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after H.G. Wells

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The above rendering of the text is the author’s preferred edition. Because of the non-standard formatting, we had to publish the text as an image in order to achieve the effect the author desired. To make the story as accessible as possible, we’re including the full text below using standard formatting practices. —eds.

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“I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. All trace of the moon had vanished. The machine was standing on a sloping beach. Quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me, a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as a table, legs moving slowly and uncertainly, big claws swaying, its long antennæ like carters’ whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and blotched with greenish incrustations. The many palps of its complicated mouth flickered and felt as it moved. With a frightful qualm, I turned and saw another monster crab just behind me, its mouth all alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed months between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the foliated sheets of intense green. I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. I moved on centuries, and there was the same red sun, the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.”

This is our struggle. We scuttle on the sand before the softly breathing salt-burdened sea with the lichen on the rocks a bright poison green and great white butterflies screaming under a red sky while we dream of justice and watch the ghost of a long-extinct rat ancestor, an ancestrat if you please, you know the ones we mean, the toothy ones who built dams to block the rivers, the handsy ones who built towers to block the skies, and choked on their own leavings. The ancestrat is a traveller through time. It is quite a large specimen nearly big as we are we think it would be quite long if unfolded but it has always been seated sideways in its nest of brass and ivory, about to fall over, bare front paws grasping at the rods and dials it lives so slowly but must be breathing very fast because over the generations we have tracked several breaths in. And out. So. Very. Slowly. It has stood on the beach almost never moving flickering slightly for uncounted generations shellless meat out eyes bulging is it fear is it prurience is it shock is it a cardiac event we are uncertain and time will tell but so much time will pass in the telling that we will have quite forgotten the question this is our struggle. He is so almost but not quite palpable that our palps palpitate and it is said by old cracked shells that if we could only catch him tight in our pincers we could see such wonders as a yellow sun, a blue sky, the small old moon that was lost. Still he lives one second at a time, as we do. We study him in his stillness and understand his project, his yearning for a solved future, a future past the struggle, a future in which the revolution has already been carcinized. He wishes to skip past the difficult part, to fast-forward the boring bits, to sidestep history and arrive in the golden city, fully automated and luxurious. But see him grimace frozen as history passes without him, a self-fulfilling failure for the rat era. We who have studied their fossil leavings and understood something of their symbology slowly over the generations we decide to raise a massive construction into orbit, an icon we think he can’t miss and might be able to read, so that he might see it overhead down the aeons and know that we understood what he was looking for, and that it was to be found here among us. But he accelerated in his journey and moved on into a dead future before we had raised more than the sickle into the sky.