The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.

Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.

Silence.

A sound of thunder.

Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.

“It,” whispered Eckels. “It……”

“Sh!”

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.

It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit area warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.

“Why, why,” Eckels twitched his mouth. “It could reach up and grab the moon.”

“Sh!” Travis jerked angrily. “He hasn't seen us yet.”

“It can't be killed,” Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. “We were fools to come. This is impossible.”

Frank Oppenheimer: “I think he [J. Robert Oppenheimer] and I were lying down right next to each other flat on the desert right outside the control [room] at the time the bomb went off.”

Robert Wilson: “When it went off … we saw what was just a tremendously overpowering vision of this thing happening. Seeing the mountain small beside it. Seeing… some kind of beauty, but awesome … as it slowly developed, went up in the air, and made the whole desert light up as if at noon. A large desert rimmed by mountains appeared to be a small place. And that was something that, once that had happened, I was a different person from then on.”

Frank Oppenheimer: “At the time it went off I think absolutely — I knew sort of what would happen but I didn't expect the heat from the flash at five miles away to be nearly that intense. And then there was a cloud, the radioactive cloud sort of hovered there.

[…]

So there was this sense of this ominous cloud hanging over us. It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactivity glowing. And it just seemed to hang there forever.

Of course it didn't. It must have been just a very short time until it went up.

It was very terrifying.

And the thunder from the blast bounced on the rocks and then went — I don't know where it bounced, but it never seemed to stop, not like an ordinary echo with thunder. It just kept echoing back and forth and then — it was a very scary time when it went off.

I wish I could remember what my brother said, but I can't. But I think we just said, 'It worked.' I think that's what we said, both of us.

And nobody knew it was going to work.”

…wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.