Memoirs of a Space Traveler

He leaned over and pushed a button. The lights dimmed at once; the machine gave a faint, high-pitched tone like a glass rod that had been struck. Molteris raised one hand in a farewell gesture and with the other flipped the black lever, straightening himself at the same time. The tubes glowed with their full light again, and I saw his figure change. The clothing on him darkened and blurred, but I paid no attention to that, astounded by what was happening to his head. The black hair became transparent and simultaneously turned white. The body dissolved and shrank, and when he disappeared, along with his machine, and when I found myself facing an empty corner of the room, an empty floor — a white, bare wall in which there was no plug — when, I say, I stood there open-mouthed, with a cry of horror frozen in my throat, I could still see the gruesome metamorphosis that had come over him. Because, gentlemen, as he disappeared, swept away by time, he also aged at an incredible rate. He must have gone through decades in a fraction of a second! I tottered to a chair, moved it to have a clear view of that empty, brightly lit corner, sat, and began to wait. I waited the whole night, until morning. Seven years, gentlemen, have passed since then. I do not believe that he will ever return, for, caught up in his idea, he forgot about a simple, an extremely simple, a truly elementary thing, yet one that all the authors of science fiction neglect to mention, whether out of ignorance 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.