TEXT: THE CYBERIAD
  FABLES FOR THE
  CYBERNETIC AGE
  STANISLAW LEM
  Translated from the Polish by MICHAEL KANDEL
  Illustrated by DANIEL MROZ
  A CONTINUUM BOOK
  THE SEABURY PRESS
  NEW YORK
  English translation copyright © 1974 by The Seabury Press, Inc. Printed in the
  United States of America.
  Original edition: Cyberiada, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Cracow, 1967, 1972
  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for
  brief reviews, without the written permission of the publisher.
  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
  Lem, Stanislaw. The cyberiad.
  (A continuum book)
  I. Title.
  Contents
  How the World Was Saved
  Trurl's Machine
  
  How the World Was Saved
  A Good Shellacking
  THE SEVEN SALLIES OF TRURL AND KLAPAUCIUS
  The First Sally, or The Trap of Gargantius
  The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard
  The Second Sally, or The Offer of King Krool
  The Third Sally, or The Dragons of Probability
  The Fourth Sally, or How Trurl Built a Femfatalatron to Save Prince
  Pantagoon from the Pangs of Love, and How Later He Resorted to a
  Cannonade of Babies
  The Fifth Sally, or The Mischief of King Balerion
  The Fifth Sally (A), or Trurl's Prescription
  The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of
  the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg
  The Seventh Sally, or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good
  Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius
  Altruizine
  FROM THE CYPHROEROTICON, OR TALES OF
  DEVIATIONS, SUPERFIXATIONS AND ABERRATIONS OF THE
  HEART
  Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal
  THE CYBERIAD
  
  How the World Was Saved
  One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything
  starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then
  nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and
  numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not
  completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noodles,
  nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads, and natrium. This last it could not do,
  and Trurl, considerably irritated, demanded an explanation.
  "Never heard of it," said the machine.
  "What? But it's only sodium. You know, the metal, the element…"
  "Sodium starts with an s, and I work only in n."
  "But in Latin it's natrium."
  "Look, old boy," said the machine, "if I could do everything starting with n in every
  possible language, I'd be a Machine That Could Do Everything in the Whole Alphabet,
  since any item you care to mention undoubtedly starts with n in one foreign language or
  another. It's not that easy. I can't go beyond what you programmed. So no sodium."
  "Very well," said Trurl and ordered it to make Night, which it made at once—small
  perhaps, but perfectly nocturnal. Only then did Trurl invite over his friend Klapaucius the
  constructor, and introduced him to the machine, praising its extraordinary skill at such
  length, that Klapaucius grew annoyed and inquired whether he too might not test the
  machine.
  "Be my guest," said Trurl. "But it has to start with n."
  "N?" said Klapaucius. "All right, let it make Nature."
  The machine whined, and in a trice Trurl's front yard was packed with naturalists.
  They argued, each publishing heavy volumes, which the others tore to pieces; in the
  distance one could see flaming pyres, on which martyrs to Nature were sizzling; there was
  thunder, and strange mushroom-shaped columns of smoke rose up; everyone talked at
  once, no one listened, and there were all sorts of memoranda, appeals, subpoenas and
  other documents, while off to the side sat a few old men, feverishly scribbling on scraps of
  paper.
  "Not bad, eh?" said Trurl with pride. "Nature to a T, admit it!"
  But Klapaucius wasn't satisfied.
  "What, that mob? Surely you're not going to tell me that's Nature?"
  
  "Then give the machine something else," snapped Trurl. "Whatever you like." For a
  moment Klapaucius was at a loss for what to ask. But after a little thought he declared
  that he would put two more tasks to the machine; if it could fulfill them, he would admit
  that it was all Trurl said it was. Trurl agreed to this, whereupon Klapaucius requested
  Negative.
  "Negative?!" cried Trurl. "What on earth is Negative?"
  "The opposite of positive, of course," Klapaucius coolly replied. "Negative attitudes,
  the negative of a picture, for example. Now don't try to pretend you never heard of
  Negative. All right, machine, get to work!"
  The machine, however, had already begun. First it manufactured antiprotons, then
  antielectrons, antineutrons, antineutrinos, and labored on, until from out of all this
  antimatter an antiworld took shape, glowing like a ghostly cloud above their heads.
  "H'm," muttered Klapaucius, displeased. "That's supposed to be Negative? Well… let's
  say it is, for the sake of peace. … But now here's the third command: Machine, do
  Nothing!"
  The machine sat still. Klapaucius rubbed his hands in triumph, but Trurl said:
  "Well, what did you expect? You asked it to do nothing, and it's doing nothing."
  "Correction: I asked it to do Nothing, but it's doing nothing."
  "Nothing is nothing!"
  "Come, come. It was supposed to do Nothing, but it hasn't done anything, and
  therefore I've won. For Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill
  nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is
  to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme, in
  its very own nonperson!"
  "You're confusing the machine!" cried Trurl. But suddenly its metallic voice rang out:
  "Really, how can you two bicker at a time like this? Oh yes, I know what Nothing is,
  and Nothingness, Nonexistence, Nonentity, Negation, Nullity and Nihility, since all these
  come under the heading of n, n as in Nil. Look then upon your world for the last time,
  gentlemen! Soon it shall no longer be…"
  The constructors froze, forgetting their quarrel, for the machine was in actual fact
  doing Nothing, and it did it in this fashion: one by one, various things were removed from
  the world, and the things, thus removed, ceased to exist, as if they had never been. The
  machine had already disposed of nolars, nightzebs, nocs, necs, nallyrakers, neotremes and
  nonmalrigers. At moments, though, it seemed that instead of reducing, diminishing and
  subtracting, the machine was increasing, enhancing and adding, since it liquidated, in
  turn: nonconformists, nonentities, nonsense, nonsupport, nearsightedness,
  narrowmindedness, naughtiness, neglect, nausea, necrophilia and nepotism. But after a
  while the world very definitely began to thin out around Trurl and Klapaucius.
  "Omigosh!" said Trurl. "If only nothing bad comes out of all this…"
  "Don't worry," said Klapaucius. "You can see it's not producing Universal Nothingness,
  but only causing the absence of whatever starts with n. Which is really nothing in the way
  of nothing, and nothing is what your machine, dear Trurl, is worth!"
  
  "Do not be deceived," replied the machine. "I've begun, it's true, with everything in n,
  but only out of familiarity. To create however is one thing, to destroy, another thing
  entirely. I can blot out the world for the simple reason that I'm able to do anything and
  everything—and everything means everything—in n, and consequently Nothingness is
  child's play for me. In less than a minute now you will cease to have existence, along with
  everything else, so tell me now, Klapaucius, and quickly, that I am really and truly
  everything I was programmed to be, before it is too late."
  "But—" Klapaucius was about to protest, but noticed, just then, that a number of
  things were indeed disappearing, and not merely those that started with n. The
  constructors were no longer surrounded by the gruncheons, the targalisks, the shupops,
  the calinatifacts, the thists, worches and pritons.
  "Stop! I take it all back! Desist! Whoa! Don't do Nothing!!" screamed Klapaucius. But
  before the machine could come to a full stop, all the brashations, plusters, laries and zits
  had vanished away. Now the machine stood motionless. The world was a dreadful sight.
  The sky had particularly suffered: there were only a few, isolated points of light in the
  heavens—no trace of the glorious worches and zits that had, till now, graced the horizon!
  "Great Gauss!" cried Klapaucius. "And where are the gruncheons? Where my dear,
  favorite pritons? Where now the gentle zits?!"
  "They no longer are, nor ever will exist again," the machine said calmly. "I executed,
  or rather only began to execute, your order…"
  "I tell you to do Nothing, and you… you…"
  "Klapaucius, don't pretend to be a greater idiot than you are," said the machine. "Had
  I made Nothing outright, in one fell swoop, everything would have ceased to exist, and
  that includes Trurl, the sky, the Universe, and you—and even myself. In which case who
  could say and to whom could it be said that the order was carried out and I am an efficient
  and capable machine? And if no one could say it to no one, in what way then could I, who
  also would not be, be vindicated?"
  "Yes, fine, let's drop the subject," said Klapaucius. "I have nothing more to ask of you,
  only please, dear machine, please return the zits, for without them life loses all its charm
  …"
  "But I can't, they're in z," said the machine. "Of course, I can restore nonsense,
  narrowmindedness, nausea, necrophilia, neuralgia, nefariousness and noxiousness. As for
  the other letters, however, I can't help you."
  "I want my zits!" bellowed Klapaucius.
  "Sorry, no zits," said the machine. "Take a good look at this world, how riddled it is
  with huge, gaping holes, how full of Nothingness, the Nothingness that fills the bottomless
  void between the stars, how everything about us has become lined with it, how it darkly
  lurks behind each shred of matter. This is your work, envious one! And I hardly think the
  future generations will bless you for it…"
  "Perhaps… they won't find out, perhaps they won't notice," groaned the pale
  Klapaucius, gazing up incredulously at the black emptiness of space and not daring to look
  his colleague, Trurl, in the eye. Leaving him beside the machine that could do everything
  in n, Klapaucius skulked home—and to this day the world has remained honeycombed
  with nothingness, exactly as it was when halted in the course of its liquidation. And as all
  
  subsequent attempts to build a machine on any other letter met with failure, it is to be
  feared that never again will we have such marvelous phenomena as the worches and the
  zits—no, never again.
  Trurl's Machine
  Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking machine. When
  it was finished, he gave it a coat of white paint, trimmed the edges in lavender, stepped
  back, squinted, then added a little curlicue on the front and, where one might imagine the
  forehead to be, a few pale orange polkadots. Extremely pleased with himself, he whistled
  an air and, as is always done on such occasions, asked it the ritual question of how much is
  two plus two.
  The machine stirred. Its tubes began to glow, its coils warmed up, current coursed
  through all its circuits like a waterfall, transformers hummed and throbbed, there was a
  clanging, and a chugging, and such an ungodly racket that Trurl began to think of adding a
  special mentation muffler. Meanwhile the machine labored on, as if it had been given the
  most difficult problem in the Universe to solve; the ground shook, the sand slid underfoot
  from the vibration, valves popped like champagne corks, the relays nearly gave way
  under the strain. At last, when Trurl had grown extremely impatient, the machine ground
  to a halt and said in a voice like thunder: SEVEN!
  "Nonsense, my dear," said Trurl. "The answer's four. Now be a good machine and
  adjust yourself! What's two and two?"
  "SEVEN!" snapped the machine. Trurl sighed and put his coveralls back on, rolled up
  his sleeves, opened the bottom trapdoor and crawled in. For the longest time he
  hammered away inside, tightened, soldered, ran clattering up and down the metal stairs,
  now on the sixth floor, now on the eighth, then pounded back down to the bottom and
  threw a switch, but something sizzled in the middle, and the spark plugs grew blue
  whiskers. After two hours of this he came out, covered with soot but satisfied, put all his
  tools away, took off his coveralls, wiped his face and hands. As he was leaving, he turned
  and asked, just so there would be no doubt about it:
  "And now what's two and two?"
  "SEVEN!" replied the machine.
  Trurl uttered a terrible oath, but there was no help for it—again he had to poke
  around inside the machine, disconnecting, correcting, checking, resetting, and when he
  learned for the third time that two and two was seven, he collapsed in despair at the foot
  of the machine, and sat there until Klapaucius found him. Klapaucius inquired what was
  wrong, for Trurl looked as if he had just returned from a funeral. Trurl explained the
  problem. Klapaucius crawled into the machine himself a couple of times, tried to fix this
  and that, then asked it for the sum of one plus two, which turned out to be six. One plus
  one, according to the machine, equaled zero. Klapaucius scratched his head, cleared his
  throat and said:
  
  "My friend, you'll just have to face it. That isn't the machine you wished to make.
  However, there's a good side to everything, including this."
  "What good side?" muttered Trurl, and kicked the base on which he was sitting.
  "Stop that," said the machine.
  "H'm, it's sensitive too. But where was I? Oh yes … there's no question but that we
  have here a stupid machine, and not merely stupid in the usual, normal way, oh no! This
  is, as far as I can determine—and you know I am something of an expert—this is the
  stupidest thinking machine in the entire world, and that's nothing to sneeze at! To
  construct deliberately such a machine would be far from easy; in fact, I would say that no
  one could manage it. For the thing is not only stupid, but stubborn as a mule, that is, it has
  a personality common to idiots, for idiots are uncommonly stubborn."
  "What earthly use do I have for such a machine?!" said Trurl, and kicked it again.
  "I'm warning you, you better stop!" said the machine.
  "A warning, if you please," observed Klapaucius dryly. "Not only is it sensitive, dense
  and stubborn, but quick to take offense, and believe me, with such an abundance of
  qualities there are all sorts of things you might do!"
  "What, for example?" asked Trurl.
  "Well, it's hard to say offhand. You might put it on exhibit and charge admission;
  people would flock to see the stupidest thinking machine that ever was—what does it
  have, eight stories? Really, could anyone imagine a bigger dunce? And the exhibition
  would not only cover your costs, but—"
  "Enough, I'm not holding any exhibition!" Trurl said, stood up and, unable to restrain
  himself, kicked the machine once more.
  "This is your third warning," said the machine.
  "What?" cried Trurl, infuriated by its imperious manner. "You… you…" And he kicked
  it several times, shouting: "You're only good for kicking, you know that?"
  "You have insulted me for the fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth times," said the machine.
  "Therefore I refuse to answer all further questions of a mathematical nature."
  "It refuses! Do you hear that?" fumed Trurl, thoroughly exasperated. "After six
  comes eight—did you notice, Klapaucius?—not seven, but eight! And that's the kind of
  mathematics Her Highness refuses to perform! Take that! And that! And that! Or
  perhaps you'd like some more?"
  The machine shuddered, shook, and without another word started to lift itself from its
  foundations. They were very deep, and the girders began to bend, but at last it scrambled
  out, leaving behind broken concrete blocks with steel spokes protruding—and it bore
  down on Trurl and Klapaucius like a moving fortress. Trurl was so dumb-founded that he
  didn't even try to hide from the machine, which to all appearances intended to crush him
  to a pulp. But Klapaucius grabbed his arm and yanked him away, and the two of them
  took to their heels. When finally they looked back, they saw the machine swaying like a
  high tower, advancing slowly, at every step sinking to its second floor, but stubbornly,
  doggedly pulling itself out of the sand and heading straight for them.
  
  "Whoever heard of such a thing?" Trurl gasped in amazement. "Why, this is mutiny!
  What do we do now?"
  "Wait and watch," replied the prudent Klapaucius. "We may learn something."
  But there was nothing to be learned just then. The machine had reached firmer
  ground and was picking up speed. Inside, it whistled, hissed and sputtered.
  "Any minute now the signal box will knock loose," said Trurl under his breath. "That'll
  jam the program and stop it…"
  "No," said Klapaucius, "this is a special case. The thing is so stupid, that even if the
  whole transmission goes, it won't matter. But—look out!!"
  The machine was gathering momentum, clearly bent on running them down, so they
  fled just as fast as they could, the fearful rhythm of crunching steps in their ears. They
  ran and ran—what else could they do? They tried to make it back to their native district,
  but the machine outflanked them, cut them off, forced them deeper and deeper into a
  wild, uninhabited region. Mountains, dismal and craggy, slowly rose out of the mist. Trurl,
  panting heavily, shouted to Klapaucius:
  "Listen! Let's turn into some narrow canyon… where it won't be able to follow us …
  the cursed thing… what do you say?"
  "No… better go straight," wheezed Klapaucius. "There's a town up ahead… can't
  remember the name… anyway, we can find—oof!—find shelter there…"
  So they ran straight and soon saw houses before them. The streets were practically
  deserted at this time of day, and the constructors had gone a good distance without
  meeting a living soul, when suddenly an awful crash, like an avalanche at the edge of the
  town, indicated that the machine was coming after them.
  Trurl looked back and groaned.
  "Good heavens! It's tearing down the houses, Klapaucius!!" For the machine, in
  stubborn pursuit, was plowing through the walls of the buildings like a mountain of steel,
  and in its wake lay piles of rubble and white clouds of plaster dust. There were dreadful
  screams, confusion in the streets, and Trurl and Klapaucius, their hearts in their mouths,
  ran on till they came to a large town hall, darted inside and raced down endless stairs to a
  deep cellar.
  "It won't get us in here, even if it brings the whole building down on our heads!"
  panted Klapaucius. "But really, the devil himself had me pay you a visit today. … I was
  curious to see how your work was going—well, I certainly found out…"
  "Quiet," interrupted Trurl. "Someone's coming…"
  And indeed, the cellar door opened up and the mayor entered, accompanied by
  several aldermen. Trurl was too embarrassed to explain how this strange and calamitous
  situation had come about; Klapaucius had to do it. The mayor listened in silence. Suddenly
  the walls trembled, the ground heaved, and the sound of cracking stone reached them in
  the cellar.
  "It's here?!" cried Trurl.
  "Yes," said the mayor. "And it demands that we give you up, otherwise it says it will
  
  level the entire town…"
  Just then they heard, far overhead, words that honked as if from a muffled horn:
  "Trul's here … I smell Trurl…"
  "But surely you won't give us up?" asked in a quavering voice the object of the
  machine's obstinate fury.
  "The one of you who calls himself Trurl must leave. The other may remain, since
  surrendering him does not constitute part of the conditions…"
  "Have mercy!"
  "We are helpless," said the mayor. "And were you to stay here, Trurl, you would have
  to answer for all the damage done to this town and its inhabitants, since it was because of
  you that the machine destroyed sixteen homes and buried beneath their ruins many of
  our finest citizens. Only the fact that you yourself stand in imminent peril permits me to
  let you leave unpunished. Go then, and nevermore return."
  Trurl looked at the aldermen and, seeing his sentence written on their stern faces,
  slowly turned and made for the door.
  "Wait! I'll go with you!" cried Klapaucius impulsively.
  "You?" said Trurl, a faint hope in his voice. "But no…" he added after a moment.
  "Why should you have to perish too?…"
  "Nonsense!" rejoined Klapaucius with great energy. "What, us perish at the hands of
  that iron imbecile? Never! It takes more than that, my friend, to wipe two of the most
  famous constructors off the face of the globe! Come, Trurl! Chin up!"
  Encouraged by these words, Trurl ran up the stairs after Klapaucius. There was not a
  soul outside in the square. Amid clouds of dust and the gaunt skeletons of demolished
  homes, stood the machine, higher than the town hall tower itself, puffing steam, covered
  with the blood of powdered brick and smeared with chalk.
  "Careful!" whispered Klapaucius. "It doesn't see us. Let's take that first street on the
  left, then turn right, then straight for those mountains. There we can take refuge and
  think of how to make the thing give up once and for all its insane… Now!" he yelled, for
  the machine had just spotted them and was charging, making the pavement buckle.
  Breathless, they ran from the town and galloped along for a mile or so, hearing behind
  them the thunderous stride of the colossus that followed relentlessly.
  "I know that ravine!" Klapaucius suddenly cried. "That's the bed of a dried-out
  stream and it leads to cliffs and caves —faster, faster, the thing'll have to stop soon!…"
  So they raced uphill, stumbling and waving their arms to keep their balance, but the
  machine still gained on them. Scrambling up over the gravel of the dried-out riverbed,
  they reached a crevice in the perpendicular rock and, seeing high above them the murky
  mouth of a cave, began to climb frantically toward it, no longer caring about the loose
  stones that flew from under their feet. The opening in the rock breathed chill and
  darkness. As quickly as they could, they leaped inside, ran a few extra steps, then
  stopped.
  
  "Well, here at least we're safe," said Trurl, calm once again. "I'll just take a look, to see
  where it got stuck…"
  "Be careful," cautioned Klapaucius. Trurl inched his way to the edge of the cave,
  leaned out, and immediately jumped back in fright.
  "It's coming up the mountain!!" he cried.
  "Don't worry, it'll never be able to get in here," said Klapaucius, not altogether
  convinced. "But what's that? Is it getting dark? Oh no!"
  At that moment a great shadow blotted out the bit of sky visible through the mouth of
  the cave, and in its place appeared a smooth steel wall with rows of rivets. It was the
  machine slowly closing with the rock, thereby sealing up the cave as if with a mighty
  metal lid.
  "We're trapped…" whispered Trurl, his voice breaking off when the darkness became
  absolute.
  "That was idiotic on our part!" Klapaucius exclaimed, furious. "To jump into a cave
  that it could barricade! How could we have done such a thing?"
  "What do you think it's waiting for now?" asked Trurl after a long pause.
  "For us to give up—that doesn't take any great brains."
  Again there was silence. Trurl tiptoed in the darkness, hands outstretched, in the
  direction of the opening, run-ning his fingers along the stone until he touched the smooth
  steel, which was warm, as if heated from within…
  "I feel Trurl …" boomed the iron voice. Trurl hastily retreated, took a seat alongside
  his friend, and for some time they sat there, motionless. At last Klapaucius whispered:
  "There's no sense our just sitting here. I'll try to reason with it…"
  "That's hopeless," said Trurl. "But go ahead. Perhaps it will at least let you go free…"
  "Now, now, none of that!" said Klapaucius, patting him on the back. And he groped his
  way toward the mouth of the cave and called: "Hello out there, can you hear us?"
  "Yes," said the machine.
  "Listen, we'd like to apologize. You see… well, there was a little misunderstanding,
  true, but it was nothing, really. Trurl had no intention of…"
  "I'll pulverize Trurl!" said the machine. "But first, he'll tell me how much two and two
  makes."
  "Of course he will, of course he will, and you'll be happy with his answer, and make it
  up with him for sure, isn't that right, Trurl?" said the mediator soothingly.
  
