Memoirs of a Space Traveler

by Stanisław Lem

  "Could you tell me now what you want from me?" I asked when he had collected himself.

  "Help," he mumbled. "Support -- not charity. Let it be. . . an advance on a share in future profits. A time vehicle -- surely you realize -- " He stopped short.

  I nodded. "You need a lot of money."

  "A lot. Great amounts of energy are involved. Besides, the chronoscope -- to make the transposed body reach the exact time desired -- still requires work."

  "How much?" I prompted.

  "A year, at least."

  "Fine, I understand. But I'll have to seek. . . the help of third parties. Financiers. If you have no objection."

  "No, of course not."

  "Good. I'll lay my cards on the table. Most people in my shoes would assume -- after what you've told me -- that they were dealing with a trick, an ingenious swindle. But I believe you. I believe you and will do what I can. That will take time, of course. At the moment I am very busy. Also, I will need to consult --"

  "Physicists?" he shot out. He was listening with the greatest attention.

  "No, why? You're touchy on that point -- no, please. I am not prying. But I'll need advice in choosing the most suitable people, those willing. . ."

  I broke off. The thought must have occurred to him the instant it occurred to me. His eyes flashed.

  "Mr. Tichy," he said, "you don't have to consult anyone. I myself will tell you who to go to."

  "Using your machine, you mean?"

  He smiled triumphantly.

  "I should have thought of it before. What an ass I am!"

  "You've already traveled in time, then?" I asked.

  "No. The machine has been working for only a short while -- since last Friday, to be exact. I sent a cat. . ."

  "A cat? And it returned?"

  "No. It went five years, give or take a year, into the future; the calibration is not yet precise. Precision in determining the point of cessation of time displacement necessitates the inclusion of a differentiator able to coordinate the field warps. As it is, the desynchronization caused by the quantum tunnel effect. . ."

  "Unfortunately, I don't understand a thing you're saying. But you haven't tried it yourself?"

  It seemed odd to me, not to use another word. Molteris was flustered.

  "I planned to, but, you see, I -- my landlord turned off the electricity on Sunday."

  His face -- the normal, right side of his face -- went scarlet.

  "I'm behind in the rent. . ." he stammered. "But yes, you're right. I'll do it at once. I'll climb in, like this. Now I'll turn on the machine. When I reach the future, I'll find out who financed the undertaking. I'll get their names, and that will make it possible for you to. . ."

  "Wait," I said. "I don't like this. How will you return if the machine stays here with me?"

  He smiled.

  "Ah, no. I'll be traveling along with the machine. This is possible -- it has two adjustments. Here, this variometer, see? If I send something through time and want the machine to stay, I focus the field into this little space under the hatch. But if I want to move through time myself, I expand the field so that it includes the whole machine. Except that the power consumption will be greater. How many amps are your fuses?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But I don't think they'll take the load. Even before, when you . . . sent that book, the lights dimmed."

  "No problem. I can replace the fuses with larger ones, if you don't mind; that is. . ."

  "Be my guest."

  He set to work. His pockets were a compact electronics workshop. In ten minutes he was done.

  "I'm off," he said, coming back into the room. "I'll need to go at least thirty years forward."

  "Why so far?" I asked. We stood before the black machine.

  "In a few years, specialists will know about the project, but in a quarter of a century every child will. It will be taught in school, and I will be able to get from any passer-by the names of the people who sponsored it."

  He smiled wanly, shook his head, and got into the machine with both his feet.

  "The lights are flickering," he said, "but that's nothing. The fuses will hold. But. . . there may be a problem with the return trip."

  "How do you mean?"

  He threw a quick glance at me.

  "You never saw me here before?"

  "What are you saying?" I did not follow.

  "Well, yesterday, or a week or month ago -- even a year ago -- you never saw me? Here, in this corner, did a man ever suddenly appear, with both his feet in such a machine?"

