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After returning to the machine, the hunters find Eckels sitting on the floor and shaking. Travis refuses to take Eckels back to the present day because his foolish actions have put them all in danger. Lesperance, however, insists that they take him back.
Travis points at the mud at the bottom of Eckels’s shoes, which indicates that he has stepped off the path. Travis fears that on return, when they report the incident, they will lose thousands of dollars in insurance and that their license might be revoked. But more importantly, he worries that Eckels’s misstep might have altered the future. Eckels offers to pay Travis one hundred thousand dollars to take him home, but Travis gets even angrier.
As punishment, Travis orders Eckels to put his hands into the Tyrannosaurus’s mouth to pull out the bullets; they do not belong in the past. Eckels reluctantly completes the task, returns, and falls on the floor of the time machine. Travis continues to blame Eckels, and Eckels keeps maintaining his innocence.
The time machine starts, and they return to the year 2055. After exiting the time machine, Travis and the others notice that something in the room has changed. Everything looks familiar yet differs slightly from the world they left behind. The man behind the desk is the same man, but he has somehow changed. The sensations in the air and the colors around Eckels seem odd and strange.
Travis is worried and instructs Eckels to leave immediately and never return. Eckels is too baffled to move. The air around Eckels has an unnatural chemical taint. Eckels cannot stop thinking about what changes might have occurred outside the four walls of the room.
Eckels suddenly notices a dramatic change. The spellings on the office wall sign have been altered. It now reads, in part, “Wee Taek Yu Thair. Yu Shoot Itt.” On seeing this, Eckels falls on a chair and checks the bottom of his shoe. He fumbles through the slime and mud on its sole and finds a dead butterfly. He tries to calm himself by saying that killing one butterfly could not have made significant changes in the world. He asks the man behind the counter about the result of the last presidential election. Surprised, the man tells him that Deutscher won, and expresses his allegiance.
Eckels cries loudly and falls to his knees. He grabs the butterfly and asks if it can be brought back to life. He cries for help but is unable to move. He hears the loud sound of Travis’s breathing and the sound of the safety being released on Travis’s rifle. Travis raises the weapon, and the story ends with “a sound of thunder.”
