or dishonesty I do not know. You see, if a time traveler goes twenty years ahead, he must necessarily become as many years older. How could it be otherwise? It has been imagined that a man’s present can be transferred to the future, his watch thereby indicating the hour of his departure while all the clocks at his destination show the hour of the future. But, needless to say, that is impossible. To accomplish this, he would have to leave time, advance outside it to the future, find the desired moment, and enter it from without … as if there existed a place outside time. But there is no place outside time and no such path. Thus with his own hands poor Molteris started the machine that killed him—killed him with old age, nothing else—and when it reaches its stopping point in the future, it will contain a gray-haired, shrunken corpse…
And now, gentlemen, the most terrible thing. The machine has come to a halt there in the future; but this building, this apartment, this room, and this empty corner are traveling through time, too—though in the only manner accessible to us—and will travel and eventually arrive at the moment when the machine came to rest. And then the machine will appear there in the white corner, and, with it, Molteris … what is left of him … and this is inevitable.
V
(The Washing Machine Tragedy)
Shortly after my return from the Eleventh Voyage, the papers began to devote increasing space to the competition between two large washing-machine manufacturers, Newton and Snodgrass.
It was probably Newton who first marketed washers so automated that they themselves separated the white laundry from the colored, and after scrubbing and wringing out the clothes, pressed, darned, hemmed, and adorned them with beautifully embroidered monograms of the owner, and sewed onto towels uplifting, stirring maxims such as “The early robot catches the oilcan.” Snodgrass’s response to this was a washer that composed quatrains for the embroidering, commensurate with the customer’s cultural level and aesthetic requirements. Newton’s next model embroidered sonnets; Snodgrass reacted with a model that kept family conversation alive during television intermissions. Newton attempted to nip this escalation in the bud; no doubt everyone remembers his full-page ads containing a picture of a sneering, bug-eyed washer and the words: “Do you want your washing machine to be smarter than you? Of course NOT !” Snodgrass, however, completely ignored this appeal to the baser instincts of the public, and in the next quarter introduced a machine that washed, wrung, soaped, rinsed, pressed, starched, darned, knitted, and conversed, and—in addition—did the children’s homework, made economic projections for the head of the family, and gave Freudian interpretations of dreams, eliminating, while you waited, complexes both Oedipal and gerontophagical. Then Newton, in despair, came out with the Superbard, a versifier-washer endowed with a fine alto voice; it recited, sang lullabies, put babies on the potty, charmed away warts, and paid ladies exquisite compliments. Snodgrass parried with an instructor-washer under the slogan: “Your washing machine will make an Einstein out of you!” Contrary to expectations, however, this model did poorly; business had fallen off 35 percent by the end of the quarter when a financial review reported that Newton was preparing a dancing washer. Snodgrass decided, in the face of imminent ruin, to take a revolutionary step. Buying up the appropriate rights and licenses from interested parties for a sum of one million dollars, he constructed, for bachelors, a washing machine endowed with the proportions of the renowned sexpot Mayne Jansfield, in platinum, and another, the Curlie McShane model, in black. Sales immediately jumped 87 percent. His opponent appealed to Congress, to public opinion, to the DAR, and to the PTA. But when Snodgrass kept supplying stores with washers of both sexes,
And now, gentlemen, the most terrible thing. The machine has come to a halt there in the future; but this building, this apartment, this room, and this empty corner are traveling through time, too—though in the only manner accessible to us—and will travel and eventually arrive at the moment when the machine came to rest. And then the machine will appear there in the white corner, and, with it, Molteris … what is left of him … and this is inevitable.
V
(The Washing Machine Tragedy)
Shortly after my return from the Eleventh Voyage, the papers began to devote increasing space to the competition between two large washing-machine manufacturers, Newton and Snodgrass.
It was probably Newton who first marketed washers so automated that they themselves separated the white laundry from the colored, and after scrubbing and wringing out the clothes, pressed, darned, hemmed, and adorned them with beautifully embroidered monograms of the owner, and sewed onto towels uplifting, stirring maxims such as “The early robot catches the oilcan.” Snodgrass’s response to this was a washer that composed quatrains for the embroidering, commensurate with the customer’s cultural level and aesthetic requirements. Newton’s next model embroidered sonnets; Snodgrass reacted with a model that kept family conversation alive during television intermissions. Newton attempted to nip this escalation in the bud; no doubt everyone remembers his full-page ads containing a picture of a sneering, bug-eyed washer and the words: “Do you want your washing machine to be smarter than you? Of course NOT !” Snodgrass, however, completely ignored this appeal to the baser instincts of the public, and in the next quarter introduced a machine that washed, wrung, soaped, rinsed, pressed, starched, darned, knitted, and conversed, and—in addition—did the children’s homework, made economic projections for the head of the family, and gave Freudian interpretations of dreams, eliminating, while you waited, complexes both Oedipal and gerontophagical. Then Newton, in despair, came out with the Superbard, a versifier-washer endowed with a fine alto voice; it recited, sang lullabies, put babies on the potty, charmed away warts, and paid ladies exquisite compliments. Snodgrass parried with an instructor-washer under the slogan: “Your washing machine will make an Einstein out of you!” Contrary to expectations, however, this model did poorly; business had fallen off 35 percent by the end of the quarter when a financial review reported that Newton was preparing a dancing washer. Snodgrass decided, in the face of imminent ruin, to take a revolutionary step. Buying up the appropriate rights and licenses from interested parties for a sum of one million dollars, he constructed, for bachelors, a washing machine endowed with the proportions of the renowned sexpot Mayne Jansfield, in platinum, and another, the Curlie McShane model, in black. Sales immediately jumped 87 percent. His opponent appealed to Congress, to public opinion, to the DAR, and to the PTA. But when Snodgrass kept supplying stores with washers of both sexes,
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