  "Yes, of course…" mumbled Trurl.
  "Really?" said the machine. "Then how much is two and two?"
  "Fo… that is, seven…" said Trurl in an even lower voice.
  "Ha! Not four, but seven, eh?" crowed the machine. "There, I told you so!"
  "Seven, yes, seven, we always knew it was seven!" Klapaucius eagerly agreed. "Now
  will you, uh, let us go?" he added cautiously.
  "No. Let Trurl say how sorry he is and tell me how much is two times two…"
  "And you'll let us go, if I do?" asked Trurl.
  "I don't know. I'll think about it. I'm not making any deals. What's two times two?"
  "But you probably will let us go, won't you?" said Trurl, while Klapaucius pulled on his
  arm and hissed in his ear: "The thing's an imbecile, don't argue with it, for heaven's sake!"
  "I won't let you go, if I don't want to," said the machine. "You just tell me how much
  two times two is…"
  Suddenly Trurl fell into a rage.
  "I'll tell you, I'll tell you all right!" he screamed. "Two and two is four and two times
  two is four, even if you stand on your head, pound these mountains all to dust, drink the
  ocean dry and swallow the sky—do you hear? Two and two is four!!"
  "Trurl! What are you saying? Have you taken leave of your senses? Two and two is
  seven, nice machine! Seven, seven!!" howled Klapaucius, trying to drown out his friend.
  "No! It's four! Four and only four, four from the begin-ning to the end of
  time—FOUR!!" bellowed Trurl, grow-ing hoarse.
  The rock beneath their feet was seized with a feverish tremor.
  The machine moved away from the cave, letting in a little pale light, and gave a
  piercing scream:
  "That's not true! It's seven! Say it's seven or I'll hit you!"
  "Never!" roared Trurl, as if he no longer cared what hap-pened, and pebbles and dirt
  rained down on their heads, for the machine had begun to ram its eight-story hulk again
  and again into the wall of stone, hurling itself against the mountainside until huge boulders
  broke away and went tumbling down into the valley.
  Thunder and sulfurous fumes filled the cave, and sparks flew from the blows of steel
  on rock, yet through all this pandemonium one could still make out, now and then, the
  ragged voice of Trurl bawling:
  "Two and two is four! Two and two is four!!" Klapaucius attempted to shut his friend's
  mouth by force, but, violently thrown off, he gave up, sat and covered his head with his
  arms. Not for a moment did the machine's mad efforts flag, and it seemed that any
  minute now the ceiling would collapse, crush the prisoners and bury them forever. But
  when they had lost all hope, and the air was thick with acrid smoke and choking dust,
  there was sud-denly a horrible scraping, and a sound like a slow explosion, louder than all
  
  the maniacal banging and battering, and the air whooshed, and the black wall that blocked
  the cave was whisked away, as if by a hurricane, and monstrous chunks of rock came
  crashing down after it. The echoes of that avalanche still rumbled and reverberated in the
  valley below when the two friends peered out of their cave. They saw the machine. It lay
  smashed and flattened, nearly broken in half by an enormous boulder that had landed in
  the middle of its eight floors. With the greatest care they picked their way down through
  the smoking rubble. In order to reach the riverbed, it was necessary to pass the remains
  of the machine, which resembled the wreck of some mighty vessel thrown up upon a
  beach. Without a word, the two stopped together in the shadow of its twisted hull. The
  machine still quivered slightly, and one could hear something turning, creaking feebly,
  within.
  "Yes, this is the bad end you've come to, and two and two is—as it always was—"
  began Trurl, but just then the ma-chine made a faint, barely audible croaking noise and
  said, for the last time, "SEVEN."
  Then something snapped inside, a few stones dribbled down from overhead, and now
  before them lay nothing but a lifeless mass of scrap. The two constructors exchanged a
  look and silently, without any further comment or conversa-tion, walked back the way
  they came.
  A Good Shellacking
  Someone was knocking at the door of Klapaucius the con-structor. He looked out and
  saw a potbellied machine on four short legs.
  "Who are you and what do you want?" he asked.
  "I'm a Machine to Grant Your Every Wish and have been sent here by your good
  friend and colleague, Trurl the Magnificent, as a gift."
  "A gift, eh?" replied Klapaucius, whose feelings for Trurl were mixed, to say the least.
  He was particularly irked by the phrase "Trurl the Magnificent." But after a little thought
  he said, "All right, you can come in."
  He had it stand in the corner by the grandfather clock while he returned to his work, a
  squat machine on three short legs, which was almost completed—he was just put-ting on
  the finishing touches. After a while the Machine to Grant Your Every Wish cleared its
  throat and said:
  "I'm still here."
  "I haven't forgotten you," said Klapaucius, not looking up. After another while the
  machine cleared its throat again and asked:
  "May I ask what you're making there?"
  "Are you a Machine to Grant Wishes or a Machine to Ask Questions?" said
  Klapaucius, but added: "I need some blue paint."
  
  "I hope it's the right shade," said the machine, opening a door in its belly and pulling
  out a bucket of blue. Klapau-cius dipped his brush in it without a word and began to paint.
  In the next few hours he needed sandpaper, some Carborundum, a brace and bit, white
  paint and one No. 5 screw, all of which the machine handed over on the spot.
  That evening he covered his work with a sheet of canvas, had dinner, then pulled up a
  chair opposite the machine and said:
  "Now we'll see what you can do. So you say you can grant every wish…"
  "Most every wish," replied the machine modestly. "The paint, sandpaper and No. 5
  screw were satisfactory, I hope?"
  "Quite, quite," said Klapaucius. "But now I have in mind something a bit more
  difficult. If you can't do it, I'll return you to your master with my kind thanks and a
  professional opinion."
  "All right, what is it?" asked the machine, fidgeting.
  "A Trurl," said Klapaucius. "I want a Trurl, the spit and image of Trurl himself, so
  alike that no one could ever tell them apart."
  The machine muttered and hummed and finally said:
  "Very well, I'll make you a Trurl. But please handle him with care—he is, after all, a
  truly magnificent constructor."
  "Oh but of course, you needn't worry about that," said Klapaucius. "Well, where is it?"
  "What, right away?" said the machine. "A Trurl isn't a No. 5 screw, you know. It'll
  take time."
  But it wasn't long at all before the door in the machine's belly opened and a Trurl
  climbed out. Klapaucius looked it up and down and around, touched it, tapped it, but there
  wasn't any doubt: here was a Trurl as much like the original Trurl as two peas in a pod.
  This Trurl squinted a little, unaccustomed to the light, but otherwise behaved in a
  per-fectly normal fashion.
  "Hello, Trurl!" said Klapaucius.
  "Hello, Klapaucius! But wait, how did I get here?" Trurl answered, clearly bewildered.
  "Oh, you just dropped in. … You know, I haven't seen you in ages. How do you like my
  place?"
  "Fine, fine… What do you have there under that can-vas?"
  "Nothing much. Won't you take a seat?"
  "Well, I really ought to be going. It's getting dark…"
  "Don't rush off, you just got here!" protested Klapaucius. "And you haven't seen my
  cellar yet."
  "Your cellar?"
  "Yes, you should find it most interesting. This way…"
  
  And Klapaucius put an arm around Trurl and led him to the cellar, where he tripped
  him, pinned him down and quickly tied him up, then took out a big crowbar and began to
  wallop the daylights out of him. Trurl howled, called for help, cursed, begged for mercy,
  but Klapaucius didn't stop and the blows rang out and echoed in the dark and empty
  night.
  "Ouch! Ouch!! Why are you beating me?!" yelled Trurl, cowering.
  "It gives me pleasure," explained Klapaucius, swinging back. "You should try it
  sometime, Trurl!"
  And he landed him one on the head, which boomed like a drum.
  "If you don't let me go at once, I'll tell the King and he'll have you thrown in his
  deepest dungeon!!" screamed Trurl.
  "Oh no he won't. And do you know why?" asked Klapau-cius, sitting down for a
  moment to catch his breath.
  "Tell me," said Trurl, glad of the reprieve.
  "Because you're not the real Trurl. Trurl, you see, built a Machine to Grant Your
  Every Wish and sent it here as a gift; to test it out, I had it make you! And now I'm going
  to knock off your head, put it at the foot of my bed and use it for a bootjack."
  "You monster! Why are you doing this to me?"
  "I already told you: it gives me pleasure. But enough of this idle chatter!" And
  Klapaucius got up and this time picked up a huge bludgeon in both hands—but Trurl cried
  out:
  "Wait! Stop! I have something to tell you!!"
  "I wonder what you could possibly tell me to keep me from using your head as a
  bootjack," replied Klapaucius.
  Trurl quickly yelled:
  "I'm not any Trurl from a machine! I'm the real Trurl —I only wanted to find out
  what you've been doing lately behind closed doors and drawn curtains, so I built a
  ma-chine, hid in its belly and had it take me here, pretending to be a gift!"
  "Come now, that's an obvious fabrication and not even clever!" said Klapaucius,
  hefting his bludgeon. "Don't waste your breath, I can see right through you. You came out
  of a machine that grants wishes, and if it manufactures paint and sandpaper, a brace and
  bit, and a No. 5 screw, it can surely manufacture you!"
  "I had all that prepared beforehand in its belly!" cried Trurl. "It wasn't hard to
  anticipate what you'd need in your work! I swear I'm telling the truth!"
  "Are you trying to tell me that my good friend and col-league, Trurl the Magnificent,
  is nothing but a common sneak? No, that I will never believe!" replied Klapaucius. "Take
  that!"
  And he let him have it.
  "That's for slandering my good friend Trurl! And take that! And that!"
  
  And he let him have it again, and again, clubbing and clobbering until his arm was too
  tired to club or clobber anymore.
  "Now I'll have a little nap and rest up," said Klapaucius, throwing aside the bludgeon.
  "But don't you worry, I'll be back…" And he left, and soon was snoring so loud you could
  hear it even in the cellar. Trurl writhed and twisted until he loosened his bonds enough to
  slip off the knots, got up, crept back to the machine, climbed inside and took off for home
  at a gallop. Klapaucius meanwhile was watching the escape from his bedroom window,
  pressing a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. The next day he went to
  pay Trurl a visit. It was a gloomy and silent Trurl that let him in. The room was dark, but
  even so, Klapaucius could see that Trurl's person bore the marks of a good
  shellacking—though it was apparent that Trurl had gone to some trouble to touch up the
  scratches and hammer out the dents.
  "Why so gloomy?" asked a cheerful Klapaucius. "I came to thank you for the nice
  gift—what a shame, though, it ran off while I slept, and in such a hurry that it left the door
  open!"
  "It seems to me," snapped Trurl, "that you somewhat misused, or should I say
  abused, my gift. Oh, you needn't bother to explain, the machine told me everything. You
  had it make me, me, then lured me, I mean the copy of me, to the cellar, where you beat
  it unmercifully! And after this great insult to my person, after this act of the blackest
  in-gratitude, you dare show your face here as if nothing hap-pened! What do you have to
  say for yourself?"
  "I really don't understand why you're so angry," said Klapaucius. "It's true I had the
  machine make a copy of you, and I must say it was absolutely perfect, an amazing
  likeness. As far as the beating goes, well, your machine must have exaggerated a little—I
  did give the artificial Trurl a poke or two, but only to see if it was well made, and per-haps
  also to test its reflexes, which were quite good, by the way. It turned out to be very much
  on its toes, and even tried to argue that it was really you, can you imagine—? Of course I
  didn't believe it, but then it swore the gift wasn't a gift at all, but some sort of low and
  underhanded trick. Well, I had to defend the honor of my good friend, you understand, so
  I thrashed it some for slandering you so shamelessly. On the other hand I found it to be
  extremely intelligent; so you see, Trurl, it resembled you mentally as well as physically.
  You are indeed a great and magnificent constructor, which is precisely what I came to tell
  you so early in the morning!"
  "Well, yes, in that case," said Trurl, considerably ap-peased. "Though your use of the
  Machine to Grant Your Every Wish was not, I would say, the most fortunate …"
  "Oh yes, one other thing I wanted to ask," said Klapau-cius, all innocence. "What did
  you do with the artificial Trurl? Could I see it?"
  "It was beside itself with rage," explained Trurl. "It said it would ambush you by that
  mountain pass near your house and tear you limb from limb. I tried to reason with it, but
  it called me names, ran out into the night and started put-ting together all sorts of booby
  traps for you—and so, dear Klapaucius, though you had insulted me, I remembered our
  old friendship and decided to remove this threat to your life and limb. Hence I had to
  disassemble it…"
  And he touched a few nuts and bolts on the floor with his shoe, and sighed.
  Whereupon they exchanged kind words, shook hands and parted the best of friends.
  
  From that time on, Trurl did nothing but tell everyone how he had given Klapaucius a
  Machine to Grant Your Every Wish, how then Klapaucius had insulted him by hav-ing it
  make an artificial Trurl, which he proceeded to beat black-and-blue; how then this
  excellently constructed copy of the great constructor made clever lies to save itself, and
  finally managed to escape while Klapaucius slept, and how Trurl himself, the real Trurl,
  eventually had to disassemble the artificial Trurl to protect his good friend and colleague
  from its vengeance. Trurl told this story so often and at such length, elaborating on his
  glorious achievement (and never failing to call on Klapaucius as a witness), that it reached
  the ears of the Royal Court at last, and now no one spoke of Trurl other than with the
  utmost respect, though not long ago he had been commonly called the Constructor of the
  World's Stupidest Computer. When Klapaucius heard, one day, that the King himself had
  rewarded Trurl hand-somely and decorated him with the Order of the Great Parallax, he
  threw up his hands and cried:
  "What? Here I was able to see through his little game and gave him so good a
  shellacking for it that he had to sneak home in the middle of the night and patch himself
  up, and even then he looked a sight! And for that they deco-rate him, praise him, shower
  him with riches? O tempora, O mores!…"
  Furious, he went home, locked himself in and drew the blinds. He too had been
  working on a Machine to Grant Your Every Wish, only Trurl had beat him to it.
  The Seven Sallies
  of Trurl and Klapaucius
  The First Sally
  Or The Trap
  of Gargantius
  When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined
  up in their proper places, so you could easily count them from left to right, or top to
  bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller, yellowing types
  pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade, when there was not a speck of dust to
  be found in outer space, nor any nebular debris—in those good old days it was the custom
  for constructors, once they had received their Diploma of Perpetual Omnipotence with
  
  dis-tinction, to sally forth ofttimes and bring to distant lands the benefit of their expertise.
  And so it happened that, in keeping with this ancient custom, Trurl and Klapaucius, who
  could kindle or extinguish suns as easily as shelling peas, did venture out on such a
  voyage. When the vastness of the traveled void had erased in them all recollection of their
  native skies, they saw a planet up ahead—not too little, not too big, just about right—with
  one continent only, down the middle of which ran a bright red line: everything on one side
  was yellow, everything on the other, pink. Realizing at once that here were two
  neighboring kingdoms, the con-structors held a brief council of war before landing.
  "With two kingdoms," said Trurl, "it's best you take one, and I the other. That way
  nobody's feelings get hurt."
  "Fine," said Klapaucius. "But what if they ask for mili-tary aid? Such things happen."
  "True, they could demand weapons, even superweapons," Trurl agreed. "We'll simply
  refuse."
  "And if they insist, and threaten us?" returned Klapaucius. "This too can happen."
  "Let's see," said Trurl, switching on the radio. It blared martial music, a rousing
  march.
  "I have an idea," said Klapaucius, turning it off. "We can use the Gargantius Effect.
  What do you think?"
  "Ah, the Gargantius Effect!" cried Trurl. "I never heard of anyone actually using it.
  But there's always a first time. Yes, why not?"
  "We'll both be prepared to use it," Klapaucius explained. "But it's imperative that we
  use it together, otherwise we're in serious trouble."
  "No problem," said Trurl. He took a small golden box out of his pocket and opened it.
  Inside, on velvet, lay two white beads. "You keep one, I'll keep the other. Look at yours
  every evening; if it turns pink, that'll mean I've started and you must too."
  "So be it," said Klapaucius and put his bead away. Then they landed, shook hands and
  set off in opposite directions.
  The kingdom to which Trurl repaired was ruled by King Atrocitus. He was a militarist
  to the core, and an incredible miser besides. To relieve the royal treasury, he did away
  with all punishments except for the death sentence. His favorite occupation was to abolish
  unnecessary offices; since that included the office of executioner, every condemned citizen
  was obliged to do his own beheading, or else—on rare occasions of royal clemency—have it
  done by his next of kin. Of the arts Atrocitus supported only those that entailed little
  expense, such as choral recitation, chess and military calisthenics. The art of war he held
  in particularly high esteem, for a victorious campaign brought in excellent returns; on the
  other hand, one could properly prepare for war only during an interval of peace, so the
  King advocated peace, though in moderation. His greatest reform was the nationalization
  of high treason. As the neighboring kingdom was continually sending spies, he created the
  office of Royal Informer, who, through a staff of subordinate traitors, would hand over
  State secrets to enemy agents for certain sums of money. Though as a rule the agents
  purchased only outdated secrets—those were less expensive and besides, they were held
  accountable to their own treasury for every penny spent.
  The subjects of Atrocitus rose early, were well-behaved, and worked long hours. They
  
  wove fascines and gabions for fortifications, made guns and denunciations. In order that
  the kingdom not be flooded with the latter (which in fact had happened during the reign of
  Bartholocaust the Wall-eyed several hundred years before), whoever wrote too many
  denunciations was required to pay a special luxury tax. In this way they were kept at a
  reasonable level. Arriving at the Court of Atrocitus, Trurl offered his services. The King—
  not surprisingly—wanted powerful instruments of war. Trurl asked for a few days to
  think it over, and as soon as he was alone in the little cubicle they had assigned to him, he
  looked at the bead in the golden box. It was white but, as he looked, turned slowly pink.
  "Aha," he said to him-self, "time to start with Gargantius!" And without further delay he
  took out his secret formulae and set to work.
  Klapaucius meanwhile found himself in the other king-dom, which was ruled by the
  mighty King Ferocitus. Here everything looked quite different than in Atrocia. This
  mon-arch too delighted in campaigns and marches, and he too spent heavily on
  armaments—but in an enlightened way, for he was a most generous lord and a great
  patron of the arts. He loved uniforms, gold braid, stripes and tassels, spurs, brigadiers
  with bells, destroyers, swords and chargers. A person of keen sensibilities, he trembled
  every time he chris-tened a new destroyer. And he lavishly rewarded paintings of battle
  scenes, patriotically paying according to the num-ber of fallen foes depicted, so that, on
  those endless pano-ramic canvases with which the kingdom was packed, moun-tains of
  enemy dead reached up to the sky. In practice he was an autocrat, yet with libertarian
  views; a martinet, yet magnanimous. On every anniversary of his coronation he instituted
  reforms. Once he ordered the guillotines decked with flowers, another time had them
  oiled so they wouldn't squeak, and once he gilded the executioners' axes and had them all
  resharpened—out of humanitarian considerations. Ferocitus was not overly dainty, yet he
  did frown upon excesses, and therefore by special decree regulated and standardized all
  wheels, racks, spikes, screws, chains and clubs. Beheadings of wrongthinkers—a rare
  enough event— took place with pomp and pageantry, brass bands, speeches, parades and
  floats. This high-minded monarch also had a theory, which he put into action, and this was
  the Theory of Universal Happiness. It is well known, certainly, that one does not laugh
  because one is amused, but rather, one is amused because one laughs. If then everyone
  maintains that things just couldn't be better, attitudes immediately im-prove. The
  subjects of Ferocitus were thus required, for their own good, to go about shouting how
  wonderful every-thing was, and the old, indefinite greeting of "Hello" was changed by the
  King to the more emphatic "Hallelujah!" —though children up to the age of fourteen were
  permitted to say, "Wow!" or "Whee!", and the old-timers, "Swell!"
  Ferocitus rejoiced to see his people in such good spirits. Whenever he drove by in his
  destroyer-shaped carriage, crowds in the street would cheer, and whenever he
  gra-ciously waved his royal hand, those up front would cry:
  "Wow!"—"Hallelujah!"—"Terrific!" A democrat at heart, he liked to stop and chat awhile
  with old soldiers who had been around and seen much, liked to hear tales of derring-do
  told at bivouacs, and often, when some foreign dignitary came for an audience, he would
  out of the blue clap him on the knee with his baton and bellow: "Have at them!"—or:
  "Swiggle the mizzen there, mates!"—or: "Thunderation!" For there was nothing he loved
  so much or held so dear as gumption, crust and pluck, roughness and toughness, pow-der,
  chowder, hardtack, grog and ammo. And so, whenever he was melancholy, he had his
  troops march by before him, singing: "Screw up yer courage, nuts to the foe"—"When
  currents lag, crank out the flag"—"We'll scrap, stout lads, until we're nought but
  scrap"—or the rousing anthem: "Lock, stock, and barrel." And he commanded that, when
  he died, the old guard should sing his favorite song over the grave: "Old Robots Never
  Rust."
  
  Klapaucius did not get to the court of this great ruler all at once. At the first village he
  came to, he knocked on sev-eral doors, but no one opened up. Finally he noticed in the
  deserted street a small child; it approached him and asked in a thin, high voice:
  "Wanna buy any, mister? They're cheap."
  "What are you selling?" inquired Klapaucius, surprised.
  "State secrets," replied the child, lifting the edge of its smock to give him a glimpse of
  some mobilization plans. This surprised Klapaucius even more, and he said:
  "No, thank you, my little one. But can you tell me where I might find the mayor?"
  "What'cha want the mayor for?" asked the child.
  "I wish to speak with him."
  "In secret?"
  "It makes no difference."
  "Need a secret agent? My dad's a secret agent. Depend-able and cheap."
  "Very well then, take me to your dad," said Klapaucius, seeing he would get nowhere
  with the child. The child led him to one of the houses. Inside, though it was in the mid-dle
  of the day, a family sat around a lighted lamp—a gray grandfather in a rocking chair, a
  grandmother knitting socks, and their fully grown and numerous progeny, each busy at
  his own household task. As soon as Klapaucius entered, they jumped up and seized him;
  the knitting needles turned out to be handcuffs, the lamp a microphone, and the
  grand-mother the local chief of police.
  "They must have made a mistake," thought Klapaucius, when he was beaten and
  thrown in jail. Patiently he waited through the night—there was nothing else he could do.
  The dawn came and revealed the cobwebs on the stone walls of his cell, also the rusted
  remains of previous prisoners. After a length of time he was taken and interrogated. It
  turned out that the little child as well as the houses—the whole village, in fact—all of it was
  a plant to trick foreign spies. But Klapaucius did not have to face the rigors of a long trial;
  the proceedings were quickly over. For attempting to estab-lish contact with the
  informer-dad the punishment was a third-class guillotining, because the local
  administration had already allotted funds to buy out enemy agents for that fiscal year,
  and Klapaucius, on his part, repeatedly refused to purchase any State secrets from the
  police. Nor did he have sufficient ready cash to mitigate the offense. Still, the prisoner
  continued to protest his innocence—not that the judge believed a word of it; even if he
  had, to free him lay outside his jurisdiction. So the case was sent to a higher court, and in
  the meantime Klapaucius was subjected to torture, though more as a matter of form than
  out of any real necessity. In about a week his case took a turn for the better; finally
  acquitted, he proceeded to the Capitol where, after receiving instructions in the rules and
  regulations of court etiquette, he obtained the honor of a private audience with the King.
  They also gave him a bugle, for every citizen was obliged to announce his comings and
  goings in official places with appropriate flourishes, and such was the iron discipline of that
  land, that the sun was not considered risen without the blowing of reveille.
  Ferocitus did in fact demand new weapons. Klapaucius promised to fulfill this royal
  wish; his plan, he assured the King, represented a radical departure from the accepted
  principles of military action. What kind of army—he asked first—always emerged
  
  victorious? The one that had the finest leaders and the best disciplined soldiers. The
  leader gave the orders, the soldier carried them out; the former therefore had to be wise,
  the latter obedient. However, to the wisdom of the mind, even of the military mind, there
  were certain natural limits. A great leader, moreover, could come up against an equally
  great leader. Then too, he might fall in battle and leave his legion leaderless, or do
  something even more dreadful, since he was, as it were, professionally trained to think,
  and the object of his thoughts was power. Was it not dangerous to have a host of old
  generals in the field, their rusty heads so packed with tactics and strategy that they
  started pining for the throne? Had not more than one kingdom come to grief thereby? It
  was clear, then, that leaders were a necessary evil; the problem lay in making that evil
  unnecessary. To go on: the discipline of an army con-sisted in the precise execution of
  orders. Ideally, we would have a thousand hearts and minds molded into one heart, one
  mind, one will. Military regimens, drills, exercises and maneuvers all served this end. The
  ultimate goal was thus an army that literally acted as one man, in itself both creator and
  executor of its objectives. But where was the embodi-ment of such perfection to be
  found? Only in the individ-ual, for no one was obeyed as willingly as one's own self, and no
  one carried out orders as cheerfully as the one who gave those orders. Nor could an
  individual be dispersed, and insubordination or mutiny against himself was quite out of
  the question. The problem then was to take this eagerness to serve oneself, this
  self-worship which marked the individ-ual, and make it a property of a force of
  thousands. How could this be done? Here Klapaucius began to explain to the keenly
  interested King the simple ideas—for are not all things of genius simple?—discovered by
  the great Gargantius.
  Into each recruit (he explained) a plug is screwed in front, a socket in back. Upon the
  command "Close up those ranks!" the plugs and sockets connect and, where only a
  moment before you had a crowd of civilians, there stands a battalion of perfect soldiers.
  When separate minds, hith-erto occupied with all sorts of nonmartial nonsense, merge
  into one regimental consciousness, not only is there auto-matic discipline, for the army
  has become a single fighting machine composed of a million parts—but there is also
  wisdom. And that wisdom is directly proportional to the numbers involved. A platoon
  possesses the acumen of a master sergeant; a company is as shrewd as a lieutenant
  colonel, a brigade smarter than a field marshal; and a divi-sion is worth more than all the
  army's strategists and spe-cialists put together. In this way one can create formations of
  truly staggering perspicacity. And of course they will follow their own orders to the letter.
  This puts an end to the vagaries and reckless escapades of individuals, the de-pendence
  on a particular commander's capabilities, the con-stant rivalries, envies and enmities
  between generals. And detachments, once joined, should not be put asunder, for that
  produces nothing but confusion. "An army whose only leader is itself—this is my idea!"
  Klapaucius concluded. The King was much impressed with his words and finally said:
  "Return to your quarters. I shall consult my general staff…"
  "Oh, do not do this, Your Royal Highness!" exclaimed the clever Klapaucius, feigning
  great consternation. "That is exactly what the Emperor Turbulon did, and his staff, to
  protect their own positions, advised him against it; shortly thereafter, the neighbor of
  Turbulon, King Enamuel, at-tacked with a revolutionized army and reduced the empire to
  ashes, though his forces were eight times smaller!"
  Whereupon he bowed, went to his room and inspected the little bead, which was red
  as a beet; that meant Trurl had done likewise at the court of Atrocitus. The King soon
  ordered Klapaucius to revolutionize one platoon of infantry; joined in spirit and now
  entirely of one mind, this tiny unit cried, "Kill, kill!" swooped down on three squadrons of
  the King's dragoons, who were armed to the teeth and led moreover by six distinguished
  