  "Ah!" I cried, "I understand. You're afraid that when you return, you might overshoot the mark and come to rest some time in the past. But no, I never saw you before. True, I returned from a voyage nine months ago; before then my apartment was unoccupied."

  "One minute . . ." He frowned. "I'm not sure myself. If I was here before -- for instance, when your apartment was unoccupied, as you say -- then I should remember that, shouldn't I?"

  "Not at all," I was quick to reply. "That's the paradox of the time loop. You were somewhere else then and doing other things -- the you of then, I mean. Of course, you could accidentally enter that then from this now, in which case --"

  "Well," he said, "it doesn't really matter. If I go back too far, I'll make a correction. At the worst, the project will be delayed a little. Anyway, it is my first experiment and I must ask for your patience."

  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 Trage
dy)

  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, more and more beautiful and seductive, Newton gave in and introduced the custom-built washers, which received the figure, coloring, size, and likeness chosen by the customer according to the photograph enclosed with his order. While the two giants of the washing-machine industry thus engaged in all-out war, their products began to exhibit unexpected and dangerous tendencies. The wet-nurse washers were bad enough, but washers that led to the ruin of promising young men and women, that tempted, seduced, and taught bad language to children -- they were a serious family problem, not to mention washers with which one could cheat on one's husband or wife! Those manufacturers of washing machines who still remained in business told the public, in ads, that the Jansfield-McShane washer represented an abuse of the high ideals of automated laundering (which was intended, after all, to strengthen and support the domestic way of life), since this washer could hold no more than a dozen handkerchiefs or one pillowcase, the rest of its interior being occupied by machinery that had not a thing to do with laundering -- quite the contrary. These appeals had no effect. The snowballing cult of beautiful washers even tore a considerable part of the public away from their television sets. And that was only the beginning. Washers endowed with full spontaneity of action formed clandestine groups and engaged in shady operations. Whole gangs of them entered into cahoots with criminal elements, became involved with the underworld, and gave their owners terrible problems.

  Congress saw that it was time to intervene with legislative action in this chaos of free enterprise, but before its deliberations had produced a remedy, the market was glutted with wringers that had curves no one could resist, with genius floor polishers, and with a special armored model of washing machine, the Shotamatic; allegedly designed for children playing cowboys and Indians, this washer, after a simple modification, could destroy any target with rapid fire. During a rumble between the Struzelli gang and the terror of Manhattan, the Byron Phums -- this was when the Empire State Building was blown up -- among the casualties on both sides were more than one hundred and twenty cooking appliances armed to the lid.

  Then Senator MacFlacon's Act went into effect. According to this law, an owner was not held responsible for the actions of his intelligent devices to the extent that such occurred without his knowledge or consent. Unfortunately, the law opened the way for numerous abuses. Owners entered into secret pacts with their washers or wringers, so that, when the machine committed a crime, the owner, hauled into court, got off by invoking the MacFlacon Act.

  It became necessary to amend this law. The new MacFlacon-Glumbkin Act granted intelligent devices a limited legal status, chiefly as regarded culpability. It stipulated punishments in the form of five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty years of forced washing, or of floor polishing augmented by deprivation of oil, and there were physical punishments up to and including short-circuiting. But the implementation of this law also encountered obstacles. For example, the Humperlson case: the washer, when charged with the perpetration of numerous holdups, was taken apart by its owner, and the pile of wires and pipes was placed before the court. An amendment was then added to the law -- known henceforth, as the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney Act -- establishing that the making of any alteration in an electrobrain under investigation constituted a punishable offense.

  Then the Ciaccopocorelli case. Ciaccopocorelli's sink frequently dressed in its owner's suits, proposed marriage to various women, and swindled them out of their money. When caught in flagrante by the police, the sink dismantled itself before the eyes of the astounded detectives, whereupon it lost all memory of the crime and therefore could not be punished. There followed the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney-Hemmling-Piaffki Act, according to which a brain that dismantled itself in order to avoid trial would be summarily scrapped.

