Years ago, probably at least twenty, I read a short story in which a group of scientists were sending a guy back in time.
Because they were concerned about his actions changing the present they’d somehow set up a series of monitors to see what was happening. But the past actions did indeed change the present, leaving the scientists unconscious of that.
Their last statements were “See! There isn’t any change at all!” Yet they were purple and blobby, with tentacles.
Do you suppose it was really a story and not something from a tv show? Because I get a visual memory from your description, and generally I don’t get mental pictures from things I’ve read, so it seems more like something I remember seeing than reading.
I remember the story but I’m drawing a complete blank on the author and title. I know I’ve read it in several collections over the years. If I can come up with anything I’ll be back.
*The Sound of Thunder *by Ray Bradbury. This is one of the all-time great classic SF short stories. It’s what *The Butterfly Effect *was based on. The way it was set up, people went back in time as a sort of safari, and were warned to stay on a path. Someone stepped off the path and stepped on a butterfly. Hence the purple tentacled things.
This is one of my favorite stories also. It’s not Sound of Thunder.
I read the story in the 80s. I have older brothers and around the house we had some of the old sci fi magazines from the late 60’s or early 70s around the house. Maybe IF?
Anyway it was in one of those magazines I think.
The story is: they send a metal sphere into the past and the future. The have to send one both ways to balance out. The one in the future always gets destroyed. They don’t know why. Probably nuclear war.
The story follows the metal sphere in the past. Its first trip into the past it displaces a few molecules. The second trip it kills an insect. The third trip is scares a T rex. Anyway, at the end of the story the scientist is pointing to the screen showing what the sphere has seen and he’s pointing to the screen with a purple tentacle and know one notices the change.
It’s called “Brooklyn Project” by William Tenn. My initial searches didn’t turn up anything until I remembered that a pendulum was somehow involved. Once I threw that into the search terms, it was all good.
Yeah apparently the trick with the spheres was they balanced out. They would go into the future and past 4 billion years, then come back to the present crash into each other then “bounce” to 2 billion years into the past and future then back to the present then “bounce” to 1 billion years and so on.
Just a note: William Tenn was one of the most prolific and popular science fiction writers of the 1950s, but today he is almost totally forgotten. Apart from “The Brooklyn Project”, I rarely see his stories anthologized.
NESFA press (http://www.nesfa.org/press/) has published all of his works in three volumes - great stuff. I should also note that Tenn is still alive - he’ll be 90 this year.
Thanks for the answer!!! I have some anthologies, but didn’t know how to go about searching most efficiently. I’ll check the indexes out now and see if I have it.