  lecturers of the Academy of the General Staff—and cut them to ribbons. Great was the
  grief of the generals, marshals, admirals and command-ers in chief, for the King sent
  them all into a speedy retire-ment; fully convinced of the efficacy of Klapaucius'
  inven-tion, he ordered the entire army revolutionized.
  And so munitions electricians worked day and night, turn-ing out plugs and sockets
  by the carload, and these were installed as necessary in all the barracks. Covered with
  medals, Klapaucius rode from garrison to garrison and super-vised everything. Trurl
  fared similarly in the kingdom of Atrocitus, except that, due to that monarch's
  well-known parsimony, he had to content himself with the lifelong title of Great Betrayer
  of the Fatherland. Both kingdoms were now preparing for war. In the heat of mobilization,
  conven-tional as well as nuclear weapons were brought into battle trim, and cannons and
  atoms subjected to the utmost spit and polish, as per regulations. Their work now all but
  done, the two constructors packed their bags in secret, to be ready to meet, when the
  time came, at the appointed place near the ship they had left in the forest.
  Meanwhile miracles were taking place among the rank and file, particularly in the
  infantry. Companies no longer had to practice their marching drills, nor did they need to
  count off to learn their number, just as one who has two legs never mistakes his right for
  his left, nor finds it neces-sary to calculate how many of himself there are. It was a joy to
  see those new units do the Forward March, About Face and Company Halt; and
  afterwards, when they were dismissed, they took to chatting, and later, through the open
  windows of the barracks one could hear voices boom-ing in chorus, disputing such
  matters as absolute truth, analytic versus synthetic a priori propositions, and the
  Thing-in-itself, for their collective minds had already at-tained that level. Various
  philosophical systems were ham-mered out, till finally a certain battalion of sappers
  arrived at a position of total solipsism, claiming that nothing really existed beyond itself.
  And since from this it followed that there was no King, nor any enemy, this battalion was
  quietly disconnected and its members reassigned to units that firmly adhered to
  epistemological realism. At about the same time, in the kingdom of Atrocitus, the sixth
  amphibi-ous division forsook naval operations for navel contempla-tion and, thoroughly
  immersed in mysticism, very nearly drowned. Somehow or other, as a result of this
  incident, war was declared, and the troops, rumbling and clanking, slowly moved towards
  the border from either side.
  The law of Gargantius proceeded to work with inexor-able logic. As formation joined
  formation, in proportion there developed an esthetic sense, which reached its apex at the
  level of a reinforced division, so that the columns of such a force easily became
  sidetracked, chasing off after but-terflies, and when the motorized corps named for
  Bartholocaust approached an enemy fortress that had to be taken by storm, the plan of
  attack drawn up that night turned out to be a splendid painting of the battlements, done
  more-over in the abstractionist spirit, which ran counter to all military traditions. Among
  the artillery corps the weightiest metaphysical questions were considered, and, with an
  absentmindedness characteristic of great genius, these large units lost their weapons,
  misplaced their equipment and completely forgot that there was a war on. As for whole
  armies, their psyches were beset by a multitude of com-plexes, which often happens to
  overly developed intellects, and it became necessary to assign to each a special
  psychi-atric motorcycle brigade, which applied appropriate therapy on the march.
  In the meantime, to the thunderous accompaniment of fife and drum, both sides
  slowly got into position. Six regi-ments of shock troops, supported by a battery of
  howitzers and two backup battalions, composed, with the assistance of a firing squad, a
  sonnet entitled "On the Mystery of Be-ing," and this took place during guard duty. There
  was con-siderable confusion in both armies; the Eightieth Marlabardian Corps, for
  
  instance, maintained that the whole con-cept of "enemy" needed to be more clearly
  defined, as it was full of logical contradictions and might even be alto-gether meaningless.
  Paratroopers tried to find algorithms for the local terrain, flanks kept colliding with
  centers, so at last the two kings sent airborne adjutants and couriers extraordinary to
  restore order in the ranks. But each of these, having flown or gal-loped up to the corps in
  question, before he could discover the cause of the disturbance, instantly lost his identity
  in the corporate identity, and the kings were left without ad-jutants or couriers.
  Consciousness, it seemed, formed a deadly trap, in that one could enter it, but never
  leave.
  Atrocitus himself saw how his cousin, the Grand Prince Bullion, desiring to raise the
  spirits of his soldiers, leaped into the fray, and how, as soon as he had hooked himself into
  the line, his spirit was literally spirited away, and he was no more.
  Sensing that something had gone amiss, Ferocitus nodded to the twelve buglers at his
  right hand. Atrocitus, from the top of his hill, did likewise; the buglers put the brass to
  their lips and sounded the charge on either side. At this clarion signal each army totally
  and completely linked up. The fearsome metallic clatter of closing contacts reverberated
  over the future battlefield; in the place of a thousand bom-bardiers and grenadiers,
  commandos, lancers, gunners, snip-ers, sappers and marauders—there stood two giant
  beings, who gazed at one another through a million eyes across a mighty plain that lay
  beneath billowing clouds. There was absolute silence. That famous culmination of
  consciousness which the great Gargantius had predicted with mathemati-cal precision
  was now reached on both sides. For beyond a certain point militarism, a purely local
  phenomenon, becomes civil, and this is because the Cosmos Itself is by nature wholly
  civilian, and indeed, the minds of both armies had assumed truly cosmic proportions!
  Thus, though on the outside armor still gleamed, as well as the death-dealing steel of
  artillery, within there surged an ocean of mutual good will, tolerance, an all-embracing
  benevolence, and bright reason. And so, standing on opposite hilltops, their weapons
  sparkling in the sun, while the drums continued to roll, the two armies smiled at one
  another. Trurl and Klapaucius were just then boarding their ship, since that which they
  had planned had come to pass: before the eyes of their mortified, infuriated rulers, both
  armies went off hand in hand, picking flowers beneath the fluffy white clouds, on the field
  of the battle that never was.
  The First Sally (A)
  OR Trurl's
  Electronic Bard
  First of all, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, we should state that this was,
  strictly speaking, a sally to no-where. In fact, Trurl never left his house throughout it—
  except for a few trips to the hospital and an unimportant excursion to some asteroid. Yet
  in a deeper and/or higher sense this was one of the farthest sallies ever undertaken by
  the famed constructor, for it very nearly took him beyond the realm of possibility.
  Trurl had once had the misfortune to build an enormous calculating machine that was
  capable of only one operation, namely the addition of two and two, and that it did
  
  incor-rectly. As is related earlier in this volume, the machine also proved to be extremely
  stubborn, and the quarrel that en-sued between it and its creator almost cost the latter
  his life. From that time on Klapaucius teased Trurl unmerci-fully, making comments at
  every opportunity, until Trurl decided to silence him once and for all by building a
  ma-chine that could write poetry. First Trurl collected eight hundred and twenty tons of
  books on cybernetics and twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry, then sat down to read
  it all. Whenever he felt he just couldn't take another chart or equation, he would switch
  over to verse, and vice versa. After a while it became clear to him that the con-struction
  of the machine itself was child's play in compari-son with the writing of the program. The
  program found in the head of an average poet, after all, was written by the poet's
  civilization, and that civilization was in turn pro-grammed by the civilization that
  preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of information that
  concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about in the primordial chaos of the cosmic
  deep. Hence in order to program a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the
  entire Universe from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it.
  Anyone else in Trurl's place would have given up then and there, but our intrepid
  constructor was nothing daunted. He built a machine and fashioned a digital model of the
  Void, an Electrostatic Spirit to move upon the face of the electrolytic waters, and he
  introduced the parameter of light, a protogalactic cloud or two, and by degrees worked his
  way up to the first ice age—Trurl could move at this rate because his machine was able, in
  one five-billionth of a second, to simulate one hundred septillion events at forty octillion
  different locations simultaneously. And if anyone questions these figures, let him work it
  out for himself.
  Next Trurl began to model Civilization, the striking of fires with flints and the tanning
  of hides, and he provided for dinosaurs and floods, bipedality and taillessness, then made
  the paleopaleface (Albuminidis sapienria), which be-gat the paleface, which begat the
  gadget, and so it went, from eon to millennium, in the endless hum of electrical currents
  and eddies. Often the machine turned out to be too small for the computer simulation of a
  new epoch, and Trurl would have to tack on an auxiliary unit—until he ended up, at last,
  with a veritable metropolis of tubes and terminals, circuits and shunts, all so tangled and
  involved that the devil himself couldn't have made head or tail of it. But Trurl managed
  somehow, he only had to go back twice —once, almost to the beginning, when he
  discovered that Abel had murdered Cain and not Cain Abel (the result, apparently, of a
  defective fuse), and once, only three hun-dred million years back to the middle of the
  Mesozoic, when after going from fish to amphibian to reptile to mam-mal, something odd
  took place among the primates and instead of great apes he came out with gray drapes. A
  fly, it seems, had gotten into the machine and shorted out the polyphase step-down
  directional widget. Otherwise every-thing went like a dream. Antiquity and the Middle
  Ages were recreated, then the period of revolutions and reforms —which gave the
  machine a few nasty jolts—and then civilization progressed in such leaps and bounds that
  Trurl had to hose down the coils and cores repeatedly to keep them from overheating.
  Towards the end of the twentieth century the machine began to tremble, first
  sideways, then lengthwise-—for no apparent reason. This alarmed Trurl; he brought out
  cement and grappling irons just in case. But fortunately these weren't needed; instead of
  jumping its moorings, the ma-chine settled down and soon had left the twentieth century
  far behind. Civilizations came and went thereafter in fifty-thousand-year intervals: these
  were the fully intelligent be-ings from whom Trurl himself stemmed. Spool upon spool of
  computerized history was filled and ejected into storage bins; soon there were so many
  spools, that even if you stood at the top of the machine with high-power binoculars, you
  wouldn't see the end of them. And all to construct some versifier! But then, such is the
  
  way of scientific fanaticism. At last the programs were ready; all that remained was to
  pick out the most applicable—else the electropoet's educa-tion would take several million
  years at the very least.
  During the next two weeks Trurl fed general instructions into his future electropoet,
  then set up all the necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was
  about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better of it and started the
  machine himself. It immediately proceeded to deliver a lecture on the grinding of
  crystallo-graphical surfaces as an introduction to the study of sub-molecular magnetic
  anomalies. Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more
  electromotive; the ma-chine sobbed, went into hysterics, then finally said, blub-bering
  terribly, what a cruel, cruel world this was. Trurl in-tensified the semantic fields and
  attached a strength of char-acter component; the machine informed him that from now
  on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add six floors to the nine it already
  had, so it could better medi-tate upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a
  philo-sophical throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after endless
  pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite something: "I had a little froggy." That
  appeared to exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated,
  disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could think of, and the
  machine presented him with a poem that made him thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't
  there to laugh—imagine, simulating the whole Uni-verse from scratch, not to mention
  Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful doggerel! Trurl put in six
  cliche filters, but they snapped like matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum
  steel. This seemed to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an
  alternating rhyme generator—which nearly ruined everything, since the machine
  resolved to become a missionary among destitute tribes on far-flung planets. But at the
  very last minute, just as he was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was
  struck by an inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them with
  self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine simpered a little, whimpered a
  little, laughed bitterly, complained of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it
  was fed up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how sorry they'd all
  be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen and paper. Trurl sighed with relief,
  switched it off and went to bed. The next morn-ing he went to see Klapaucius. Klapaucius,
  hearing that he was invited to attend the debut of Trurl's electronic bard, dropped
  everything and followed—so eager was he to be an eyewitness to his friend's humiliation.
  Trurl let the machine warm up first, kept the power low, ran up the metal stairs
  several times to take readings (the machine was like the engine of a giant steamer,
  galleried, with rows of rivets, dials and valves on every tier)—till finally, satisfied all the
  decimal places were where they ought to be, he said yes, it was ready now, and why not
  start with something simple. Later, of course, when the machine had gotten the feel of it,
  Klapaucius could ask it to produce poetry on absolutely whatever topic he liked.
  Now the potentiometers indicated the machine's lyrical capacitance was charged to
  maximum, and Trurl, so nervous his hands were shaking, threw the master switch. A
  voice, slightly husky but remarkably vibrant and bewitching, said:
  
  "Phlogisticosh. Rhomothriglyph. Floof."
  "Is that it?" inquired Klapaucius after a pause, extremely polite. Trurl only bit his lip,
  gave the machine a few kicks of current, and tried again. This time the voice came
  through much more clearly; it was a thrilling baritone, sol-emn yet intriguingly sensual:
  Pev't o' tay merlong gumin gots,
  Untie yun furly pazzen ye,
  Confre an' ayzor, ayzor ots,
  Bither de furloss bochre blee!
  "Am I missing something?" said Klapaucius, calmly watching a panic-stricken Trurl
  struggling at the controls.
  Finally Trurl waved his arms in despair, dashed clattering several flights up the metal
  stairs, got down on all fours and crawled into the machine through a trapdoor; he
  ham-mered away inside, swearing like a maniac, tightened some-thing, pried at
  something, crawled out again and ran franti-cally to another tier. At long last he let out a
  cry of triumph, threw a burnt tube over his shoulder—it bounced off the railing and fell to
  the floor, shattering at the feet of Klapau-cius. But Trurl didn't bother to apologize; he
  quickly put in a new tube, wiped his hands on a chammy cloth and hollered down for
  Klapaucius to try it now. The following words rang out:
  Mockles! Fent on silpen tree,
  Blockards three a-feening,
  Mockles, what silps came to thee
  In thy pantry dreaming?
  "Well, that's an improvement!" shouted Trurl, not en-tirely convinced. "The last line
  particularly, did you notice?"
  "If this is all you have to show me…" said Klapaucius, the very soul of politeness.
  "Damn!" said Trurl and again disappeared inside the ma-chine. There was a fierce
  banging and clanging, the sputter-ing of shorted wires and the muttering of an even
  shorter temper, then Trurl stuck his head out of a trapdoor on the third story and yelled,
  
  "Now try it!"
  Klaupaucius complied. The electronic bard shuddered from stem to stern and began:
  Oft, in that wickless chalet all begorn,
  Where whilom soughed the mossy sappertort
  And you were wont to bong—
  Trurl yanked out a few cables in a fury, something rattled and wheezed, the machine
  fell silent. Klapaucius laughed so hard he had to sit on the floor. Then suddenly, as Trurl
  was rushing back and forth, there was a crackle, a clack, and the machine with
  perfect poise said:
  The Petty and the Small;
  Are overcome with gall ;
  When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
  Klapaucius too, I ween,
  Will turn the deepest green
  To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
  "There you are, an epigram! And wonderfully apropos!" laughed Trurl, racing down
  the metal stairs and flinging himself delightedly into his colleague's arms. Klapaucius,
  quite taken aback, was no longer laughing.
  "What, that?" he said. "That's nothing. Besides, you had it all set up beforehand."
  "Setup?!"
  "Oh, it's quite obvious… the ill-disguised hostility, the poverty of thought, the
  crudeness of execution."
  "All right, then ask it something else! Whatever you like! Go on! What are you waiting
  for? Afraid?!"
  "Just a minute," said Klapaucius, annoyed. He was try-ing to think of a request as
  difficult as possible, aware that any argument on the quality of the verse the machine
  might be able to produce would be hard if not impossible to settle either way. Suddenly he
  brightened and said:
  
  "Have it compose a poem—a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless,
  full of love, treachery, retribu-tion, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines,
  cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"
  "And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata
  while you're at it?" growled Trurl. "You can't give it such idiotic—"
  But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:
  Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
  She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
  Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
  Silently scheming,
  Sightlessly seeking
  Some savage, spectacular suicide.
  "Well, what do you say to that?" asked Trurl, his arms folded proudly. But Klapaucius
  was already shouting:
  "Now all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen
  artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two
  lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of
  Czar Murdicog the Head-less…"
  "Grinding gleeful gears, Gerontogyron grabbed / Giggling gynecobalt-6o golems,"
  began the machine, but Trurl leaped to the console, shut off the power and turned,
  defending the machine with his body.
  "Enough!" he said, hoarse with indignation. "How dare you waste a great talent on
  such drivel? Either give it decent poems to write or I call the whole thing off!"
  "What, those aren't decent poems?" protested Klapau-cius.
  "Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridicu-lous crossword puzzles! That's
  hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like…"
  Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
  "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of
  pure mathematics. Tensor alge-bra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if
  need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cyber-netic spirit."
  "Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but
  stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
  
  Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
  Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
  Their indices bedecked from one to n,
  Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
  Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
  And every vector dreams of matrices.
  Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
  It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
  In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
  Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways
  Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
  We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
  I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
  Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
  And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
  And in our bound partition never part.
  For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
  Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
  Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
  Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
  Cancel me not—for what then shall remain?
  Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
  A root or two, a torus and a node:
  
  The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
  Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
  The product of our scalars is defined!
  Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
  Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
  I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
  I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
  Bernoulli would have been content to die,
  Had he but known such a2 cos 2 Ø!
  This concluded the poetic competition, since Klapaucius suddenly had to leave, saying
  he would return shortly with more topics for the machine; but he never did, afraid that in
  so doing, he might give Trurl more cause to boast. Trurl of course let it be known that
  Klapaucius had fled in order to hide his envy and chagrin. Klapaucius meanwhile spread
  the word that Trurl had more than one screw loose on the subject of that so-called
  mechanical versifier.
  Not much time went by before news of Trurl's computer laureate reached the
  genuine—-that is, the ordinary—poets. Deeply offended, they resolved to ignore the
  machine's existence. A few, however, were curious enough to visit Trurl's electronic bard
  in secret. It received them courte-ously, in a hall piled high with closely written paper (for
  it worked day and night without pause). Now these poets were all avant-garde, and
  Trurl's machine wrote only in the traditional manner; Trurl, no connoisseur of poetry, had
  relied heavily on the classics in setting up its program. The machine's guests jeered and
  left in triumph. The machine was self-programming, however, and in addition had a
  special ambition-amplifying mechanism with glory-seeking circuits, and very soon a great
  change took place. Its poems became difficult, ambiguous, so intricate and charged with
  meaning that they were totally incomprehensible. When the next group of poets came to
  mock and laugh, the machine replied with an improvisation that was so modern, it took
  their breath away, and the second poem seriously weakened a certain sonneteer who had
  two State awards to his name, not to mention a statue in the city park. After that, no poet
  could resist the fatal urge to cross lyrical swords with Trurl's electronic bard. They came
  from far and wide, carrying trunks and suitcases full of manuscripts. The machine would
  let each challenger recite, instantly grasp the algo-rithm of his verse, and use it to
  compose an answer in exactly the same style, only two hundred and twenty to three
  hundred and forty-seven times better.
  The machine quickly grew so adept at this, that it could cut down a first-class
  rhapsodist with no more than one or two quatrains. But the worst of it was, all the
  third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from
  
  bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat. One of them, true, broke his
  leg when, on the way out, he tripped over an epic poem the machine had just completed, a
  prodigious work beginning with the words:
  Arms, and machines I sing, that, forc'd by fate,
  And haughty Homo's unrelenting hate,
  Expell'd and exil'd, left the Terran shore …
  The true poets, on the other hand, were decimated by Trurl's electronic bard, though
  it never laid a finger on them. First an aged elegiast, then two modernists committed
  sui-cide, leaping off a cliff that unfortunately happened to lie hard by the road leading
  from Trurl's place to the nearest train station.
  There were many poet protests staged, demonstrations, demands that the machine
  be served an injunction to cease and desist. But no one else appeared to care. In fact,
  maga-zine editors generally approved: Trurl's electronic bard, writing under several
  thousand different pseudonyms at once, had a poem for every occasion, to fit whatever
  length might be required, and of such high quality that the magazine would be torn from
  hand to hand by eager readers. On the street one could see enraptured faces, bemused
  smiles, some-times even hear a quiet sob. Everyone knew the poems of Trurl's electronic
  bard, the air rang with its delightful rhymes. Not infrequently, those citizens of a greater
  sensi-tivity, struck by a particularly marvelous metaphor or as-sonance, would actually
  fall into a faint. But this colossus of inspiration was prepared even for that eventuality; it
  would immediately supply the necessary number of restorative rondelets.
  Trurl himself had no little trouble in connection with his invention. The classicists,
  generally elderly, were fairly harm-less; they confined themselves to throwing stones
  through his windows and smearing the sides of his house with an unmentionable
  substance. But it was much worse with the younger poets. One, for example, as powerful
  in body as his verse was in imagery, beat Trurl to a pulp. And while the constructor lay in
  the hospital, events marched on. Not a day passed without a suicide or a funeral; picket
  lines formed around the hospital; one could hear gunfire in the distance —instead of
  manuscripts in their suitcases, more and more poets were bringing rifles to defeat Trurl's
  electronic bard. But the bullets merely bounced off its calm exterior. After his return from
  the hospital, Trurl, weak and desperate, finally decided one night to dismantle the
  homeostatic Homer he had created.
  But when he approached the machine, limping slightly, it noticed the pliers in his hand
  and the grim glitter in his eye, and delivered such an eloquent, impassioned plea for
  mercy, that the constructor burst into tears, threw down his tools and hurried back to his
  room, wading through new works of genius, an ocean of paper that filled the hall
  chest-high from end to end and rustled incessantly.
  The following month Trurl received a bill for the elec-tricity consumed by the
  machine and almost fell off his chair. If only he could have consulted his old friend
  Klapaucius! But Klapaucius was nowhere to be found. So Trurl had to come up with
  something by himself. One dark night he unplugged the machine, took it apart, loaded it
  onto a ship, flew to a certain small asteroid, and there assembled it again, giving it an
  
  atomic pile for its source of creative energy.
  Then he sneaked home. But that wasn't the end of it. The electronic bard, deprived
  now of the possibility of hav-ing its masterpieces published, began to broadcast them on
  all wave lengths, which soon sent the passengers and crews of passing rockets into states
  of stanzaic stupefaction, and those more delicate souls were seized with severe attacks of
  esthetic ecstasy besides. Having determined the cause of this disturbance, the Cosmic
  Fleet Command issued Trurl an official request for the immediate termination of his
  device, which was seriously impairing the health and well-being of all travelers.
  At that point Trurl went into hiding, so they dropped a team of technicians on the
  asteroid to gag the machine's output unit. It overwhelmed them with a few ballads,
  how-ever, and the mission had to be abandoned. Deaf techni-cians were sent next, but
  the machine employed panto-mime. After that, there began to be talk of an eventual
  puni-tive expedition, of bombing the electropoet into submission. But just then some ruler
  from a neighboring star system came, bought the machine and hauled it off, asteroid and
  all, to his kingdom.
  Now Trurl could appear in public again and breathe easy. True, lately there had been
  supernovae exploding on the southern horizon, the like of which no one had ever seen
  before, and there were rumors that this had something to do with poetry. According to
  one report, that same ruler, moved by some strange whim, had ordered his
  astroengineers to connect the electronic bard to a constellation of white supergiants,
  thereby transforming each line of verse into a stupendous solar prominence; thus the
  Greatest Poet in the Universe was able to transmit its thermonuclear crea-tions to all the
  illimitable reaches of space at once. But even if there were any truth to this, it was all too
  far away to bother Trurl, who vowed by everything that was ever held sacred never,
  never again to make a cybernetic model of the Muse.
  The Second Sally
  OR The Offer
  of King Krool
  The tremendous success of their application of the Gargantius Effect gave both
  constructors such an appetite for ad-venture, that they resolved to sally forth once again
  to parts unknown. Unfortunately, they were quite unable to decide on a destination.
  Trurl, given to tropical climes, had his heart set on Scaldonia, the land of the Flaming
  Flamingos, while Klapaucius, of a somewhat cooler disposition, was equally determined to
  visit the Intergalactic Cold Pole, a bleak continent adrift among frozen stars. The friends
  were about to part company for good when Trurl suddenly had an idea. "Wait," he said,
  "we can advertise our services, then take the best offer!"
  "Ridiculous!" snorted Klapaucius. "How are you going to advertise? In a newspaper?
  