  This law, it seemed, would serve to deter any electrobrain from criminal activity, since such a machine, like any sentient being, possessed the instinct of self-preservation. It turned out, however, that accomplices of the criminal washers were buying their scrapped remains and rebuilding them. A proposal to add an antiresurrection clause to the MacFlacon Act, though approved by a congressional committee, was torpedoed by Senator Davis; shortly thereafter it was discovered that Senator Davis was a washer. It has been the custom, since then, to tap congressmen before each session; a two-and-a-half-pound mallet is traditionally used for this purpose.

  The Murdstone case came next. Murdstone's washer flagrantly tore his shirts, ruined radio reception throughout the neighborhood with static, propositioned old men and juveniles, telephoned various individuals and -- impersonating its owner -- extorted money from them; it invited the neighbors' floor polishers and washers in to look at postage stamps but then performed immoral acts upon them; and in its spare time the machine indulged in vagrancy and panhandling. Brought before a court, it presented the testimony of a licensed electrical engineer, Edgar P. Dusenberry, which stated that the aforesaid washer was subject to periodic fits of insanity, as a result of which fits it was beginning to imagine that it was human. Experts summoned by the court confirmed this diagnosis, and Murdstone's washer was acquitted. No sooner was the acquittal pronounced than it pulled out a Luger and with three shots took the life of the assistant prosecutor, who had called for the machine's shortcircuiting. It was arrested but later released on bail. The court was faced with a predicament: the washer's certified insanity precluded its indictment; nor could it be placed in an asylum, there being no institutions for mentally ill washers. The legal solution came only with the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney-Hemmling-Piaffki-Snow-Juarez Act, and it came in the nick of time, for the Murdstone casus was generating a tr
emendous public demand for electrobrains non compos mentis, and some companies had actually begun to produce intentionally deranged machines. At first there were two versions -- the Sadomat and the Masomat. But Newton (who prospered phenomenally, having filled -- as the most progressive of the manufacturers -- 30 percent of his firm's board of directors with washers, to serve in an advisory capacity at the general meeting of shareholders) turned out a universal machine, the Sadomastic. It was suited equally well for beating or for being beaten, and had an incendiary attachment for pyromaniacs and iron feet for fetishists. Rumors that he was preparing to turn out a special model, the Narcissimatic, were spread maliciously by the competition. The law now provided for the establishment of special asylums where perverted washers, floor polishers, and the like would be confined.

  Meanwhile, hordes of mentally sound products of Newton, Snodgrass, et al., upon gaining legal status, began taking advantage of their constitutional rights. They banded together spontaneously, formed such groups as the Humanless Society and the League of Electronic Egalitarianism, and held pageants, such as the Miss Universe Washing Machine Contest.

  Congress strove to keep up with this furious pace of development and to curb it with legislation. Senator Groggs deprived intelligent appliances of their right to acquire real estate; Congressman Caropka, of their copyright in the area of the fine arts -- which, again, led to a rash of abuses, since creative washers began hiring less talented, albeit human writers, in order to use their names in publishing essays, novels, dramas, etc. Finally, the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney-Hemmling-Piaffki-Snow-Juarez-Swenson-Iskowitz-Groggs-Javor-Sacks-Holloway-LeBlanc Act stated that intelligent machines could not be their own property but belonged only to the human who had acquired or constructed them, and that their progeny were likewise the property of said owner(s). It was generally believed that the law now covered all contingencies and would prevent situations that could not be resolved legally. It was an open secret, of course, that wealthy electrobrains, having made their fortune in stock-market speculation or occasionally in outright skulduggery, continued to prosper by concealing their maneuverings behind fictitious, supposedly human companies or corporations. There were already many people who, for material gain, rented their identities to intelligent machines, not to mention those hired by electronic millionaires: as living secretaries, servants, mechanics, and even laundresses and accountants.