Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

Grach ran towards his target; there was plenty of noise now to cover his approach—cracking chitin, whooping Morlocks, the harsh screams of the giant white butterfly-like beasts swooping overhead. The crab’s rear was to Grach, and it did not turn around as he came closer and closer still.

When at last he’d reached the hideous creature, Grach planted his rod in the moist ground, then reached out with his hands. He got his flat palms underneath the left edge of the crab’s carapace. With all the strength he could muster, he lifted the side of the crab.

The segmented legs on that side began to move frantically as they lost contact with the ground. As Grach tipped the creature more and more he could see the complex workings of its underbelly. For its part, the crab couldn’t observe what Grach was doing; its eyestalks lacked the reach to see underneath. Still, its claws were snapping in panicky spasms. Grach continued to lift, more, more, more still, until at last the thing’s body was vertical rather than horizontal. A final mighty shove toppled the crab over sideways onto its back. Legs worked rapidly, trying to find purchase; the forward claws attempted to right the crab, but they weren’t succeeding.

After retrieving his metal rod, Grach jumped onto the thing’s underbelly, landing on his knees, the hideous articulations of the limbs shifting and sliding beneath him. He then took his rod in both hands, held it high over his head, and drove it down with all his strength. The rod poked through the creature’s underside and soon was slipping easily through its soft innards. Grach felt it resist again as it reached the far side of the shell, but he leaned now with both hands and all of his body’s weight on the end of his pole, and at last the exoskeleton gave way. The crab convulsed for a time, but eventually it expired, impaled on the sandy beach.

The battle continued for much of—well, it felt to Grach the length of an afternoon, but there was no way to tell. When it was done, though, a dozen crabs were dead, and the others had fled, abandoning not just the beach but their fused-sand buildings, which were to become the initial surface dwellings of the Morlock race.

* * *

Of course, there had to be two great battles. The first—or second; the order of events was so hard to keep straight when time travel was involved—was the one that had already taken place here on the beach. And, naturally, no one would undertake the second battle (or was it the first?) until after the Morlocks had safely secured the far future for themselves.

It had taken Grach and the others quite some time—that word again— to comprehend it all, and perhaps their understanding of such matters was still faulty. But the reasoning they came up with seemed to make sense: first, ensure that the crabs could be routed in the far future, clearing the way for all the Morlocks to travel forward and live again on the surface.

But, with the battle in the future over, the Morlocks couldn’t simply leave the Eloi to make their own way in the past. After all, once the Morlocks had traveled forward, the Eloi would venture underground. Oh, surely not at first—months or even years might elapse before the Eloi decided the Morlocks really were gone before any of those timid, frail creatures would dare to climb down the ladders on the inside of the access wells, thereby entering the underworld. But eventually they would—perhaps, Grach thought, led by that bold female who had narrowly survived accompanying the giant during so much of his visit—and just as the Morlocks were now about to regain the surface, so the Eloi would regain what had once been theirs, as well: equipment and tools, technology and power.

Simple experiments with the time machines had proven that changes made in the past would eventually catch up with the future. The time machines, because of their temporal alacrity, allowed one to arrive in the future ahead of the wave of change barreling through the fourth dimension at a less speedy rate. But eventually effect caught up with cause, and the world was remade to conform to its modified past. And so though the beach might now appear as Grach and the others wished it to, there was still a chance that reality would be further modified.