  Do you have any idea how long it takes a newspaper to reach the nearest planet? You'll be
  dead and buried before the first offer comes in!"
  But Trurl gave a knowing smile and revealed his plan, which
  Klapaucius—begrudgingly—had to admit was ingen-ious, and so they set to work. All the
  necessary equipment quickly thrown together, they gathered up the local stars and
  arranged them in a great sign, a sign that would be visible at truly incalculable distances.
  Only blue giants were used for the first word—to get the cosmic reader's attention—and
  lesser stellar material made up the others. The advertisement read: TWO Distinguished
  Constructors Seek Em-ployment Commensurate with Their Skill and Above All
  Lucrative, Hence Preferably at the Court of a Well-heeled King (Should Have His Own
  Kingdom), Terms to Be Ar-ranged. It was not long before, one bright morning, a most
  marvelous craft alighted on their front lawn. It gleamed in the sun, all inlaid with
  mother-of-pearl, had three legs in-tricately carved and six additional supports of solid
  gold (quite useless, since they didn't even reach the ground—but then, the builders
  obviously had more wealth than they knew what to do with). Down a magnificent
  staircase with billowing fountains on either side there came a figure of stately bearing
  with a retinue of six-legged machines: some of these massaged him, some supported him
  and fanned him, and the smallest flew above his august brow and sprayed it with eau de
  cologne from an atomizer. This im-pressive emissary greeted the constructors on behalf
  of his lord and sovereign, King Krool, who wished to engage them.
  "What sort of work is it?" asked Trurl, interested.
  "The details, gentle sirs, you shall learn at the proper time," was his reply. He was
  dressed in galligaskins of gold, mink-tufted buskins, sequined earmuffs, and a robe of
  most unusual cut—instead of pockets it had little shelves full of mints and marzipan. Tiny
  mechanical flies also buzzed about his person, and these he brushed away whenever they
  grew too bold.
  "For now," he went on, "I can only say that His Bound-less Kroolty is a great
  enthusiast of the hunt, a fearless and peerless conqueror of every sort of galactic fauna,
  and verily, his prowess has reached such heights that now the fiercest predators known
  are no longer worthy game for him. And herein lies our misfortune, for he craves
  excitement, danger, thrills… which is why—"
  "Of course!" said Trurl. "He wants us to construct a new model of beast, something
  wild and rapacious enough to present a challenge."
  "You are, worthy constructor, indeed quick!" said the King's emissary. "Then it is
  agreed?"
  Klapaucius began to question the emissary more closely on certain practical matters.
  But after the King's generosity was glowingly described and sufficiently elaborated upon,
  they hurriedly packed their things and a few books, ran up the magnificent staircase,
  hopped on board and were imme-diately lifted, with a great roar and burst of flame that
  blackened the ship's gold legs, into the interstellar night.
  As they traveled, the emissary briefed the constructors on the laws and customs
  prevailing in the Kingdom of Krool, told them of the monarch's nature, as broad and open
  as a leveled city, and of his manly pursuits, and much more, so that by the time the ship
  landed, they could speak the lan-guage like natives.
  First they were taken to a splendid villa situated on a mountainside above the
  village—this was where they were to stay. Then, after a brief rest, the King sent a
  
  carriage for them, a carriage drawn by six fire-breathing monsters. These were muzzled
  with fire screens and smoke filters, had their wings clipped to keep them on the ground,
  and long spiked tails and six paws apiece with iron claws that cut deep pits in the road
  wherever they went. As soon as the monsters saw the constructors, the entire team set
  up a howl, belching fire and brimstone, and strained to get at them. The coach-men in
  asbestos armor and the King's huntsmen with hoses and pumps had to fall upon the
  crazed creatures and beat them into submission with laser and maser clubs before Trurl
  and Klapaucius could safely step into the plush car-riage, which they did without a word.
  The carriage tore off at breakneck speed or—to use an appropriate metaphor— like a bat
  out of hell.
  "You know,” Trurl whispered in Klapaucius' ear as they rushed along, knocking down
  everything in their path and leaving a long trail of sulfurous smoke behind them, "I have a
  feeling that this king won't settle for just anything. I mean, if he has coursers like these…"
  But level-headed Klapaucius said nothing. Houses now flashed by, walls of diamonds
  and sapphires and silver, while the dragons thundered and hissed and the drivers cursed
  and shouted. At last a colossal portcullis loomed up ahead, opened, and their carriage
  whirled into the courtyard, ca-reening so sharply that the flower beds all shriveled up,
  then ground to a stop before a castle black as blackest night. Wel-comed by an unusually
  dismal fanfare and quite over-whelmed by the massive stairs, balustrades and especially
  the stone giants that guarded the main gate, Trurl and Kla-paucius, flanked by a
  formidable escort, entered the mighty castle.
  King Krool awaited them in an enormous hall the shape of a skull, a vast and vaulted
  cave of beaten silver. There was a gaping pit in the floor, the skull's foramen magnum,
  and beyond it stood the throne, over which two streams of light crossed like swords—they
  came from high windows fixed in the skull's eye sockets and with panes specially tinted to
  give everything a harsh and infernal aspect. The constructors now saw Krool himself: too
  impatient to sit still on his throne, this monarch paced from wall to wall across the silver
  floor, his steps booming in that cadaverous cavern, and as he spoke he emphasized his
  words with such sudden stabs of the hand, that the air whistled.
  "Welcome, constructors!" he said, skewering them both with his eyes. "As you've no
  doubt learned from Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, I want you to build me new
  and better kinds of game. Now I'm not interested, you understand, in any mountain of
  steel on a hundred-odd treads—that's a job for heavy artillery, not for me. My quarry
  must be strong and ferocious, but swift and nimble too, and above all cunning and full of
  wiles, so that I will have to call upon all my hunter's art to drive it to the ground. It must
  be a highly intelligent beast, and know all there is to know of covering tracks, doubling
  back, hiding in shadows and lying in wait, for such is my will!"
  "Forgive me, Your Highness," said Klapaucius with a careful bow, "but if we do Your
  Highness' bidding too well, might not this put the royal life and limb in some peril?"
  The King roared with such laughter that a couple of crystal pendants fell off a
  chandelier and shattered at the feet of the trembling constructors.
  "Have no fear of that, noble constructors!" he said with a grim smile. "You are not the
  first, and you will not be the last, I expect. Know that I am a just but most exacting ruler.
  Too often have assorted knaves, flatterers and fakes attempted to deceive me, too often,
  I say, have they posed as distinguished hunting engineers, solely to empty my coffers and
  fill their sacks with gems and precious stones, leaving me, in return, with a few paltry
  scarecrows that fall apart at the first touch. Too often has this happened for me not to
  
  take appropriate measures. For twelve years now any constructor who fails to meet my
  demands, who promises more than he is able to deliver, indeed receives his reward, but is
  hurled, reward and all, into yon deep well—-unless he be game enough (excuse the pun)
  to serve as the quarry himself. In which case, gentlemen, I use no weapon but these two
  bare hands …"
  "And… and have there been, ah, many such impostors?" asked Trurl in a weak voice.
  "Many? That's difficult to say. I only know that no one yet has satisfied me, and the
  scream of terror they invariably give as they plummet to the bottom doesn't last quite so
  long as it used to—the remains, no doubt, have begun to mount. But rest assured,
  gentlemen, there is room enough still for you!"
  A deathly silence followed these dire words, and the two friends couldn't help but look
  in the direction of that dark and ominous hole. The King resumed his relentless pacing, his
  boots striking the floor like sledge hammers in an echo chamber.
  "But, with Your Highness' permission… that is, we— we haven't yet drawn up the
  contract," stammered Trurl. "Couldn't we have an hour or two to think it over, weigh
  carefully what Your Highness has been so gracious as to tell us, and then of course we can
  decide whether to accept your generous offer or, on the other hand—"
  "Ha!!" laughed the King like a thunderclap. "Or, on the other hand, to go home? I'm
  afraid not, gentlemen! The moment you set foot on board the Infernanda, you accepted
  my offer! If every constructor who came here could leave whenever he pleased, why, I'd
  have to wait forever for my fondest hopes to be realized! No, you must stay and build me
  a beast to hunt. I give you twelve days, and now you may go. Whatever pleasure you
  desire, in the meantime, is yours. You have but to ask the servants I have given you;
  nothing will be denied you. In twelve days, then!"
  "With Your Highness' permission, you can keep the pleasures, but—well, would it be
  at all possible for us to have a look at the, uh, hunting trophies Your Highness must have
  collected as a result, so to speak, of the efforts of our predecessors?"
  "But of course!" said the King indulgently and clapped his hands with such force that
  sparks flew and danced across the silver walls. The gust of air from those powerful palms
  cooled even more our constructors' ardor for adventure. Six guards in white and gold
  appeared and conducted them down a corridor that twisted and wound like the gullet of a
  giant serpent. Finally, to their great relief, it led out into a large, open garden. There, on
  remarkably well-trimmed lawns, stood the hunting trophies of King Krool.
  Nearest at hand was a saber-toothed colossus, practically cut in two in spite of the
  heavy mail and plate armor that was to have protected its trunk; the hind legs,
  dispropor-tionately large (evidently designed for great leaps), lay upon the grass
  alongside the tail, which ended in a firearm with its magazine half-empty—a clear sign
  that the creature had not fallen to the King without a fight. A yellow strip of cloth hanging
  from its open jaws also testified to this, for Trurl recognized in it the breeches worn by the
  King's huntsmen. Next was another prone monstrosity, a dragon with a multitude of tiny
  wings all singed and blackened by enemy fire; its circuits had spilled out molten and had
  then congealed in a copper-porcelain puddle. Farther on stood another creature, the
  pillarlike legs spread wide. A gentle breeze soughed softly through its fangs. And there
  were wrecks on wheels and wrecks on treads, some with claws and some with cannon, all
  sundered to the magnetic core, and tank-turtles with squashed turrets, and mutilated
  military millipedes, and other oddities, broken and battle-scarred, some equipped with
  
  auxiliary brains (burnt out), some perched on telescoping stilts (dislocated), and there
  were little vicious biting things strewn about. These had been made to attack in great
  swarms, then regroup in a sphere bristling with gun muzzles and bayonets—a clever idea,
  but it saved neither them nor their creators. Down this aisle of devastation walked Trurl
  and Klapaucius, pale, silent, look-ing as if they were on their way to a funeral instead of to
  another brilliant session of vigorous invention. They came at last to the end of that
  dreadful gallery of Krool's triumphs and stepped into the carriage that was waiting for
  them at the gate. That dragon team which sped them back to their lodgings seemed less
  terrible now. Just as soon as they were alone in their sumptuously appointed green and
  crimson drawing room, before a table heaped high with effervescent drinks and rare
  delicacies, Trurl broke into a volley of im-precations; he reviled Klapaucius for heedlessly
  accepting the offer made by the Master of the Royal Hunt, thereby bringing down
  misfortune on their heads, when they easily could have stayed at home and rested on
  their laurels. Kla-paucius said nothing, waiting patiently for Trurl's desperate rage to
  expend itself, and when it finally did and Trurl had collapsed into a lavish mother-of-pearl
  chaise longue and buried his face in his hands, he said:
  "Well, we'd better get to work."
  These words did much to revive Trurl, and the two con-structors immediately began
  to consider the various possi-bilities, drawing on their knowledge of the deepest and
  dark-est secrets of the arcane art of cybernetic generation. First of all, they agreed that
  victory lay neither in the armor nor in the strength of the monster to be built, but entirely
  in its program, in other words, in an algorithm of demoniacal derivation. "It must be a
  truly diabolical creature, a thing of absolute evil!" they said, and though they had as yet
  no clear idea of what or how, this observation lifted their spirits considerably. Such was
  their enthusiasm by the time they sat down to draft the beast, that they worked all night,
  all day, and through a second night and day before taking a break for dinner. And as the
  Leyden jars were passed about, so sure were they of success, that they winked and
  smirked —but only when the servants weren't looking, since they suspected them (and
  rightly, too) of being the King's spies. So the constructors said nothing of their work, but
  praised the mulled electrolyte which the waiters brought in, tail coats flapping, in beakers
  of the finest cut crystal. Only after the repast, when they had wandered out on the
  veranda overlooking the village with its white steeples and domes catching the last golden
  rays of the setting sun, only then did Trurl turn to Klapaucius and say:
  "We're not out of the woods yet, you know."
  "How do you mean?" asked Klapaucius in a cautious whisper.
  "There's one difficulty. You see, if the King defeats our mechanical beast, he'll
  undoubtedly have us thrown into that pit, for we won't have done his bidding. If, on the
  other hand, the beast… You see what I mean?"
  "If the beast isn't defeated?"
  "No, if the beast defeats him, dear colleague. If that hap-pens, the King's successor
  may not let us off so easily."
  "You don't think we'd have to answer for that, do you? As a rule, heirs to the throne
  are only too happy to see it vacated."
  "True, but this will be his son, and whether the son pun-ishes us out of filial devotion
  or because he thinks the royal court expects it of him, it'll make little difference as far as
  we're concerned."
  
  "That never occurred to me," muttered Klapaucius. "You're quite right, the prospects
  aren't encouraging… Have you thought of a way out of this dilemma?"
  "Well, we might make the beast multimortal. Picture this: the King slays it, it falls,
  then it gets up again, resur-rected, and the King chases it again, slays it again, and so on,
  until he gets sick and tired of the whole thing."
  "That he won't like," said Klapaucius after some thought. "And anyway, how would
  you design such a beast?"
  "Oh, I don't know… We could make it without any vital organs. The King chops the
  beast into little pieces, but the pieces grow back together."
  "How?"
  "Use a field."
  "Magnetic?"
  "If you like."
  "How do we operate it?"
  "Remote control, perhaps?" asked Trurl.
  "Too risky," said Klapaucius. "How do you know the King won't have us locked up in
  some dungeon while the hunt's in progress? Our poor predecessors were no fools, and
  look how they ended up. More than one of them, I'm sure, thought of remote control—yet
  it failed. No, we can't ex-pect to maintain communication with the beast during the
  battle."
  "Then why not use a satellite?" suggested Trurl. "We could install automatic
  controls-—"
  "Satellite indeed!" snorted Klapaucius. "And how are you going to build it, let alone
  put it in orbit? There are no miracles in our profession, Trurl! We'll have to hide the
  controls some other way."
  "But where can we hide the controls when they watch our every step? You've seen
  how the servants skulk about, stick-ing their noses into everything. We'd never be able to
  leave the premises ourselves, and certainly not smuggle out such a large piece of
  equipment. It's impossible!"
  "Calm down," said prudent Klapaucius, looking over his shoulder. "Perhaps we don't
  need such equipment in the first place."
  "Something has to operate the beast, and if that some-thing is an electronic brain
  anywhere inside, the King will smash it to a pulp before you can say goodbye."
  They were silent. Night had fallen and the village lights below were flickering on, one
  by one. Suddenly Trurl said:
  "Listen, here's an idea. We only pretend to build a beast but in reality build a ship to
  escape on. We give it ears, a tail, paws, so no one will suspect, and they can be easily
  jettisoned on takeoff. What do you think of that? We get off scot-free and thumb our
  noses at the King!"
  
  "And if the King has planted a real constructor among our servants, which is not
  unlikely, then it's all over and into the pit with us. Besides, running away—no, it just
  doesn't suit me. It's him or us, Trurl, you can't get around it."
  "Yes, I suppose a spy could be a constructor too," said Trurl with a sigh. "What then
  can we do, in the name of the Great Comet?! How about—a photoelectric phantom?"
  "You mean, a mirage? Have the King hunt a mirage? No thanks! After an hour or two
  of that, he'd come straight here and make phantoms of us!"
  Again they were silent. Finally Trurl said:
  "The only way out of our difficulty, as far as I can see, is to have the beast abduct the
  King, and then—"
  "You don't have to say another word. Yes, that's not at all a bad idea… Then for the
  ransom we—and haven't you noticed, old boy, that the orioles here are a deeper orange
  than on Maryland IV?" concluded Klapaucius, for just then some servants were bringing
  silver lamps out on the veranda. "There's still a problem though," he continued when they
  were alone again. "Assuming the beast can do what you say, how will we be able to
  negotiate with the prisoner if we're sitting in a dungeon ourselves?"
  "You have a point there," said Trurl. "We'll have to figure some way around that…
  The main thing, however, is the algorithm!"
  "Any child knows that! What's a beast without an al-gorithm?"
  So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experi-ment—by simulation, that is
  mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the
  beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors'
  pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals
  beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate
  terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it
  with differen-tials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see
  Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of
  both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the
  Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the
  begin-ning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand
  canonical ensembles, attacking the prob-lem with such fervor that the very paper began
  to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values,
  stumbled into a dark forest of roots and log-arithms, had to backtrack, then encountered
  the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two
  decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n
  -dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming
  factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing
  daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his
  increment Äk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through
  an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns
  and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through tran-scendental functions and double
  eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out
  for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all
  their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the
  chan-delier-—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher
  mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting,
  
  over and over, "Hurrah! Victory!!"
  Well after midnight, the Leyden jug from which the con-structors had on occasion
  refreshed themselves in the course of their labors was quietly taken to the headquarters
  of the King's secret police, where its false bottom was opened and a tiny tape recorder
  removed. This the experts switched on and listened to eagerly, but the rising sun found
  them to-tally unenlightened and looking haggard. One voice, for example, would say:
  "Well? Is the King ready?"
  "Right!"
  "Where'd you put him? Over there? Good! Now—hold on, you have to keep the feet
  together. Not yours, idiot, the King's! All right now, ready? One, two, find the deriva-tive!
  Quick! What do you get?"
  "Pi."
  "And the beast?"
  "Under the radical sign. But look, the King's still standing!"
  "Still standing, eh? Factor both sides, divide by two, throw in a few imaginary
  numbers—good! Now change var-iables and subtract—Trurl, what on earth are you
  doing?! The beast, not the King, the beast! That's right! Good! Per-fect!! Now transform,
  approximate and solve for x. Do you have it?"
  "I have it! Klapaucius! Look at the King now!!"
  There was a pause, then a burst of wild laughter.
  That same morning, as all the experts and high officials of the secret police shook their
  heads, bleary-eyed after a sleep-less night, the constructors asked for quartz, vanadium,
  steel, copper, platinum, rhinestones, dysprosium, yttrium and thulium, also cerium and
  germanium, and most of the other elements that make up the Universe, plus a variety of
  machines and qualified technicians, not to mention a wide as-sortment of spies—for so
  insolent had the constructors become, that on the triplicate requisition form they boldly
  wrote: "Also, kindly send agents of various cuts and stripes at the discretion and with the
  approval of the Proper Au-thorities." The next day they asked for sawdust and a large
  red velvet curtain on a stand, a cluster of little glass bells in the center and a large tassel
  at each of its four corners; everything, even down to the littlest glass bell, was specified
  with the utmost precision. The King scowled when he heard these requests, but ordered
  them to be carried out to the letter, for he had given his royal word. The constructors
  were thus granted all that they wished.
  All that they wished grew more and more outlandish. For instance, in the files of the
  secret police under code number 48999/11K/T was a copy of a requisition for three
  tailor's mannequins as well as six full police uniforms, complete with sash, side arm,
  shako, plume and handcuffs, also all available back issues of the magazine The Patriotic
  Police-man, yearbooks and supplements included—under "Com-ments" the constructors
  had guaranteed the return of all items listed above within twenty-four hours of delivery
  and in perfect condition. In another, classified section of the police archives was a copy of
  a letter from Klapaucius in which he demanded the immediate shipment of (1) a life-size
  doll representing the Postmaster General in full regalia, and (2) a light gig painted green
  with a kerosene lamp on the left and a sky-blue sign on the back that said THINK. The
  
  doll and gig proved too much for the Chief of Police: he had to be taken away for a
  much-needed rest. During the next three days the constructors asked only for barrels of
  red castor oil, and after that—nothing. From then on, they worked in the basement of the
  palace, hammering away and singing space chanties, and at night blue lights came flashing
  from the basement windows and gave weird shapes to the trees in the garden outside.
  Trurl and Klapaucius with their many helpers bustled about amid arcs and sparks, now
  and then looking up to see faces pressed against the glass: the servants, as if out of idle
  curiosity, were photographing their every move. One evening, when the weary
  constructors had finally dragged themselves off to bed, the components of the apparatus
  they had been working on were quickly transported by unmarked balloon to police
  headquarters and assembled by eighteen of the finest cyberneticians in the land, who had
  been deputized and duly sworn in for that very purpose, whereupon a gray tin mouse ran
  out from under their hands, blowing soap bubbles and dropping a thin trail of chalk dust
  from under its tail, which spelled, as it danced this way and that across the table, WHAT,
  DON'T YOU LOVE US ANYMORE? Never before in the kingdom's history did Chiefs of
  Police have to be re-placed with such speed and regularity. The uniforms, the doll, the
  green gig, even the sawdust, everything which the constructors returned exactly as
  promised, was thoroughly examined under electron microscope. But except for a
  min-uscule card in the sawdust which read JUST SAWDUST, there was nothing out of the
  ordinary. Then individual atoms of the uniforms and gig were thoroughly searched— with
  equal lack of success. At last the day came when the work was completed. A huge vehicle
  on three hundred wheels, looking something like a refrigerator, was drawn up to the main
  entrance and opened in the presence of wit-nesses and officials; Trurl and Klapaucius
  brought out a curtain, the one with the tassels and bells, and placed it carefully inside, in
  the middle of the floor. Then they got in themselves, closed the door, did something, then
  went and got various containers from the basement, cans of chem-icals, all sorts of finely
  ground powders—gray, silver, white, yellow, green—and sprinkled them under and
  around the curtain, then stepped out, had the vehicle closed and locked, consulted their
  watches and together counted out fourteen and a half seconds—at which time, much to
  everyone's sur-prise, since the vehicle was stationary and there could be no question of a
  breeze inside (for the seal was hermetic), the glass bells tinkled. The constructors
  exchanged a wink and said:
  "You can take it now!"
  The rest of the day they spent blowing soap bubbles from the veranda. That evening
  Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, came with an escort and politely but firmly
  informed them that they were to go with him at once to an assigned place. They were
  required to leave all their posses-sions behind, even their clothes; in exchange they were
  given rags, then put in irons. The guards and police digni-taries present were astounded
  by their perfect sang-froid: instead of demanding justice or trembling with fear, Trurl
  giggled as the shackles were being hammered on, saying he was ticklish. And when the
  constructors were thrown into a dark and dismal dungeon, they promptly struck up a
  rous-ing chorus of "Sing Sweet Software."
  Meanwhile mighty Krool rode forth from the village on his mighty hunting chariot,
  surrounded by all his retinue and followed by a long and winding train of riders and
  ma-chines, machines that included not only the traditional cata-pult and cannon, but
  enormous laser guns and beta ray ba-zookas, and a tar-thrower guaranteed to immobilize
  
