
The past is no place for the weak or the child.”
With Travis the guide, and three hunters beside,
They stepped in the Machine for a terrifying ride.

The engines roared loud and the steel began to spin,
Unwinding the years to the Holy Begin.
They swept past the empires, the wars, and the tombs,
To the age of the swamps and the prehistoric blooms.
“Stay on the path!” Travis ordered the crew,
“Don’t touch a single leaf, whatever you do!”

[…]

“A foot on the moss,” Travis sternly explained,
“Could alter the future, leaving destiny stained.
Step on a mouse, and you kill all its race,
And crush a whole empire right out of its place!
The safety of tomorrow depends on this track,
So walk on the metal, and never look back.”

They hid in the brush as the thunder drew near,
A trembling horror that struck them with fear.
Out of the mist came the great Tyrant King,
A mountain of muscle, a terrible thing!
It towered thirty feet o’er the trees and the mud,
With armor of grease and a hunger for blood.

“It can’t be destroyed,” Eckels gasped in dismay,
“It’s a nightmare of stone, let us get far away!”
“Don’t run!” Travis shouted, but Eckels turned round,
Blinded by terror, he stepped off the mound.
His boots sank in moss where the wild ferns grew,
Breaks the prime law that the travelers knew.

[…]

The rifles cracked loud, like a lightning bolt’s flash,
The beast hit the earth with a deafening crash.
They returned to the vessel, exhausted and red,
But Travis looked down at the hunter with dread.
He saw the wet mud on the heel of his shoe—
“You stepped off the path! Look what you’ve made us do!”

They traveled back home through the river of years,
Through decades of silence and centuries of fears.
They stepped from the box to the room of the clerk,
But something was wrong with the world and its work.
The air tasted different, the chemical smell,
Like a subtle distortion had triggered a spell.

Eckels looked at the sign that had greeted his eye,
But the words were misspelled underneath the gray sky:
TYM SAFARI INCORPORATED it read on the sheet,
And Deutscher, the tyrant, had won the elite!
With a trembling hand, Eckels lifted his shoe,
To find what a single mistake could undo.

Embedded in mud, like a jewel in the clay,
A butterfly lay, with its life stolen away.
A beautiful thing, dead and stiff in the grime,
That had shattered the future and broken all time.
He fell to his knees with a whimpering cry,
As Travis raised up the cold rifle on high.

The room went completely and utterly still,
As a sudden dread freeze settled over the hill.
No words were exchanged as the shadow grew long…
Then a sharp sound of thunder broke over the song.