  anything that walked, swam, flew or rolled along.
  And so this grand procession wended its way to the royal game preserve, and many
  jokes were made, and boasts, and haughty toasts, and no one gave a thought to the two
  con-structors, except perhaps to remark that those fools were in a pretty pickle now.
  But when the silver trumpets announced His Majesty's approach, one could see a
  huge vehicle-refrigerator coming up in the opposite direction. Its door flung open, and for
  one brief moment there gaped the black maw of what ap-peared to be some sort of field
  gun. Next there was a boom, a puff of yellow smoke, and something came rocketing out, a
  form as blurry as a tornado and with the general consis-tency of a sandstorm; it arced
  through the air so fast that no one really got a good look at it anyway. Whatever it was
  flew a hundred paces or more and landed without a sound; the curtain that had been
  wrapped around it floated to the earth, glass bells tinkling oddly in that perfect silence,
  and lay there like a crushed strawberry. Now everyone could see the beast
  clearly—though it wasn't clear at all, but looked a little like a hill, rather large, fairly long,
  its color much like its surroundings, a clump of dried-up weeds. The King's huntsmen
  unleashed the whole pack of automated hounds (mainly Saint Cybernards and Cyberman
  pinschers, with an occasional high-frequency terrier); these hurled themselves, howling
  and slavering, at the crouching beast. The beast didn't rear back, didn't roar, didn't even
  breathe fire, but only opened its two eyes wide and reduced half the pack to ashes in a
  trice.
  "Oho! Laser-eyed, is it?" cried the King. "Hand me my trusty duralumin doublet, my
  bulletproof buckler, my hal-berd and arquebus!" Thus accoutered and gleaming like a
  supernova, he rode out upon his fearless high-fidelity cyber-steed, came nigh the beast
  and smote it such a mighty blow that the air crackled and its head tumbled neatly to the
  ground. Though the retinue dutifully hallooed his triumph, the King took no delight in it;
  greatly angered, he swore in his heart to devise some special torment for those wretches
  who dared to call themselves constructors. The beast, how-ever, shook another head out
  of its severed neck, opened its new eyes wide and played a withering beam across the
  King's armor (which, however, was proof against all manner of elec-tromagnetic
  radiation). "Well, those two weren't a total loss," said the King to himself, "though this still
  won't help them." And he recharged his charger and spurred it into the fray.
  This time he swung full and cleaved the beast in twain. The beast didn't seem to
  mind—in fact, it positioned itself helpfully beneath the whistling blade and gave a grateful
  twitch as it fell. And small wonder! The King took another look: the thing was twinned
  instead of twained! There were two spitting images, each a little smaller than the original,
  plus a third, a baby beast gamboling between them—that was the head he had cut off
  earlier: it now had a tail and feet and was doing cartwheels through the weeds.
  "What next?" thought the King. "Chop it into mice or little worms? A fine way to
  hunt!" And with great ire did he have at it, hewing with might and main until there were
  no end of little beasts underfoot, but suddenly they all backed off, went into a huddle, and
  there stood the beast again, good as new and stifling a yawn.
  "H'm," thought the King. "Apparently it has the same kind of stabilization mechanism
  that—what was his name again?—Pumpington—that Pumpington tried to use. Yes, I dealt
  with him myself for that idiotic trick… Well, we'll just wheel out the antimatter artillery…"
  He picked one with a six-foot bore, lined it up and loaded it himself, took aim, pulled
  the string and sent a perfectly silent and weirdly shimmering shell straight at the beast,
  to blow it to smithereens once and for all. But nothing hap-pened—that is, nothing much.
  
  The beast only crouched a little lower, put out its left hand, long and hairy, and gave the
  King the finger.
  "Bring out our biggest!" roared the King, pretending not to notice. And several
  hundred peasants pulled up a verit-able giant of a cannon, all of eighty-gauge, which the
  King aimed and was just about to fire—when all at once the beast leaped. The King lifted
  his sword to defend himself, but then there was no more beast. Those who saw what
  happened next said later that they were sure they had taken leave of their senses, for as
  the beast flew through the air, it underwent a lightning transformation, the grayish hulk
  divided up into three men in uniform, three policemen, who, still aloft, were already
  preparing to do their duty. The first policeman, a sergeant, got out the handcuffs,
  maneu-vering his legs to keep upright; the second held on to his plumed shako with one
  hand, so it wouldn't blow off, and with the other pulled out a warrant from his breast
  pocket; the third, apparently a rookie, assumed a horizontal position beneath the feet of
  the first two, to cushion their fall—after which, however, he jumped up and carefully
  dusted off his uniform. Meanwhile the first policeman had handcuffed the dumbfounded
  King and the second slapped the sword from his hand. Feebly protesting, the suspect was
  then sum-marily trotted off the field. The entire hunting procession stood rooted to the
  spot for a minute or two, then gave a yell and followed in hot pursuit. The snorting
  cybersteeds had practically caught up with the abductors, and swords and sabers were
  unsheathed and raised to strike, but the third policeman bent over, depressed his
  bellybutton and immediately the arms grew into two shafts, the legs coiled up, sprouting
  spokes, and began to turn, while the back formed the seat of a green racing gig to
  accommodate the other two policemen, who were vigorously plying the now-harnessed
  King with a whip, to make him run faster. The King obliged and broke into a mad gallop,
  waving his arms frantically to ward off the blows that descended upon his royal head; but
  now the huntsmen were gaining again, so the policemen jumped on the King's back and
  one slipped down between the shafts, huffed and puffed and turned into a spinning top7 a
  dancing whirlwind, which gave wings to the little gig and whisked it away over hill and
  dale till it disappeared altogether in a cloud of dust. The King's retinue split up and began
  a desperate search with Geiger counters and bloodhounds, and a special detachment
  came running up with shovels and flamethrowers and left no bone unburned in all the
  neighboring cemeteries—an obvious error, occasioned most likely by the trembling hand
  that hastily telegraphed the order from the observation balloon that had monitored the
  hunt. Several police divisions rushed here and there, searched the grounds, every bush,
  every weed, and both x-rays and laboratory samples were diligently taken of everything
  imaginable. The King's charger was ordered to appear before a special board of inquiry
  appointed by the Prosecutor General. A unit of paratroopers with vacuum cleaners and
  sieves was dropped on the royal game pre-serve to sift through every last particle of
  dust. Finally, the order was issued that anyone resembling a policeman was to be
  detained and held without bail, which naturally cre-ated difficulties—one half of the police
  force, as it turned out, had arrested the other, and vice versa. At dusk the huntsmen and
  soldiers returned to the village dazed and bedraggled with the woeful tidings that neither
  hide nor hair of the King's person was anywhere to be found.
  By torchlight and in the dead of night, the chained con-structors were taken before
  the Great Chancellor and Keeper of the Royal Seal, who addressed them in the fol-lowing
  way:
  "Whereas ye have falsely conspired and perversely plotted against the Crown and
  Life of Our Beloved Sovereign and Most Noble Ruler Krool and therewith dared to raise a
  treacherous hand and vilely devise his demise, not to men-tion impersonating an officer, a
  great aggravation of your crimes, so shall ye be quartered without quarter, impaled and
  
  pilloried, disemboweled, buried alive, crucified and burnt at the stake, after which your
  ashes shall be sent into orbit as a warning and perpetual reminder to all would-be
  regicides, amen."
  "Can't you wait a bit?" asked Trurl. "You see, we were expecting a letter…"
  "A letter, thou most scurrilous and scurvy knave?!"
  Just then the guards made way for the Postmaster Gen-eral himself—indeed, how
  could they bar that dignitary's en-trance with their poleaxes? The Postmaster
  approached in full regalia, his medals jingling impressively, pulled a letter from a sapphire
  satchel and handed it to the Chancellor, saying, "Mannequin though I be, I come from His
  Maj-esty," whereupon he disintegrated into a fine powder. The Chancellor could scarcely
  believe his eyes, but quickly recognized the King's signet impressed there on the purple
  seal-ing wax; he opened the letter and read that His Majesty was forced to negotiate with
  the enemy, for the constructors had employed means algorithmic and algebraic to make
  him cap-tive, and now they would list their demands, all of which the Great Chancellor
  had better meet, if he wished ever to get his Mighty Sovereign back in one piece. Signed:
  "Krool herewith affixes his hand and seal, held prisoner in a cave of unknown location by
  one pseudoconstabulary beast in three uniforms personified."
  There then arose a great clamor, everyone shouting and asking what it all meant and
  what were the demands, to which Trurl said only, "Our chains, if you please."
  A blacksmith was summoned to unfetter them, after which Trurl said:
  "We are hungry and dirty, we need a bath, a shave, mas-sage, refreshment, nothing
  but the best, plenty of pomp and a water ballet with fireworks for dessert!"
  The court, of course, was hopping mad, but had to comply in every particular. Only at
  dawn did the constructors return from their villa, each elegantly pomaded, arrayed and
  reclining in a sedan chair borne by footmen (their former in-formers); they then, deigning
  to grant an audience, sat down and presented their demands—not off the top of their
  heads, mind you, but from a little notebook they had prepared for the occasion and
  hidden behind a curtain in their room. The following articles were read:
  First, A ship of the finest make and model available shall be furnished to carry the
  constructors home.
  2nd, The said ship shall be laden with various cargo as here specified: diamonds—four
  bushels, gold coin—forty bushels, platinum, palladium and whatever other ready
  val-uables they happen to think of—eight bushels of each, also whatever mementos and
  tokens from the Royal Apartments the signatories of this instrument may deem
  appropriate.
  3rd, Until such time as the said ship shall be in readiness for takeoff, every nut and
  bolt in place, fully loaded and de-livered up to the constructors complete with red carpet,
  an eighty-piece send-off band and children's chorus, an abun-dance of honors, decorations
  and awards, and a wildly cheer-ing crowd—until then, no King.
  4th, That a formal expression of undying gratitude shall be stamped upon a gold
  medallion and addressed to Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors Trurl and
  Klapaucius, Delight and Terror of the Universe, and moreover it shall contain a full
  account of their victory and be duly signed and notarized by every high and low official in
  the land, then set in the richly embellished barrel of the King's favorite cannon, which
  
  Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, shall himself and wholly unaided carry on
  board—no other Protozor but the one who lured Their Most Sublime and Radiant
  Constructors to this planet, thinking to work their painful and ignominious death thereby.
  5th, That the aforesaid Protozor shall accompany them on their return journey as
  insurance against any sort of double-dealing, pursuit, and the like. On board he shall
  occupy a cage three by three by four feet and shall receive a daily allowance of humble pie
  with a filling made of that very same sawdust which Their Most Sublime and Radiant
  Con-structors saw fit to order in the process of indulging the King's foolishness and which
  was subsequently taken to po-lice headquarters by unmarked balloon.
  6th and lastly, The King need not crave forgiveness of Their Most Sublime and
  Radiant Constructors on bended knee, since he is much too beneath them to deserve
  notice.
  In Witness Whereof, the parties have hereunto set their hands and seals this day and
  year, etc. and so on. By: Trurl and Klapaucius, Constructors, and the Great Chancellor,
  the Great Chamberlain, the Great Chief of Secret Police, the Seneschal, Squadron Leader
  and Royal Balloonmaster.
  All the ministers and dignitaries turned blue, but what could they do? They had no
  choice, so a ship was imme-diately ordered. But then the constructors unexpectedly
  showed up after a leisurely breakfast, to supervise the work, and nothing suited them:
  this material, for instance, was no good, and that engineer was an absolute idiot, and they
  had to have a revolving magic lantern in the main hall, one with four pneumatic widgets
  and a calibrated cuckoo clock on top —and if the natives here didn't know what a widget
  was, so much the worse for them, considering that the King was no doubt most impatient
  for his release and would (when he could) deal harshly with anyone who dared to delay it.
  This remark occasioned a general numbness, a great weakness about the knees, and
  much trembling, but the work continued apace. Finally the ship was ready and the royal
  steve-dores began to stow the cargo in the hold, diamonds, sacks of pearls, so much gold it
  kept spilling out the hatch. Meanwhile the police were secretly running all about the
  country-side, turning everything upside down, much to the amuse-ment of Trurl and
  Klapaucius, who didn't mind explaining to a fearful but fascinated audience how it all
  happened, how they had discarded one idea after another until they hit upon an
  altogether different kind of beast. Not know-ing where or how to place the controls—that
  is, the brain —so that they would be safe, the constructors had simply made everything
  brain, enabling the beast to think with its leg, or tail, or jaws (equipped with wisdom teeth
  only). But that was just the beginning. The real problem had two aspects, algorithmic and
  psychoanalytic. First they had to determine what would check the King, catch him
  flatfooted, so to speak. To this end, they created by nonlinear trans-mutation a police
  subset within the beast, since everyone knows that resisting or interfering with an officer
  who is making an arrest lege artis is a cosmic offense and utterly unthinkable. So much
  for the psychology of it—except that the Postmaster General was utilized here on similar
  grounds: an official of lower rank might not have made it past the guards, the letter then
  would not have been delivered, and the constructors would have very literally lost their
  heads. Moreover, the Postmaster mannequin had been given means to bribe the guards,
  should that have proved necessary. Every eventuality had been anticipated and provided
  for. Now as far as the algorithms went: they had only to find the proper domain of beasts,
  closed, bounded and bonded, with plenty of laws both associative and distributive in
  op-eration, throw in a constable constant or two, some graphs of graft, squadratic
  equations and crime waves—and the thing took over from there, once activated by the
  expedient of writing a document-program (behind the curtain with the bells) in castor oil
  ink, rendering it thereby sufficiently hard to swallow to serve as a red-tape generator. We
  
  might add here that later on the constructors had an article pub-lished in a prominent
  scientific journal under the title of "Recursive â—Metafunctions in the Special Case of a
  Bogus Polypolice Transmogrification Conversion on an Oscillating Harmonic Field of Glass
  Bells and Green Gig, Kerosene Lamp on the Left to Divert Attention, Solved by Beastly
  Incarceration-Concatenation,” which was subsequently ex-ploited by the tabloids as "The
  Police State Rears Its Ugly Head." Obviously none of the ministers, dignitaries or
  huntsmen understood a single word of what was said, but that hardly mattered. The
  loving subjects of King Krool knew not whether they should despise these constructors or
  stand and gape in awe and admiration.
  Now all was in readiness for takeoff. Trurl, as stipulated in the agreement, went
  through the King's private chambers with a large sack and calmly appropriated whatever
  object he took a fancy to. Finally, the carriage arrived and took the victors to the
  spaceport, where a crowd cheered wildly and a children's chorus sang, then a charming
  little girl in local costume curtsied and presented them with a ribboned nose-gay, and
  high-ranking officials took turns to express their undying gratitude, bidding them both a
  fond farewell, and the band played, several ladies fainted, and then a hush fell over the
  multitude. Klapaucius had pulled a tooth from his mouth, not an ordinary tooth but a
  transmitter-receiver, a two-way bicuspid. He threw a tiny switch and a sandstorm
  appeared on the horizon, growing and growing, whirling faster and faster, until it dropped
  into an empty space be-tween the ship and the crowd and came to a sudden stop,
  scattering dust and debris in all directions. Everyone gasped and stepped back—there
  stood the beast, looking unusually bestial as it flashed its laser eyes and flailed its dragon
  tail!
  "The King, if you please," said Klapaucius. But the beast answered, speaking in a
  perfectly normal voice:
  "Not on your life. It's my turn now to make de-mands…"
  "What? Have you gone mad? You have to obey, it's in the matrix!" shouted
  Klapaucius. Everyone stared, thunder-struck.
  "Matrix-schmatrix. Look pal, I'm not just any beast, I'm algorithmic, heuristic and
  sadistic, fully automatic and auto-cratic, that means undemocratic, and I've got loads of
  loops and plenty of feedback so none of that back talk or I'll clap you in irons, that means
  in the clink with the King, in the brig with the green gig, get me?"
  "I'll give you feedback!" roared Klapaucius, furious. But Trurl asked the beast:
  "What exactly do you want?"
  And he sneaked around behind Klapaucius and pulled out a special tooth of his own, so
  the beast wouldn't see.
  "Well, first of all I want to marry—"
  But they never learned whom in particular the beast had in mind, for Trurl threw a
  tiny switch and quickly chanted:
  "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, input, output, out—you—go!"
  The fantastically complex electromagnetic wave system that held the beast's atoms in
  place now came apart under the influence of those words, and the beast blinked, wiggled
  its ears, swallowed, tried to pull itself together, but before it could even grit its teeth there
  
  was a hot gust of wind, a strong smell of ozone, then nothing left to pull together, just a
  little mound of ashes and the King standing in the middle, safe and sound, but in great
  need of a bath and mortified to tears that it had come to this.
  "That'll cut you down to size," said Trurl, and no one knew whether he meant the
  beast or the King. In either case, the algorithm had done its job well.
  "And now, gentlemen," Trurl concluded, "if you'll kindly help the Master of the Royal
  Hunt into his cage, we can be on our way …"
  The Third Sally
  Or The Dragons
  of Probability
  Trurl and Klapaucius were former pupils of the great Cerebron of Umptor, who for
  forty-seven years in the School of Higher Neantical Nillity expounded the General Theory
  of Dragons. Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation
  may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher
  Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality
  of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any
  further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the prob-lem analytically, discovered
  three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical.
  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different
  way. And then there were the imaginary dragons, and the a-, anti- and minus-dragons
  (colloquially termed nots, noughts and oughtn'ts by the ex-perts), the minuses being the
  most interesting on account of the well-known dracological paradox: when two minuses
  hypercontiguate (an operation in the algebra of dragons cor-responding roughly to simple
  multiplication), the product is 0.6 dragon, a real nonplusser. Bitter controversy raged
  among the experts on the question of whether, as half of them claimed, this fractional
  beast began from the head down or, as the other half maintained, from the tail up. Trurl
  and Klapaucius made a great contribution by showing the error of both positions. They
  were the first to apply probability theory to this area and, in so doing, created the field of
  statistical draconics, which says that dragons are thermodynamically impossible only in
  the probabilistic sense, as are elves, fairies, gnomes, witches, pixies and the like. Using the
  general equation of improbability, the two constructors obtained the coefficients of
  pixation, elfinity, kobolding, etc. They found that for the spontaneous manifestation of an
  average dragon, one would have to wait a good sixteen quintoquadrillion heptillion years.
  In other words, the whole problem would have remained a mathematical curiosity had it
  not been for that famous tinkering passion of Trurl, who decided to examine the
  nonphenome non empirically. First, as he was dealing with the highly improbable, he
  invented a probability amplifier and ran tests in his basement—then later at the
  Dracogenic Proving Grounds established and funded by the Academy. To this day those
  who (sadly enough) have no knowledge of the General Theory of Improbability ask why
  Trurl probabilized a dragon and not an elf or goblin. The answer is simply that dragons
  are more probable than elves or goblins to begin with. True, Trurl might have gone
  
  further with his amplifying experiments, had not the first been so discouraging—
  discouraging in that the materialized dragon tried to make a meal of him. Fortunately,
  Klapaucius was nearby and low-ered the probability, and the monster vanished. A
  number of scholars subsequently repeated the experiment on a phantasmatron, but, as
  they lacked the necessary know-how and sang-froid, a considerable quantity of dragon
  spawn, raising an ungodly perturbation, broke loose. Only then did it be-come clear that
  those odious beasts enjoyed an existence quite different from that of ordinary cupboards,
  tables and chairs; for dragons are distinguished by their probability rather than by their
  actuality, though granted, that probability is overwhelming once they've actually come
  into be-ing. Suppose, for example, one organizes a hunt for such a dragon, surrounds it,
  closes in, beating the brush. The circle of sportsmen, their weapons cocked and ready,
  finds only a burnt patch of earth and an unmistakable smell: the dragon, seeing itself
  cornered, has slipped from real to configurational space. An extremely obtuse and brutal
  creature, it does this instinctively, of course. Now, ignorant and back-ward persons will
  occasionally demand that you show them this configurational space of yours, apparently
  unaware that electrons, whose existence no one in his right mind would question, also
  move exclusively in configurational space, their comings and goings fully dependent on
  curves of prob-ability. Though it is easier not to believe in electrons than in dragons:
  electrons, at least taken singly, won't try to make a meal of you.
  A colleague of Trurl, one Harborizian Cybr, was the first to quantize a dragon,
  detecting a particle known as the dracotron, the energy of which is
  measured—obviously—in units of dracon by a dracometer, and he even determined the
  coordinates of its tail, for which he nearly paid with his life. Yet what did these scientific
  achievements concern the common folk, who were now greatly harassed by dragons
  ranging the countryside, filling the air with their howls and flames and trampling, and in
  places even exacting tribute in the form of young virgins? What did it concern the poor
  villagers that Trurl's dragons, indeterministic hence heuris-tic, were behaving exactly
  according to theory though con-trary to all notions of decency, or that his theory could
  pre-dict the curve of the tails that demolished their barns and leveled their crops? It is
  not surprising, then, that the gen-eral public, instead of appreciating the value of Trurl's
  revo-lutionary invention, held it much against him. A group of individuals thoroughly
  benighted in matters of science waylaid the famous constructor and gave him a good
  thrashing. Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further
  experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on
  its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it
  is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a
  great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running
  rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they
  multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant
  Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Spe-cial Case of Passage from States
  Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities." The
  article created a sensation in the scientific world, where there was still talk of the amazing
  polypolice beast that had been used by the intrepid constructors against King Krool to
  avenge the deaths of their colleagues. But far greater was the sensation caused by the
  news that a certain constructor known as Basiliscus the Gorgonite, traveling through the
  Galaxy, was apparently making dragons appear by his pres-ence—and in places where no
  one had ever seen a dragon before. Whenever the situation grew desperate and
  catas-trophe seemed imminent, this Basiliscus would turn up, ap-proach the sovereign of
  that particular area and, settling on some outrageous fee after long hours of bargaining,
  would undertake to extirpate the beasts. At which he usually suc-ceeded, though no one
  knew quite how, since he worked in secret and alone. True, the guarantee he offered for
  dragon removal—dracolysis—was only statistical; though one ruler did pay him in similar
  
  coin, that is, in ducats that were only statistically good. After that, the insolent Basiliscus
  always used aqua regia to check the metallic reliability of his royal payments. One sunny
  afternoon Trurl and Klapaucius met and held the following conversation:
  “Have you heard about this Basiliscus?" asked Trurl.
  "Yes."
  "Well, what do you think?"
  "I don't like it."
  "Nor do I. How do you suppose he does it?"
  "With an amplifier."
  "A probability amplifier?"
  "Either that, or oscillating fields."
  "Or a paramagnedracic generator."
  "You mean, a draculator?"
  "Yes."
  "Ah."
  "But really," cried Trurl, "that would be criminal! That would mean he was bringing
  the dragons with him, only in a potential state, their probability near zero; then, after
  landing and getting the lay of the land, he was increasing the chances, raising the
  potential, strengthening the proba-bility until it was almost a certainty. And then, of
  course, you have visualization, materialization, full manifestation."
  "Of course. And he probably shuffles the letters of the matrix to make the dragons
  grand."
  "Yes, and the poor people groan in agony and gore. Ter-rible!"
  "What do you think; does he then apply an irreversible antidraconian
  retroectoplasmatron, or simply lower the probability and walk off with the gold?"
  "Hard to say. Though if he's only improbabilizing, that would be an even greater piece
  of villainy, since sooner or later the fractional fluctuations would have to give rise to a
  draconic iso-oscillation—and the whole thing would start all over again."
  "Though by that time both he and the money would be gone," observed Klapaucius.
  "Shouldn't we report him to the Main Office?"
  "Not just yet. He may not be doing this, after all. We have no real proof. Statistical
  fluctuations can occur without an amplifier; at one time, you know, there were neither
  am-plifiers nor phantasmatrons, yet dragons did appear. Purely on a random basis."
  "True…" replied Trurl. "But these appear immediately after he arrives on the
  planet!"
  "I know. Still, reporting a fellow constructor—it just isn't done. Though there's no
  
  reason we can't take measures of our own."
  "No reason at all."
  "I'm glad you agree. But what exactly should we do?"
  At this point the two famous dracologists got into a dis-cussion so technical, that
  anyone listening in wouldn't have been able to make head or tail of it. There were such
  mys-terious words as "discontinuous orthodragonality." "grand draconical ensembles."
  "high-frequency binomial fafneration." "abnormal saurian distribution." "discrete
  dragons." "indiscrete dragons." "drasticodracostochastic control." "simple Grendelian
  dominance." "weak interaction dragon diffraction." "aberrational reluctance."
  "informational figmentation," and so on.
  The upshot of all this penetrating analysis was the third sally, for which the
  constructors prepared most carefully, not failing to load their ship with a quantity of
  highly com-plicated devices.
  In particular they took along a scatter-scrambler and a special gun that fired negative
  heads. After landing on Eenica, then on Meenica, then finally on Mynamoaca, they
  realized it would be impossible to comb the whole infested area in this way and they
  would have to split up. This was most easily done, obviously, by separating; so after a
  brief council of war each set out on his own. Klapaucius worked for a spell on
  Prestopondora for the Emperor Maximillion, who was prepared to offer him his
  daughter's hand in marriage if only he would get rid of those vile beasts. Dragons of the
  highest probability were everywhere, even in the streets of the capital, and the place
  literally swarmed with virtuals. A virtual dragon, the uneducated and simple-minded
  might say, "isn't really there," having no observable substance nor displaying the least
  intention of acquiring any; but the Cybr-Trurl-Klapaucius-Leech calculation (not to
  mention the Drachendranginger wave equation) clearly shows that a dragon can jump
  from configurational to real space with no more effort than it takes to jump off a cliff.
  Thus, in any room, cellar or attic, provided the probability is high, you could meet with a
  dragon or possibly even a metadragon.
  Instead of chasing after the beasts, which would have accomplished little or nothing,
  Klapaucius, a true theoretician, approached the problem methodically; in squares and
  prom-enades, in barns and hostels he placed probabilistic battery-run dragon dampers,
  and in no time at all the beasts were extremely rare. Collecting his fee, plus an honorary
  degree and an engraved loving cup, Klapaucius blasted off to rejoin his friend. On the way,
  he noticed a planet and someone waving to him frantically. Thinking it might be Trurl in
  some sort of trouble, he landed. But it was only the inhab-itants of Trufffandria, the
  subjects of King Pfftius, gesticu-lating. The Trufflandrians held to various superstitions
  and primitive beliefs; their religion, Pneumatological Dracolatry, taught that dragons
  appeared as a divine retribution for their sins and took possession of all unclean souls.
  Quickly realiz-ing it would be useless to enter into a discussion with the royal
  dracologians—their methods consisted primarily of waving censers and distributing
  sacred relics—Klapaucius in-stead conducted soundings of the outlying terrain. These
  revealed the planet was occupied by only one beast, but that beast belonged to the
  terrible genus of Echidnosaurian hypervipers. He offered the King his services. The King,
  how-ever, answered in a vague, roundabout fashion, evidently under the influence of that
  ridiculous doctrine which would have the origin of dragons be somehow supernatural.
  Perus-ing the local newspapers, Klapaucius learned that the dragon terrorizing the planet
  was considered by some to be a single thing, and by others, a multiplex creature that
  could operate in several locations at the same time. This gave him pause—though it
  
  wasn't so surprising really, when you con-sidered that the localization of these odious
  phenomena was subject to so-called dragonomalies, in which certain speci-mens,
  particularly when abstracted, underwent a "smearing" effect, which was in reality nothing
  more than a simple isotopic spin acceleration of asynchronous quantum moments. Much
  as a hand, emerging from the water fingers-first, ap-pears above the surface in the form
  of five seemingly sepa-rate and independent items, so do dragons, emerging from the
  lairs of their configurational space, on occasion appear to be plural, though in point of fact
  they are quite singular. Towards the end of his second audience with the King, Klapaucius
  inquired if perhaps Trurl were on the planet and gave a detailed description of his
  comrade. He was aston-ished to hear that yes, his comrade had only recently visited their
  kingdom and had even undertaken to exorcise the monster, had in fact accepted a
  retainer and departed for the neighboring mountains where the monster had been most
  frequently sighted. Had then returned the next day, de-manding the rest of his fee and
  presenting four and twenty dragon's teeth as proof of his success. There was some
  mis-understanding, however, and it was decided to withhold pay-ment until the matter
  was fully cleared up. At which Trurl flew into a rage and in a loud voice made certain
  comments about His Royal Highness that were perilously close to lese majesty if not
  treason, then stormed out without leaving a forwarding address. That very same day the
  monster reap-peared as if nothing had happened and, alas, ravaged their farms and
  villages more fiercely than before.
  Now this story seemed questionable to Klapaucius, though on the other hand it was
  hard to believe the good King was lying, so he packed his knapsack with all sorts of
  powerful dragon-exterminating equipment and set off for the mountains, whose
  snowcapped peaks rose majestically in the east.
  It wasn't long before he saw dragon prints and got an unmistakable whiff of
  brimstone. On he went, undaunted, holding his weapon in readiness and keeping a
  constant eye on the needle of his dragon counter. It stayed at zero for a spell, then began
  to give nervous little twitches, until, as if struggling with itself, it slowly crawled towards
  the number one. There was no doubt now: the Echidnosaur was close at hand. Which
  amazed Klapaucius, for he couldn't under-stand how his trusty friend and renowned
  theoretician, Trurl, could have gotten so fouled up in his calculations as to fail to wipe the
  dragon out for good. Nor could he imag-ine Trurl returning to the royal palace and
  demanding pay-ment for what he had not accomplished.
  Klapaucius then came upon a group of natives. They were plainly terrified, the way
  they kept looking around and trying to stay together. Bent beneath heavy burdens
  bal-anced on their backs and heads, they were stepping single-file up the mountainside.
  Klapaucius accosted the proces-sion and asked the first native what they were about.
  "Sire!" replied the native, a lower court official in a tat-tered tog and cummerbund. "
  'Tis the tribute we carry to the dragon."
  "Tribute? Ah yes, the tribute! And what is the tribute?"
  "Nothin' more 'r less, Sire, than what the dragon would have us bring it: gold coins,
  precious stones, imported per-fumes, an' a passel o' other valuables."
  This was truly incredible, for dragons never required such tributes, certainly not
  
  perfume—no perfume could ever mask their own natural fetor—and certainly not
  currency, which was useless to them.
  "And does it ask for young virgins, my good man?" asked Klapaucius.
  "Virgins? Nay, Sire, tho' there war a time … we had to cart 'em in by the bevy, we
  did… Only that war before the stranger came, the furrin gentleman, Sire, a-walkin'
  around the rocks with 'is boxes an' contraptions, all by 'is-self…" Here the worthy native
  broke off and stared at the instruments and weapons Klapaucius was carrying,
  partic-ularly the large dragon counter that was ticking softly all the while, its red pointer
  jumping back and forth across the white dial.
  "Why, if he dinna have one… jus' like yer Lordship's," he said in a hushed voice. "Aye,
  jus' like… the same wee stiggermajigger and a' the rest…"
  "There was a sale on them," said Klapaucius, to allay the native's suspicions. "But tell
  me, good people, do you hap-pen to know what became of this stranger?"
  "What became o' him, ye ask? That we know not, Sire, to be sure. 'Twas, if I not
  mistake me, but a fortnight past —'twas, 'twas not, Master Gyles, a fortnight withal an'
  nae more?"
  " 'Twas, 'twas, 'tis the truth ye speak, the truth aye, a fortnight sure, or maybe two."
  "Aye! So he comes to us, yer Grace, partakes of our 'umble fare, polite as ye please an'
  I'll not gainsay it, nay, a parfit gentleman true, pays hondsomely, inquires after the
  missus don't y'know, aye an' then he sits 'isself down, spreads out a' them contraptions an'
  thin's with clocks in 'em, y'see, an' scribbles furious-like, numbers they are, one
  after't'other, in this wee book he keep in 'is breast pocket, then takes out
  a—whad'yacallit—therbobbiter thingamabob…"
  "Thermometer?"
  "Aye, that's it! A thermometer… an' he says it be for dragons, an' pokes it here an'
  there, Sire, an' scribbles in 'is book again, then he takes a' them contraptions an' things an'
  packs 'em up an' puts 'em on 'is back an' says farewell an' goes 'is merry way. We never
  saw 'im more, yer Honor. That very night we hear a thunder an' a clatter, oh, a good ways
  off, 'bout as far as Mount Murdigras—'tis the one, Sire, hard by yon peak, aye, that one
  thar, looks like a hawk, she do, we call 'er Pfftius Peak after our beluved King, an' that one
  thar on't'uther side, bent over like't'would spread 'er arse, that be the Dollymog, which,
  accordin' to legend—"
  "Enough of the mountains, worthy native," said Klaupaucius. "You were saying there
  was thunder in the night. What happened then?"
  "Then, Sire? Why nothin', to be sure. The hut she give a jump an' I falls outta bed, to
  which I'm well accustomed, mind ye, seein' as how the wicked beast allus come a-bumpin'
  gainst the house with 'er tail an' send a feller flyin'—like when Master Gyles' ayn brother
  londed in the privy 'cause the creatur' gets a hankerin' to scratch 'isself on the corner o'
  the roof…"
  "To the point, man, get to the point!" cried Klapaucius. "There was thunder, you fell
  down, and then what?"
  "Then nothin', like I says before an' thought I made it clear. Nothin', an' if'n there war
  somethin', there'd be some-thin', only there war nothin' sure an' that be the long an' the
  
  short of it! D'ye agree, Master Gyles?"
  "Aye, sure 'tis the truth ye speak, 'tis."
  Klapaucius bowed and stepped back, and the whole procession continued up the
  mountain, the natives straining beneath the dragon's tribute. He supposed they would
  place it in some cave designated by the beast, but didn't care to ask for details; his head
  was already spinning from listening to the local official and his Master Gyles. And anyway,
  he had heard one of the natives say to another that the dragon had chosen "a spot as near
  us an' as near 'isself as could be found."
  Klapaucius hurried on, picking his way according to the readings of the dragonometer
  he kept on a chain around his neck. As for the counter, its pointer had come to rest on
  exactly eight-tenths of a dragon.
  "What in the devil is it, an indeterminant dragon?" he thought as he marched,
  stopping to rest every now and then, for the sun beat fiercely and the air was so hot that
  every-thing shimmered. There was no vegetation anywhere, not a scrap, only baked
  mud, rocks and boulders as far as the eye could see.
  An hour passed, the sun hung lower in the heavens, and Klapaucius still walked
  through fields of gravel and scree, through craggy passes, till he found himself in a place of
  narrow canyons and ravines full of chill and darkness. The red pointer crept to
  nine-tenths, gave a shudder, and froze.
  Klapaucius put his knapsack on a rock and had just taken off his antidragon belt when
  the indicator began to go wild, so he grabbed his probability extinguisher and looked all
  around. Situated on a high bluff, he was able to see into the gorge below, where something
  moved.
  "That must be her!" he thought, since Echidnosaurs are invariably female.
  Could that be why it didn't demand young virgins? But no, the native said it had
  before. Odd, most odd. But the main thing now, Klapaucius told himself, was to shoot
  straight and everything would be all right. Just in case, how-ever, he reached for his
  knapsack again and pulled out a can of dragon repellent and an atomizer. Then he peered
  over the edge of the rock. At the bottom of the gorge, along the bed of a dried-up stream
  walked a grayish brown dragoness of enormous proportions, though with sunken sides as
  if it had been starved. All sorts of thoughts ran through Klapaucius' head. Annihilate the
  thing by reversing the sign of its pentapendragonal coefficient from positive to negative,
  thereby raising the statistical probability of its nonexistence over that of its existence?
  Ah, but how very risky that was, when the least deviation could prove disastrous: more
  than one poor soul, seeking to produce the lack of a dragon, had ended up instead with the
  back of the dragon—resulting in a beast with two backs—and nearly died of
  embarrassment! Besides, total deprobabilization would rule out the possibil-ity of
  studying the Echidnosaur's behavior. Klapaucius wa-vered; he could see a splendid
  dragonskin tacked on the wall of his den, right above the fireplace. But this wasn't the
  time to indulge in daydreams—though a dracozoologist would certainly be delighted to
  receive an animal with such unusual tastes. Finally, as Klapaucius got into position, it
  oc-curred to him what a nice little article might be written up on the strength of a
  well-preserved specimen, so he put down the extinguisher, lifted the gun that fired
  negative heads, took careful aim and pulled the trigger.
  The roar was deafening. A cloud of white smoke engulfed Klapaucius and he lost sight
  of the beast for a moment. Then the smoke cleared.
  
  There are a great many old wives' tales about dragons. It is said, for example, that
  dragons can sometimes have seven heads. This is sheer nonsense. A dragon can have only
  one head, for the simple reason that having two leads to disagree-ments and violent
  quarrels; the polyhydroids, as the scholars call them, died out as a result of internal feuds.
  Stubborn and headstrong by nature, dragons cannot tolerate opposi-tion, therefore two
  heads in one body will always bring about a swift death: each head, purely to spite the
  other, refuses to eat, then maliciously holds its breath—with the usual consequences. It
  was this phenomenon which Euphorius Cloy exploited when he invented the anticapita
  can-non. A small auxiliary electron head is discharged into the dragon's body. This
  immediately gives rise to unreconcilable differences of opinion and the dragon is
  immobilized by the ensuing deadlock. Often it will stand there, stiff as a board, for a day, a
  week, even a month; sometimes a year goes by before the beast will collapse, exhausted.
  Then you can do with it what you will.
  But the dragon Klapaucius shot reacted strangely, to say the least. True, it did rear up
  on its hind paws with a howl that started a landslide or two, and it did thrash the rocks
  with its tail until the sparks flew all over the canyon. But then it scratched its ear, cleared
  its throat and coolly con-tinued on its way, though trotting at a slightly quicker pace.
  Unable to believe his eyes, Klapaucius ran along the ridge to head the creature off at the
  mouth of the dried-up stream —it was no longer an article, or even two articles in the 
  Dracological Journal he could see his name on now, but a whole monograph elegantly
  bound, with a likeness of the dragon and the author on the cover!
  At the first bend he crouched behind a boulder, pulled out his improbability
  automatic, took aim and actuated the possibiliballistic destabilizers. The gunstock
  trembled in his hands, the red-hot barrel steamed; the dragon was sur-rounded with a
  halo like a moon predicting bad weather— but didn't disappear! Once again Klapaucius
  unleashed the utmost improbability at the beast; the intensity of nonverisimilarity was so
  great, that a moth that happened to be fly-ing by began to tap out the Second Jungle
  Book in Morse code with its little wings, and here and there among the crags and cliffs
  danced the shadows of witches, hags and harpies, while the sound of hoofbeats announced
  that some-where in the vicinity there were centaurs gamboling, summoned into being by
  the awesome force of the improbabil-ity projector. But the dragon just sat there and
  yawned, lei-surely scratching its shaggy neck with a hind paw, like a dog. Klapaucius
  clutched his sizzling weapon and desperately kept squeezing the trigger—he had never
  felt so helpless— and the nearest stones slowly lifted into the air, while the dust that the
  dragon had kicked up, instead of settling, hung in midair and assumed the shape of a sign
  that clearly read AT YOUR SERVICE GOV. It grew dim—day was night and night was
  day, it grew cold-—hell was freezing over; a couple of stones went out for a stroll and
  softly chatted of this and that; in short, miracles were happening right and left, yet that
  horrid monster sitting not more than thirty paces from Klapaucius apparently had no
  intention of disap-pearing. Klapaucius threw down his gun, pulled an anti-dragon grenade
  from his vest pocket and, committing his soul to the Universal Matrix of Transfinite
  Transformations, hurled it with all his might. There was a loud ker-boom, and into the air
  with a spray of rock flew the dragon's tail, and the dragon shouted "Yipe!"—just like a
  person—and gal-loped straight for Klapaucius. Klapaucius, seeing the end was near,
  leaped out from behind his boulder, swinging his antimatter saber blindly, but then he
  heard another shout:
  "Stop! Stop! Don't kill me!"
  "What's that, the dragon talking?" thought Klapaucius. "I must be going mad …"
  But he asked:
  
  "Who said that? The dragon?"
  "What dragon? It's me!!"
  And as the cloud of dust blew away, Trurl stepped out of the beast, pushing a button
  that made it sink to its knees and go dead with a long, drawn-out wheeze.
  "Trurl, what on earth is going on? Why this masquerade? Where did you find such a
  costume? And what about the real dragon?" Klapaucius bombarded his friend with
  ques-tions. Trurl finished brushing himself off and held up his hands.
  "Just a minute, give me a chance! The dragon I destroyed, but the King wouldn't pay
  …"
  "Why not?"
  "Stingy, most likely. He blamed it on the bureaucracy, of course, said there had to be
  a notarized death certificate, an official autopsy, all sorts of forms in triplicate, the
  approval of the Royal Appropriations Commission, and so on. The Head Treasurer
  claimed he didn't know the procedure to hand over the money, for it wasn't wages, nor
  did it come under maintenance. I went from the King to the Cashier to the Commission,
  back and forth, and no one would do any-thing; finally, when they asked me to submit a
  vita sheet with photographs and references, I walked out—but by then the dragon was
  beyond recall. So I pulled the skin off it, cut up a few sticks and branches, found an old
  telephone pole, and that was really all I needed; a frame for the skin, some pulleys—you
  know—and I was ready …"
  "You, Trurl? Resorting to such shameful tactics? Impos-sible! What could you hope to
  gain by it? I mean, if they didn't pay you in the first place…"
  "Don't you understand?" said Trurl, shaking his head. "This way I get the tribute!
  Already there's more than I know what to do with."
  "Ah! Of course!!" Klapaucius saw it all now. But he added, "Still, it wasn't right to force
  them …"
  "Who was forcing them? I only walked around in the mountains, and in the evenings I
  howled a little. But really, I'm absolutely bushed." And he sat down next to Klapau-cius.
  "What, from howling?"
  "Howling? What are you talking about? Every night I have to drag sacks of gold from
  the designated cave—all the way up there!" He pointed to a distant ridge. "I made
  my-self a blast-off pad—it's right over there. Just carry several hundred pounds of bullion
  from sundown to sunup and you'll see what I mean! And that dragon was no ordinary
  dragon—the skin itself weighs a couple of tons, and I have to cart that around with me all
  day, roaring and stamping —and then it's all night hauling and heaving. I'm glad you
  showed up, I can't take much more of this…"
  "But… why didn't the dragon—the fake one, that is— why didn't it disappear when I
  lowered the probability to the point of miracles?" Klapaucius asked. Trurl smiled.
  "I didn't want to take any chances," he explained. "Some fool of a hunter might've
  happened by, maybe even Basiliscus himself, so I put probability-proof shields under the
  dragonskin. But come, I've got a few sacks of platinum left —saved them for last since
  they're the heaviest. Which is just perfect, now that you can give me a hand…"
  
  The Fourth Sally
  Or How Trurl
  Built a Femfatalatron to Save Prince
  Pantaloon from the Pangs of Love,
  and How Later He Resorted to a
  Cannonade of Babies
  One day, in the middle of the night, as Trurl lay deep in slumber, there came a violent
  knocking at the door of his domicile, as if someone was trying to knock it off its hinges.
  Still in a stupor, Trurl pulled back the bolts and saw stand-ing there against the paling
  stars an enormous ship. It looked like a giant sugar loaf or flying pyramid, and out of this
  colossus, which had landed right on his front lawn, long rows of andromedaries laden with
  packs walked down a wide ramp, while robots, garbed in turbans and togas and painted
  black, unloaded the bags at his doorstep, and so quickly, that before Trurl knew it, he was
  hemmed in by a growing embankment of bulging sacks—though a narrow passageway
  was left therein, and through this approached an electroknight of remarkable
  countenance, for his jeweled eyes blazed like comets, and he had radar antennas jauntily
  thrown back, and an elegant diamond-studded stole. This imposing personage doffed his
  armored cap and in a mighty yet silken voice inquired:
  "Have I the honor to speak with his lordship Trurl, Trurl the highborn, Trurl the
  illustrious constructor?"
  "Why yes, of course… won't you come in … I wasn't expecting… that is, I was asleep,"
  said Trurl, terribly flustered, pulling on a bathrobe, for a nightshirt was all he was
  wearing, and that wasn't the cleanest.
  The magnificent electroknight, however, appeared not to notice any shortcoming in
  Trurl's attire. Doffng his cap again, which purred and hummed above his castellated brow,
  he gracefully entered the room. Trurl excused himself for a moment, perfunctorily
  performed his morning ablu-tions, then hurried back downstairs. By now it was growing
  light outside, and the first rays of the sun gleamed on the turbans of the robots, who sang
  the old sad and soulful song of bondage, "Tote Dat Jack," as they formed in triple rows
  around both house and pyramidal ship. Trurl took a seat opposite his guest, who blinked
  his shining eyes and finally spoke as follows:
  "The planet from which I come to you, Sir Constructor, is at present deep in the Dark
  Ages. Ah, but Your Excel-lency must forgive our untimely arrival, which did so
  incommoditate him; on board we had no way of knowing, you see, that at this particular
  locus of this worthy sphere, which your abode is pleased to occupy, night still reigned
  supreme and stayed the break of day."
  
  Here he cleared his throat, like someone playing sweetly upon a glass harmonica, and
  continued:
  "I have been sent to Your Exalted Person by my lord and master, His Royal Highness
  Protuberon Asteristicus, sov-ereign ruler of the sister globes of Aphelion and Perihelion,
  hereditary monarch of Aneuria, emperor of all the Monodamites, Biproxicans and
  Tripartisans, the Grand Duke of Anamandorinth, Glorgonzigor and Esquacciaccaturbia,
  Count of the Euscalipü, the Algorissimo and the Flora del Fortran, Paladin Escutcheoned,
  Begudgeoned and of the Highest Dudgeon, Baron of Bhm, Wrph and
  Clarafoncasterbrackeningen, as well as anointed exarch extraordinary of Ida, Pida and
  Adinfinida, to invite in His munificent name Your Resplendent Grace to our kingdom as
  the long-awaited savior of the crown, as the only one who can deliver us from the general
  mortifaction occasioned by the thrice-unhappy infatuation of His Royal Highness, the heir
  to the throne, Pantagoon."
  "But really, I'm not—" Trurl tried to interpose, but the dignitary waved his hand,
  signifying that he had not as yet finished, and went on in that same resonating voice:
  "In return for the gracious loan of your most sympathetic ear, and for your succor in
  the overcoming of our national calamity, His Royal Highness Protuberon hereby
  promises, pledges and solemnly swears that he shall shower Your Con-structorship with
  such riches and honors, that Your Es-teemed Effulgence will never exhaust them, even
  until the end of his days. And now, by way of an advance or, as they say, a retainer, I
  forthwith dub thee"—and here the mag-nate rose, drew his sword, and spoke, vigorously
  punctuating each word with the flat of the blade on both Trurl's shoul-ders—"Earl of Otes,
  Grotes and Finocclea, Margrave Emer-itus of Trundle and Sklar, Eight-barreled Bearer of
  the Great Guamellonian Hok, not to mention Thane of Bondacalonda and Cgth, Governor
  General of Muxis and Ptuxis, as well as Titular Viscount of the Order of Unwinched Waifs,
  Almoner in perpetuum of the realms of Eenica, Meenica and Mynamoaca, with all the
  attendant rights and privileges accruing thereto, including a twenty-one gun salute upon
  rising in the morning and retiring at night, an after-dinner fanfare, and the Extinguished
  Ex-ponential Cross, duly certified and carved in ebony, slate and marzipan. And as proof
  of his royal favor, my Lord and Liege sends you these few trifles, which I have taken the
  liberty to place about your dwelling."
  And indeed, the sacks already blocked out the sky, and the room grew dim. The
  magnate finished speaking, though his hand, raised in eloquence, remained in midair.
  Trurl took this opportunity to say:
  "I am much obliged to His Royal Highness Protuberon, but affairs of the heart, you
  understand, are not exactly my specialty. Though…" he added, uncomfortable under the
  magnate's dazzling gaze, "perhaps you would explain the problem to me …"
  The magnate gave a nod.
  "That is simply done, Sir Constructor! The heir to the throne has fallen in love with
  Amarandina Cybernella, the only daughter of the ruler of the neighboring state of Ib. But
  an ancient enmity divides our kingdoms, and doubtless, if our Beloved Sovereign, yielding
  to the unwearying pleas of the prince, were to ask that emperor for the hand of
  Amarandina, the answer would be a categorical never. And so a year has passed, and six
  
  days, and the crown prince wastes away before our eyes. All attempts to restore him to
  reason have failed, and now our only hope lies in Your Most Iridescent Eminence!"
  Here the magnate made a deep bow. Trurl, observing rows of warriors right outside
  his window, coughed and said in a feeble voice:
  "Well, I really don't see how I could be of … though, of course, if the King wishes it… in
  that case…"
  "Wonderful!" cried the magnate and clapped his hands with a mighty clang.
  Immediately twelve cuirassiers, black as night, rushed in with clattering armor and bore
  Trurl off to the ship, which fired its engines twenty-one times, pulled anchor and, banners
  waving, lifted up into the open sky.
  During the flight the magnate, who was Grand Seneschal and Artifactotum to the
  King, filled Trurl in on the details of the prince's ill-starred enamorization. Directly upon
  their arrival, after the welcoming ceremonies and ticker-tape pa-rade through the streets
  of the capital, the constructor got down to work. He set up his equipment in the
  magnificent royal gardens and in three weeks had converted the Tem-ple of
  Contemplation there into a strange edifice full of metal, cables and glowing screens. This
  was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic,
  and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously
  experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the
  Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a
  maximum attainable effi-ciency—given a constant concupiscence coefficient—of
  ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in
  kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous
  mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, om-nidirectional
  consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight"
  flip-flop circuits, since Trurl held here to the position of Dr. Yentzicus, creator of the
  famous oculo-oscular feel theory.
  There were also all sorts of auxiliary components, like a high-frequency titillizer, an
  alternating tantalator, plus an entire set of lecherons and debaucheraries; on the outside,
  in a special glass case, were enormous dials, on which one could carefully follow the course
  of the whole decaptivation process. Statistical analysis revealed that the femfatalatron
  gave positive, permanent results in ninety-eight cases of unrequited amatorial
  superfixation out of a hundred. The chances of saving the crown prince therefore were
  excellent.
  It took forty venerable peers of the kingdom four hours and more to push and pull
  their prince through the gardens to the Temple of Contemplation, for though fully
  deter-mined, they had to show proper respect for his royal person, and the prince, having
  no desire whatever of becoming de-captivated, kicked and butted his faithful courtiers
  with great vigor. When finally His Majesty was shoved, with the application of numerous
  feather pillows, into the machine and the trapdoor shut after him, Trurl, full of misgivings,
  threw the switch, and the computer began its countdown in a dreary monotone: "Five,
  four, three, two, one, zero … start!" The synchroerotorotors, bumping and grinding, set
  up powerful counterseduction currents to displace the prince's so tragically misplaced
  affections. After an hour of this, Trurl looked at the dials: their needles trembled under
  the terrible load of lascivicity but, alas, failed to show any significant improvement. He
  began to have serious doubts about the success of the treatment, but it was too late to do
  anything now—other than fold his hands and wait pa-tiently. He only checked to make
  sure that the autolips were landing in the right place and at the proper angle, that the
  
  aphrodisial philanderoids and satyriacal panderynes weren't going too far, for he didn't
  want the patient to undergo a total dotal transferral and end up idolizing the machine
  in-stead of Amarandina, but only to fall thoroughly out of love. At last the trapdoor was
  opened in solemn silence. Out of the dim interior, wreathed with a cloud of the sweetest
  perfume, stumbled the pale prince through crushed rose petals—and fell in a swoon,
  stunned by that awesome access of passion. His faithful servants rushed up and, as they
  lifted his limp limbs, heard him utter in a hoarse whisper one solitary word: Amarandina.
  Trurl cursed under his breath, for all of it had been in vain, and the prince's mad love had
  proven stronger than all the megamors and kilocuddles the femfatalatron could bring to
  bear. The rapturometer, when pressed against the brow of the stupefied prince,
  registered one hundred and seven, then the glass shattered and the mercury poured out,
  still quivering, as if it too had come under the influence of those raging emotions. The first
  attempt, then, was a complete failure.
  Trurl returned to his quarters in the foulest mood, and anyone eavesdropping would
  have heard how he paced from wall to wall, seeking a solution. Meanwhile there was an
  awful racket back in the gardens: some stonemasons, or-dered to fix the wall of a small
  arborium, had out of curiosity crawled into the femfatalatron and accidentally turned it
  on. It became necessary to summon the fire department, for they jumped out so
  inflamed, that they started to smoke.
  Next Trurl tried a retropruriginous eroginator with heavy-duty volupticles, but that
  too—to make a long story short— was a flop. The prince was not a whit less smitten with
  Amarandina's charms; in fact, he was more smitten than ever. Once again Trurl paced the
  floor of his room, back and forth for many miles, and sat up half the night reading
  pro-fessional manuals, till he hurled them against the wall. That morning he went to the
  Grand Seneschal and requested an audience with the King. Admitted to the presence of
  His Majesty, Trurl spoke in this fashion:
  "Your Royal Highness and Gracious Sovereign! The dis-enamorment methods which I
  employed upon Your son are the most powerful possible. He simply will not be
  dis-enamored, not alive—Your Majesty must know the truth."
  The King was silent, crushed by this news, but Trurl went on:
  "Of course, I could deceive him, synthesizing an Amarandina according to the
  parameters I have at hand, but sooner or later the prince would find out, when news of
  the true Amarandina reached his ears. No, I see no other way: the prince must marry the
  Emperor's daughter!"
  "Bah, but that is the whole problem, O foreigner! The Emperor will never agree to
  such a marriage!"
  "And if he were conquered? If he had to sue for peace, beg for mercy?"
  "Why then, certainly—but would you have me plunge two large kingdoms into a
  bloody war, which is a risky proposition at best, solely in order to win the hand of the
  Emperor's daughter for my son? No, that is quite out of the question!"
  "Precisely the answer I expected of Your Royal High-ness!" said Trurl calmly.
  "However, there are wars and there are wars; the kind I have in mind would be
  absolutely bloodless. For we would not attack the Emperor's realm with arms; in fact, we
  would not take the life of a single citizen, but just the opposite!"
  "What are you saying? What do you mean?" exclaimed the King.
  
  And as Trurl whispered his secret plan into the royal ear, the monarch's careworn
  face gradually brightened, and he cried:
  "Go then, and do this thing, good foreigner, and may the gods be with thee!"
  The very next day the royal forges and workshops under-took the construction,
  according to Trurl's specifications, of a great number of tremendous cannons, though for
  what purpose intended it was not clear. These were placed around the planet and
  disguised as defense installations, so that no one would guess a thing. Meanwhile Trurl sat
  day and night in the royal cybergenetic laboratory, watching over secret cauldrons in
  which mysterious concoctions gurgled and per-colated. A spy on the premises would have
  discovered noth-ing, except that now and then behind the double-locked doors there was
  an odd mewling, puling sound, and tech-nicians and assistants ran frantically back and
  forth with piles of diapers.
  The bombardment began a week later, at midnight. The cannons, primed by veteran
  cannoneers, were aimed, muz-zles raised, straight at the white star of the Emperor's
  em-pire, and they fired—not death-dealing, but life-giving missiles. For Trurl had loaded
  the cannons with newborn babies, which rained down upon the enemy in gooing, coo-ing
  myriads and, growing quickly, crawled and drooled over everything; there were so many
  of them, that the air shook with their ear-splitting ma-ma's, da-da's, kee-kee's and waa's.
  This infant inundation lasted until the economy began to collapse under the strain and the
  kingdom was faced with the dread specter of a depression, and still out of the sky came
  tots, tads, moppets and toddlers, all chubby and chuckling, their diapers fluttering. The
  Emperor was forced to capitulate to King Protuberon, who promised to call a halt to the
  hostilities on the condition that his son be granted Amarandina's hand in marriage—to
  which the Em-peror hastily agreed. Whereupon the baby cannons were all carefully
  spiked and put away, and, to be safe, Trurl himself took apart the femfatalatron. Later, as
  best man, in a suit of emeralds and holding the ceremonial baton, he played toastmaster
  at the riotous wedding feast. Afterwards, he loaded his rocket with the titles, diplomas
  and citations which both the King and the Emperor had bestowed upon him, and then,
  sated with glory, he headed for home.
  The Fifth Sally
  Or The Mischief
  of King Balerion
  Not by being cruel did Balerion, King of Cymberia, oppress his people, but by having a
  good time. And again, it wasn't feasts or all-night orgies that were dear to His Majesty's
  heart, but only the most innocent games—tiddlywinks, mumbledypeg, old maid and go
  fish into the wee hours of the morning, then hopscotch, leapfrog, but more than any-thing
  he loved to play hide-and-seek. Whenever there was an important decision to be made, a
  State document to be signed, interstellar emissaries to be received or some Com-modore
  requesting an audience, the King would hide, and they would have to find him, else suffer
  the most dreadful punishments. So the whole court would chase up and down the palace,
  
  check the dungeons, look under the drawbridge, comb the towers and turrets, tap the
  walls, turn the throne inside out, and quite often these searches lasted a long time, for the
  King was always thinking up new places to hide. Once, a terribly important war never got
  declared, and all because the King, decked in spangles and crystal pendants, hung three
  days from the ceiling of the main hall and passed for a chandelier, holding his mouth to
  keep from laughing out loud at the ministers rushing about frantically below. Whoever
  found the King was instantly given the title of Royal Discoverer—there were already
  seven hundred and thirty-six of those at court. But he who would gain the King's special
  favor had to beguile him with some new game, one the King had never heard of. Which
  was by no means easy, considering that Balerion was unusually well-versed in the
  subject; he knew all the ancient games, like jackstones or knucklebones, and all the latest
  games, like spin the electron, and he often said that everything was a game, his Crown
  included, and for that matter the whole wide world.
  These thoughtless and frivolous words outraged the ven-erable members of the
  King's privy council; the prime min-ister in particular, My Lord Papagaster of the great
  house of Pentaperihelion, was much provoked, saying the King held nothing sacred and
  even dared expose his own Exalted Person to ridicule.
  Then, when the King unexpectedly announced it was time for riddles, terror filled the
  hearts of everyone. He had always had a passion for riddles; once, right in the middle of
  the coronation, he confounded the Lord High Chancellor with the question, why was
  antimatter like an antimacassar?
  It wasn't very long before the King realized that his cour-tiers weren't putting forth
  the proper effort in solving the conundrums he posed. They replied in any which way,
  said whatever came into their heads, and this infuriated the King. However, as soon as he
  began to base all royal appointments and promotions upon the answers to his riddles,
  things improved considerably. Decorations and dismissals came thick and fast, and the
  whole court, like it or not, had to play the game in earnest. Unfortunately, many
  dignitaries attempted to deceive the King, who, though basically good-natured, could
  simply not tolerate a cheater. The Keeper of the Great Seal was sent into exile because he
  had used a crib (con-cealed beneath his cuirass) in the Royal Presence; he never would
  have been discovered, had not one of his old enemies, a certain general, brought this to
  the King's attention. Papagaster himself had to part with his high post, for he didn't know
  what was the darkest place in outer space. In time, the King's Cabinet was composed of
  the most ac-complished solvers of crosswords, acrostics and rebuses in the land, and his
  ministers never went anywhere without their encyclopedias. The courtiers soon became
  so proficient, that they could supply the correct answer before the King had finished
  asking the question, though this was hardly surprising when you considered that they
  were all avid sub-scribers to the "Official Register," which, instead of a te-dious list of acts
  and administrative decisions, contained nothing but puzzles, puns and parlor games.
  As the years went by, however, the King liked less and less to have to think, and
  gradually returned to his first and greatest love, hide-and-seek. One day, in a particularly
  play-ful mood, he offered a most handsome prize to the one who could find for him the
  best hiding place in all the world. The prize was to be nothing less than the Royal Diadem
  of the Cymberanide Dynasty, a cluster of truly priceless jewels. No one had laid eyes on
  this wonder for many centuries, for it lay locked and coffered in the Royal Vault.
  Now it so happened that Trurl and Klapaucius chanced upon Cymberia in the course
  of one of their travels. News of the King's proclamation, having quickly spread
  through-out the realm, reached our constructors too; they learned of it from the local
  villagers at the inn where they were spend-ing the night.
  
  The next day they repaired to the palace to announce that they knew a hiding place
  unequaled by any other. Unfortunately, so many others had come to claim the prize, that
  it was next to impossible to get by the crowd at the gate. Trurl and Klapaucius therefore
  returned to their lodgings and resolved to try their luck the following day. Though they
  didn't leave it to luck alone; this time the prudent constructors came prepared. To every
  guard who barred the way and then to every court official who challenged them, Trurl
  quietly slipped a few coins and, whenever that didn't work, a few more, and in less than
  five minutes they were standing before the throne of His Royal Highness. His Royal
  Highness was of course delighted to hear that such famous wise men had come so far for
  the sole purpose of imparting to him the secret of the perfect hiding place. It took them a
  little time to explain the how and the why of it to Balerion, but his mind, schooled from
  childhood in the ways of tricks and puzzles, finally grasped the idea. Burning with
  enthusiasm, the King jumped down from his throne, assured the two friends of his
  undying gratitude, promised they would receive the prize without fail—pro-vided only
  they let him try out their secret method at once. Klapaucius was reluctant on this point,
  muttering to him-self that they ought to write up a proper contract first, with parchment,
  seals and tassels; but the King was so insistent, and pleaded with such vehemence,
  swearing great oaths the prize was as good as theirs, that the constructors had to give in.
  Trurl opened a small box he had brought with him, took out the necessary device and
  showed it to the King. This invention actually had nothing to do with hide-and-seek, but
  could be applied to that game wonderfully well. It was a portable bilateral personality
  transformer, with retroreversible feedback, of course. Using it, any two individuals could
  quickly and easily exchange minds. The device, fitted onto one's head, resembled a pair of
  horns; when these came into contact with the forehead of the one with whom one wished
  to effect the exchange, and were lightly pressed, the device was activated and
  instantaneously set up two oppos-ing series of antipodal impulses. Through one horn,
  one's own psyche flowed into the other, and through the other, the other into one's own.
  Hence the total deenergizing of the one memory and the simultaneous energizing of the
  other in its place, and contrariwise. Trurl had set the apparatus on his head for purposes
  of demonstration and was explaining the procedure to the King, bringing the royal
  forehead into proximity with the horns, when the King impulsively butted against them,
  which triggered the mechanism and imme-diately brought about a personality transfer. It
  all happened so quickly that Trurl, who had never really tested the device on himself,
  didn't notice. Nor did Klapaucius, standing to one side; it did strike him rather odd that
  Trurl suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and Balerion instantly took up where
  Trurl had left off,, using such words as "the potentials involved with nonlinear conversion
  of submnemonic quanta" and "the adiabatic flux differential of the id." The King went on
  in his squeaky voice for almost a minute before Klapaucius realized there was something
  wrong. Balerion, finding himself inside the body of Trurl, was no longer listening to the
  lecture, but wiggled his fingers and toes, as if making himself more comfortable in this
  novel shape, which he inspected with the greatest curiosity. Meanwhile Trurl, in a long
  purple robe, was waving his arms and explaining the reversed entropy of mutually
  trans-posed systems, until he grew aware that something was in the way, looked down at
  his hand and was dumbfounded to find himself holding a scepter. He was about to speak,
  but the King burst out laughing and took to his heels. Trurl started after him, but tripped
  over the royal robe and fell flat on his face. This commotion quickly brought the royal
  bodyguards, who straightway threw themselves upon Kla-paucius, thinking he had
  attacked the Royal Person. By the time Trurl managed to get his royal personage off the
  floor and convince the guards it stood in no danger, Balerion was far away, rollicking
  somewhere in Trurl's body. Trurl at-tempted to give chase, but the courtiers wouldn't
  permit it, and when he protested he wasn't the King at all but there had been a
  personality transfer, they concluded that excessive puzzle-solving had finally unhinged
  the Royal Reason and politely but firmly locked him in the royal bedchamber, then sent
  
  for the royal physicians while he roared and pounded on the door. Klapaucius meanwhile,
  thrown out of the palace on his ear, headed back to the inn, thinking—not without
  alarm—of the complications that might arise from what had just taken place.
  "Undoubtedly," he thought, "had I been in Trurl's shoes, my great presence of mind
  would have saved the day. Instead of making a scene and ranting on about telepsychic
  transfers, which couldn't help but create suspicions as to his sanity, I would have taken
  advantage of the King's body and ordered them to seize Trurl, namely Balerion, at
  once-—whereas now he's running around free somewhere in the city—and also, I would
  have had the other constructor remain at my side, in the capacity of special adviser. But
  that complete idiot"—by which he meant Trurl—"completely lost his head, and now I'll
  have to bring all my tactical talents into play, else this business may end badly…"
  He tried to recall everything he knew about the per-sonality transformer, which was
  considerable. By far the greatest danger, as he saw it, was that Balerion, heedlessly
  rushing about in Trurl's body, might stumble and hit some inanimate object with his
  horns. In which case Balerion's consciousness would immediately enter that object and,
  since inanimate things had no consciousness and conse-quently the object could offer the
  transformer nothing in return, Trurl's body would fall lifeless to the ground; as for the
  King, he would be trapped for all eternity inside some stone, or lamppost, or discarded
  shoe. Uneasy, Klapaucius quickened his pace, and not far from the inn he overheard some
  villagers talking excitedly of how his col-league, Trurl, had flown out of the royal palace
  like one possessed, and how, racing down the long, steep steps that led to the harbor, he'd
  taken a spill and broken his leg. How this drove him into a most amazing frenzy; how,
  lying there, he bellowed that he was King Balerion Himself, called for the royal physicians,
  a stretcher with feather pil-lows, sweet essences and balm; and how, when the people
  laughed at this madness, he crawled along the pavement, cursing terribly and rending his
  garments, until one passerby took pity on him and bent over to help. How then the fallen
  constructor tore the hat off his head, revealing—and there were witnesses to swear to
  this—devil's horns. How with those horns he rammed the good Samaritan in the head,
  then fell senseless, strangely stiff and groaning feebly, while the good Samaritan suddenly
  changed, "as if an evil spirit had taken hold of him," and dancing, skipping, shoving aside
  everyone who stood in his way, galloped down the steps to the harbor.
  Klapaucius grew faint when he heard all of this, for he understood that Balerion,
  having damaged Trurl's body (and after using it for so short a time), had cunningly
  switched to the body of some stranger. "Now it's started," he thought with horror. "And
  how will I ever find Balerion, hidden in a body I don't even know? Where do I begin to
  look?!" He tried to learn from the villagers who this passerby was, who had so nobly
  approached the injured pseudo-Trurl, and also, what had become of the horns. Of the
  good Samaritan they knew only that his dress was foreign, though unmistakably naval,
  which suggested he'd stepped off a vessel from distant skies; concerning the horns,
  nothing. But then a certain mendicant whose legs had rusted through (a widower, he had
  no one to keep them taped and tarred) and who was therefore obliged to go around on
  wheels attached to his hips, which indeed gave him a better vantage point on what
  transpired at ground level, told Klapaucius that the worthy mariner had snatched the
  horns from the prone constructor's head with such speed, that no one but himself had
  seen it. So, apparently Balerion was again in possession of the transformer and could
  continue this hair-raising business of jumping from body to body. The news that he now
  occupied the person of a sailor was especially disturbing. "Of all things, a sailor!" thought
  Klapaucius. "When shore leave is up and he doesn't appear on board (and how can he, not
  knowing which ship is his?), the captain is bound to notify the authorities, they'll arrest
  the deserter of course, and Our Highness will find himself in a dungeon! And if at any time
  he beats his head against the dungeon wall in despair—with the horns on—then may
  
  heaven help us all!!" There was little chance, if any, of locating the sailor who was
  Balerion, but Klapaucius hastened to the harbor. Luck was with him, for he saw a sizable
  crowd gathered up ahead. Certain he was on the right track, he mingled with the crowd
  and soon learned, from what was said here and there, that his worst fears were being
  realized. Only minutes earlier, a certain respectable skipper, the owner of an entire fleet
  of merchant ships, had recognized a crewman of his, a person of sterling character; yet
  now this worthy individual was hurling insults at all who went by, and to those who
  cautioned him to be on his way lest the police come, he shouted he could become whoever
  he wanted, and that included the whole police force. Scandalized by such behavior, the
  skipper remon-strated with his crewman, who replied by striking him with a large stick.
  Then a police squad, patrolling the harbor as a place of frequent altercations and
  disorders, arrived on the scene, and it so happened the Commissioner himself was in
  charge. The Commissioner, seeing that the unruly sailor refused to listen to reason,
  ordered him thrown in jail. But while they were making the arrest, the sailor suddenly
  hurled himself at the Commissioner like one possessed and butted him with what seemed
  to resemble horns. Directly after that, he began to howl that he was a policeman, and not
  just any policeman, but chief commander of the har-bor patrol, while the Commissioner,
  instead of being an-gered by this insolent raving, laughed as if it were a tre-mendous joke,
  but then ordered his subordinates to escort the troublemaker to prison without further
  delay, nor to be sparing with their clubs and fists in the process.
  Thus, in less than an hour, Balerion had managed to change his corporeal quarters
  three times, presently occupy-ing the body of a police commissioner, who, though Lord
  knew he was innocent, had to sit and stew in some dark, dank cell. Klapaucius sighed and
  went directly to the police station. It was situated on the coast, a heavy stone edifice. No
  one barred the way, so he went inside and walked through a few empty rooms, until he
  found himself standing in front of a veritable giant several sizes too large for his uniform
  and armed to the teeth. This hulk of an individual glowered at Klapaucius and stepped
  forward, as if to throw him out bodily—but suddenly gave a wink (though Kla-paucius
  certainly had never met him before) and burst out laughing. The voice was gruff, a
  policeman's voice beyond a shadow of a doubt, yet the laugh—and particularly that
  wink—brought to mind Balerion, and indeed, it was Baler-ion on the other side of that
  desk, though obviously not in his own person!
  "I knew you right off," said Balerion the policeman. "You were at the palace, you're
  the friend of the one who had the apparatus. Well, what do you think? Isn't this a fabulous
  hiding place? They'll never find me, you know, not in a million years! And it's so much fun
  being a big, strong policeman! Watch!"
  And he brought his huge policeman's fist down on the desk with such force that it split
  in half—though there was a cracking in the hand as well. Balerion winced and said:
  "Ow, I snapped something. But that's okay. If need be, I can always change—into you,
  for example!"
  Klapaucius backed off in the direction of the door, but the policeman blocked the way
  with his colossal frame and went on:
  "Not that I have anything against you personally, you understand. But you know too
  much, old boy. So I really think it's best we put you in the clink. Yes, into the clink with
  you!" And he gave a nasty laugh. "That way, when I leave the force, no one—not even
  you—will have the fog-giest notion where, or rather who, I am! Ha-ha!"
  "But Your Majesty!" Klapaucius protested. "You don't know all the dangers of the
  
  device. Suppose you entered the body of someone with a fatal illness, or a hunted
  criminal…"
  "No problem," said the King. "All I have to do is remem-ber one thing: after every
  switch, grab the horns!"
  And he pointed to the broken desk, where the device lay in an open drawer.
  "As long as, each time," he said, "I pull it off the head of the person I just was and hold
  on to it, nothing can harm me!"
  Klapaucius did his best to persuade the King to abandon the idea of future personality
  transfers, but it was quite hopeless; the King only laughed and made jokes, then finally
  said, clearly enjoying himself:
  "I won't go back to the palace—you can forget about that! Anyway, I'll tell you: I see
  before me a great voyage, traveling among my loyal subjects from body to body, which,
  after all, is very much in keeping with my democratic principles. And then for dessert, so
  to speak, the body of some fair maiden—that ought to be a most edifying ex-perience,
  don't you think? Ha-ha!"
  And he threw open the door with a great, hairy paw and bawled for his subordinates.
  Klapaucius, seeing they would lock him up for sure unless he acted at once, grabbed an
  inkwell and tossed its contents into the King's face, then in the general confusion leaped
  out a window into the street. By a great stroke of luck, there were no witnesses about,
  and he was able to make it to a populous square and lose himself in the crowd before the
  police began pouring from the station, straightening their shakos and waving their
  weapons in the air.
  Plunged in thoughts that were far from pleasant, Klapaucius walked away from the
  harbor. "It would be best, really," he said to himself, "to leave that incorrigible Balerion to
  his fate, go to the hospital where Trurl's body is stay-ing, occupied by the honest sailor,
  and bring it to the palace, so my friend can be himself again, body and soul. Though it's
  true that that would make the sailor King instead of Balerion—and serve that rascal
  right!" Not a bad plan perhaps, but inoperable for the lack of a small but indispensable
  item, namely the transformer with the horns, which at present lay in the drawer of a
  policeman's desk. For a moment Klapaucius considered the possibility of constructing
  another such device—no, there was neither the time nor the means. "But here's an idea,"
  he thought. "I'll go to Trurl, who's the King and by now has surely come to his senses, and
  I'll tell him to have the army surround the harbor police station. That way, we'll recover
  the device and Trurl can get back to his old self!"
  However, Klapaucius wasn't admitted to the palace. The King, so the sentries told
  him, had been put under heavy electrostatic sedation by his physicians and should sleep
  like a top for the next twenty-eight hours at least.
  "That's all we need!" groaned Klapaucius, and hastened to the hospital where Trurl's
  body was staying, for he feared that it might have already been discharged and
  
  irretrievably lost in the labyrinth of the big city. At the hospital he presented himself as a
  relative of the one with the broken leg; the name he managed to read off the in-patient
  register. He learned that the injury wasn't serious, a bad sprain and not a fracture, though
  the patient would have to remain in traction for several days. Klapaucius, of course, had
  no in-tention of visiting the patient—it would only come out that they weren't even
  acquainted. Reassured at least that Trurl's body wouldn't run off on him unexpectedly, he
  left the hospital and took to wandering the streets, deep in thought. Somehow he found
  himself back in the vicinity of the harbor and noticed the place was swarming with police;
  they were stopping everyone, carefully comparing face after face with a description each
  officer carried with him in a notebook. Klapaucius immediately guessed that this was the
  doing of Balerion, who at all costs wanted him under lock and key. Just then a patrol
  approached—and two guards rounded the corner in the opposite direction, cutting off his
  retreat. Klapaucius quietly gave himself up, demanding only that they take him before
  the Commissioner, saying that it was most urgent, that he was in possession of extremely
  important evidence concerning a certain horrible crime. They took him into custody and
  handcuffed him to a burly policeman; at the station, the Commissioner—Balerion—
  greeted him with a grunt of satisfaction and an evil twinkle in his beady eyes. But
  Klapaucius was already exclaiming, in a voice not his own:
  "Great One! High-high Police Sir! They take me, they say me Klapaucius, me not
  Klapaucius, not-not, me not even know who-what Klapaucius! Maybe that Klapaucius he
  bad one, one who bam-bam horns in head, make big magic, bad magic, make that me not
  me, put head in other head, take old head, horns, run zip-zip, O Much Police Sir! Help!"
  And with these words did the wily Klapaucius fall to his knees, shaking his head and
  muttering in a strange tongue. Balerion, standing behind the desk in a uniform with wide
  epaulets, blinked as he listened, somewhat taken aback; he gave the kneeling Klapaucius
  a closer look and began to nod, apparently convinced—-unaware that the constructor, on
  the way to the station, had pressed his own forehead with his free hand, to produce two
  marks not unlike those left by the horns of a personality transformer. Balerion had his
  men release Klapaucius and leave the room; when the two of them were alone, he asked
  him to relate exactly what had happened, omitting nothing. Klapaucius replied with a long
  story of how he, a wealthy foreigner, had arrived only that day at the harbor, his ship
  laden with two hundred cases of the prettiest puzzles in creation as well as thirty
  self-winding fair maidens, for he had hoped to present these to the great King Balerion;
  how they were a gift from the great Emperor Proboscideon, who in this way sought to
  express his boundless admiration for the great House of Cymberia; but how, having
  arrived and disembarked, he had thought to stretch his legs a little after the long journey
  and was strolling peacefully along the quay, when this person, who looked just like this
  (here Klapaucius pointed to him-self) and who had already aroused his suspicions by
  gazing upon the splendor of his foreign dress with such evident rapacity—when this
  person, in short, suddenly ran towards him like a maniac, ran as if to run him down, but
  doffed his cap instead and butted him viciously with a pair of horns, whereupon an
  extraordinary exchange of minds took place.
  Klapaucius put everything he had into the tale, trying to make it as believable as
  possible. He spoke at great length of his lost body, while heaping insults upon the one it
  was now his misfortune to possess, and he even began to slap his own face and spit on his
  own legs and chest; he spoke of the treasures he'd brought with him, describing them in
  every detail, particularly the self-winding maidens; he rem-inisced about the family he'd
  left behind, his ion-scions, his hi-fi fido, his wife, one of three hundred, who made a mulled
  electrolyte as fine as any that ever graced the table of the Emperor Himself; he even let
  the Commissioner in on his biggest secret, to wit, that he had arranged with the captain of
  
  his ship to hand the treasures over to whomsoever came on board and gave the
  password.
  Balerion listened greedily, for it seemed quite logical to him that Klapaucius, seeking
  to hide from the police, should do so by entering the body of a foreigner, a foreigner
  more-over attired in splendid robes, hence obviously wealthy, which would provide him
  with considerable means once the transfer were effected. It was plain that a similar
  scheme had hatched in the brain of Balerion. Slyly, he tried to coax the secret password
  from the false foreigner, who didn't require much coaxing, soon whispering the word into
  his ear: "Niterc." By now the constructor was sure Balerion had taken the bait: the King,
  loving puzzles as he did, couldn't bear to see them go to the King, since the King, after all,
  was no longer he; and, believing everything, he believed that Klapaucius had a second
  transformer—indeed, he had no reason to think otherwise.
  They sat awhile in silence; one could see the wheels turn-ing in Balerion's head.
  Assuming an air of indifference, he began to question the foreigner as to the location of his
  ship, the name of the captain, and so forth. Klapaucius answered, banking on the King's
  cupidity, nor was he mistaken, for suddenly the King stood up, announced that he would
  have to verify what the foreigner had told him, and hurriedly left the room, locking the
  door securely behind him. Klapaucius then heard Balerion—evidently the wiser from past
  experience—station a guard beneath the window as he was leaving. Of course he would
  find nothing, there being no ship, no treasure, no self-winding maidens whatever. But that
  was the whole point of Klapaucius' plan. As soon as the King was gone, he rushed over to
  the desk, pulled the device from the drawer and quickly placed it on his head. Then he
  quietly waited for the King to return. It wasn't long before there were heavy footsteps
  outside, muffled curses, the grinding of teeth, a key scraping in the lock—and the
  Commissioner burst in, bellowing:
  "Scoundrel! Where's the ship, the treasure, the pretty puzzles?!"
  But that was all he said, for Klapaucius leaped out from behind the door and charged
  like a mad ram, butting him square in the head. Then, before Balerion had time to get his
  bearings inside Klapaucius, Klapaucius, now the Com-missioner, roared for the guards to
  throw him in jail at once and keep a close eye on him! Stunned by this sudden re-versal,
  Balerion didn't realize at first how shamefully he had been deceived; but when it finally
  dawned on him that he had been dealing with the crafty constructor all along, and there
  had never been any wealthy foreigner, Balerion filled his dark dungeon with terrible oaths
  and threats—harmless, however, without the device. Klapaucius, on the other hand,
  though he had temporarily lost the body to which he was accustomed, had succeeded in
  gaining possession of the personality transformer. He put on his best uniform and
  marched straight to the royal palace.
  The King was still asleep, they told him, but Klapaucius, in his capacity as Police
  Commissioner, said it was impera-tive he see His Highness, if only for a few moments,
  said that this was a matter of the utmost gravity, a crisis, the nation hanging in the
  balance, and more of the same, until the frightened courtiers led him to the royal
  bedchamber. Well-acquainted with his friend's habits and peculiarities, Klapaucius
  touched the heel of Trurl's foot; Trurl jumped up, instantly wide-awake, for he was
  exceedingly ticklish. He rubbed his eyes and stared in amazement at this hulking giant of
  a policeman before him, but the giant leaned over and whispered: "It's me, Klapaucius. I
  had to occupy the Commissioner—without a badge, they'd never have let me in—and I got
  the device, it's right here in my pocket…"
  Trurl, overjoyed when Klapaucius told him of his strata-gem, rose from the royal bed,
  
  declaring to all that he was fully recovered, and later, draped in purple and holding the
  royal orb and scepter, sat upon his throne and issued several orders. First, he had them
  bring from the hospital his own body with the leg Balerion sprained on the harbor steps.
  This swiftly done, he enjoined the royal physicians to tend the patient with all the skill and
  solicitude at their disposal. Then, after a brief conference with his Commissioner, namely
  Klapaucius, Trurl proclaimed he would restore order in the realm and bring things back to
  normal.
  Which wasn't easy, there being no end of complications to straighten out. Though the
  constructors had no intention of returning all the displaced souls to their former bodies;
  their main concern, actually, was that Trurl be Trurl as soon as possible, and Klapaucius
  Klapaucius. In the flesh, that is. Trurl therefore commanded that the prisoner (Balerion in
  his colleague's body) be dragged from jail and hauled before His August Presence. The
  first transfer promptly carried out, Klapaucius was himself again, and the King (now in
  the body of the ex-commissioner of police) had to stand and listen to a most unpleasant
  lecture, after which he was placed in the castle dungeon, the official word being that he
  had fallen into disfavor due to incompetence in the solv-ing of a certain rebus. Next
  morning Trurl's body was in good enough health to be repossessed. Only one problem
  remained: it wasn't right, somehow, to leave without having properly settled the question
  of succession to the throne. To release Balerion from his constabulary corpus and seat him
  once more at the helm of the State was quite unthink-able. So this is what they did: under
  a great oath of secrecy the friends told the honest sailor in Trurl's body everything, and
  seeing how much good sense resided in that simple soul, they judged him worthy to reign;
  after the transfer, then, Trurl became himself and the sailor King. Before this, how-ever,
  Klapaucius ordered a large cuckoo clock brought to the palace, one he had seen in a
  nearby shop when roaming the city streets, and the mind of King Balerion was conveyed
  to the cuckoo's works, while it, in turn, occupied the person of the policeman. Thus was
  justice done, for the King was obliged to work diligently day and night thereafter,
  an-nouncing the hours with a dutiful cuckoo-cuckoo, to which he was compelled at the
  appropriate moments by the sharp little teeth of the clock's gears, and with which he
  would expiate, hanging on the wall of the main hall for the re-mainder of his days, his
  thoughtless games, not to mention having endangered the life and limb of two famous
  con-structors by so frequently changing his mind. As for the Commissioner, he returned
  to his duties and functioned flawlessly, proving that a cuckoo mentality was quite
  suffi-cient for that post. The friends finally took their leave of the crowned sailor,
  gathered up their belongings, shook the dust of that troublesome kingdom from their feet,
  and con-tinued on their way. One might only add that Trurl's final action in the King's
  body had been to visit the Royal Vault and take possession of the Royal Diadem of the
  Cymberanide Dynasty, which prize he had fairly earned, having dis-covered the very best
  hiding place in all the world.
  The Fifth Sally (A)
  OR Trurl's
  Prescription
  
  Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the Steelypips,
  illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in their vats, no rules, no schools,
  no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter—for they
  had a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect.
  And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it was all they had—first
  they saved up all their atoms, then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why
  they chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine. Each and every Steelypip had its
  own little socket and its own little plug, and each was completely on its own. Though they
  didn't own the machine, neither did the machine own them, everybody just pitched in.
  Some were mechanics, other mechanicians, still others mechanists: but all were
  mechan-ically minded. They had plenty to do, like if night had to be made, or day, or an
  eclipse of the sun—but that not too often, or they'd grow tired of it. One day there flew up
  to the white sun behind the green star a comet in a bonnet, namely a female, mean as
  nails and atomic from her head to her four long tails, awful to look at, all blue from
  hydro-gen cyanide and, sure enough, reeking of bitter almonds. She flew up and said,
  "First, I'll burn you to the ground, and that's just for starters."
  The Steelypips watched—the fire in her eye smoked up half the sky, she drew on her
  neutrons, mesons like caissons, pi- and mu- and neutrinos too—"Fee-fi-fo-fum
  plu-to-ni-um." And they reply: "One moment, please, we are the Steelypips, we have no
  fear, no spats in our vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the moon, for
  we have a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every
  respect, so go away, lady comet, or you'll be sorry."
  But she already filled up the sky, burning, scorching, roaring, hissing, until their moon
  shriveled up, singed from horn to horn, and even if it had been a little cracked, old, and on
  the small side to begin with, still that was a shame. So wast-ing no more words, they took
  their strongest fields, tied them around each horn with a good knot, then threw the
  switch: try that on for size, you old witch. It thundered, it quaked, it groaned, the sky
  cleared up in a flash, and all that remained of the comet was a bit of ash—and peace
  reigned once more.
  After an undetermined amount of time something ap-pears, what it is nobody knows,
  except that it's hideous and no matter from which angle you look at it, it's even more
  hideous. Whatever it is flies up, lands on the highest peak, so heavy you can't imagine,
  makes itself comfortable and doesn't budge. But it's an awful nuisance, all the same.
  So those who are in the proximity say: "Excuse us, but we are the Steelypips, we have
  no dread, we don't live on a planet but in a machine instead, and it's no ordinary ma-chine
  but a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect, so beat it,
  nasty thing, or you'll be sorry."
  But that just sits there.
  So, not to go to any great expense, they send not a very big, actually a rather small
  scarechrome: it'll go and frighten that off, and peace will reign once more.
  The scarechrome sets off, and all you can hear inside are its programs whirring, one
  more frightening than the next. It approaches—how it hisses, how it spits! It even scares
  it-self a little—but that just sits there. The scarechrome tries once more, this time on a
  different frequency, but by now it just doesn't have its heart in it.
  The Steelypips see that something else is needed. They say: "Let's take a higher
  caliber, hydraulic, differential-exponential, plastic, stochastic, and with plenty of muscle.
  
  It won't cower if it has nuclear power."
  So they sent it off, universal, reversible, double-barreled, feedback on every track, all
  systems go heigh-ho, and inside one mechanic and one mechanist, and that's not all
  because just to be on the safe side they stuck a scarechrome on top. It arrived, so
  well-oiled you could hear a pin drop—it winds up for the swing and counts down: four
  quarters, three quar-ters, two quarters, one quarter, no quarter! Ka-boom! what a blow!
  See the mushroom grow! The mushroom with the radioactive glow! And the oil bubbles,
  the gears chatter, the mechanic and the mechanist peer out the hatch: can you imagine,
  not even a scratch.
  The Steelypips held a council of war and then built a mechanism which in turn built a
  metamechanism which in turn built such a megalomechanism that the closest stars had to
  step back. And in the middle of it was a machine with cogs and wheels and in the middle of
  that a servospook, because they really meant business now.
  The megalomechanism gathered up all its strength and let go! Thunder, rumbling,
  clatter, a mushroom so huge you'd need an ocean to make soup out of it, the clenching of
  teeth, darkness, so much darkness you can't even tell what's what. The Steelypips
  look—nothing, not a thing, just all their mechanisms lying around like so much scrap metal
  and without a sign of life.
  Now they rolled up their sleeves. "After all," they say, "we are mechanics and
  mechanists, all mechanically minded, and we have a machine, a dream of a machine, with
  springs and gears and perfect in every respect, so how can this nasty thing just sit there
  and not budge?"
  This time they make nothing less than an enormous cyberivy-bushwhacker: it'll creep
  up casually, as if minding its own business, glance over its shoulder, grow a little bolder,
  send out a root or two, grow up from behind, taking its time, and then when it closes in,
  that'll be the end of that. And truly, everything happened exactly as predicted, except,
  when it was over, that wasn't exactly the end of that, not at all.
  They fell into despair, and they didn't even know what to think because this had
  never happened to them before, so they mobilized and analyzed, made nets and glues,
  lariats and screws, traps and contraptions to make it drown, break it down, make it fall, or
  maybe wall it up—they try this way and that and the other, but one is as poor as another.
  They turn everything upside-down, but nothing helps. They're about ready to give up
  hope when suddenly they see—some-one's coming: he's on horseback, but no, horses
  don't have wheels—it must be a bicycle, but wait, bicycles don't have prows, so maybe it's
  a rocket, but rockets don't have saddles. What he's riding no one can tell, but who's in the
  saddle we all know well: it's Trurl himself, the constructor, out on a spree, or maybe on
  one of his famous sallies, serene and smiling, coming closer, flying by—but even from a
  distance you'd know that this wasn't just anybody.
  He lowers, he hovers, so they tell him the whole story: "We are the Steelypips, we
  have a machine, a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every
  respect, we saved up all our atoms, put them all together ourselves, we hadn't a care, no
  
  spats in our vats, no rules, no schools,until something flew up, landed, sat down and won't
  budge."
  "Did you try scaring it off?" Trurl asks with a kindly smile.
  "We tried a scarechrome and a servospook and a megalo-mechanism, all hydraulic
  and high caliber, spouting mesons like caissons, pi- and mu- and neutrinos too, protons
  and photons, but nothing worked."
  "No machine, you say?"
  "No sir, no machine." .
  "H'm, interesting. And what exactly is it?"
  "That we don't know. It appeared, flew here, what it is nobody knows, except that it's
  hideous and no matter from which angle you look at it, it's even more hideous. It flew up,
  landed, so heavy you can't imagine, and just sits there. But it's an awful nuisance, all the
  same."
  "Well, I really don't have much time," says Trurl. "The most I can do is stay here for a
  while, in an advisory capac-ity. Is that agreeable with you?"
  It certainly is and the Steelypips immediately ask what he wants them to
  bring—photons, screws, hammers, artil-lery, or how about some dynamite, or TNT? And
  would our guest like coffee or tea? From a vending machine, of course.
  "Coffee's fine," agrees Trurl, "not for me, but for the business at hand. As for the rest
  of it, I don't think so. You see, if neither scarechrome, nor servospook, nor
  cyberivy-bushwhacker will do the job, then other methods are indi-cated: archaic and
  archival, legalistic hence sadistic. I've yet to see the remittance due and payable in full
  fail."
  "Come again?" ask the Steelypips, but Trurl, rather than explain, continues:
  "It's quite simple, really. All you need is paper, ink, stamps and seals, sealing wax and
  thumbtacks, sand to sprin-kle, blotters, a teller window, a zinc teaspoon, a saucer—the
  coffee we already have—and a mailman. And something to write with—do you have
  that?"
  "We'll get it!" And they take off.
  Trurl pulls up a chair and dictates: "Notice is hereby given, that in re hindrance of
  Tenant, as stated under Rev. Stat. c.117(e) dash 2 dash KKP4 of the CTSP Comm. Code,
  in clear violation of paragraph 199, thereby consti-tuting a most reprehendable offense,
  we do declare the ter-mination, desummation and full cessation of all services ac-cruing
  thereunto, by authority of Ordinance 67 DPO No. 14(j) 1101 et seq., on this the 19th day
  of the 17th month of the current year, aff'g 77 F. Supp. 301. The Tenant may appeal said
  action by extraordinary procedure to the Chair-man of the Board within twenty-four
  hours."
  Trurl attaches the seal, affixes the stamp, has it entered in the Central Ledger,
  consults the Official Register, and says:
  "Now let the mailman deliver it."
  
  The mailman takes it, they wait, they wait, the mailman returns.
  "Did you deliver it?" asks Trurl.
  "I did."
  "And the return receipt?"
  "Here it is, signed on this line. And here's the appeal."
  Trurl takes the appeal and, without reading it at all, orders it returned to sender and
  writes diagonally across it: "Unacceptable—Proper Forms Not Attached." And he signs his
  name illegibly.
  "And now," he says, "to work!"
  He sits and writes, while those who are curious look on and, understanding nothing,
  ask what this is and what it's supposed to do.
  "Official business," answers Trurl. "And things will go well, now that it's under way."
  The mailman runs back and forth all day like one pos-sessed; Trurl notarizes, issues
  directives, the typewriter chat-ters, and little by little an entire office takes shape, rubber
  stamps and rubber bands, paper clips and paper wads, port-folios and pigeonholes,
  foolscap and scrip, teaspoons, signs that say "No Admittance," inkwells, forms on file,
  writing all the while, the typewriter chattering, and everywhere you look you see coffee
  stains, wastepaper, and bits of gum eraser. The Steelypips are worried, they don't
  understand a thing, meanwhile Trurl uses special delivery registered C.O.D., certified
  with return receipt, or, best of all, remit-tance due and payable in full—he sends out no
  end of dun-ning letters, bills of lading, notices, injunctions, and there are already special
  accounts set up, no entries at the mo-ment but he says that's only temporary. After a
  while, you can see that that is not quite so hideous, especially in pro-file—it's actually
  gotten smaller!—yes, yes, it is smaller! The Steelypips ask Trurl, what now?
  "No idle talk permitted on the premises," is his answer. And he staples, stamps,
  inspects vouchers, revokes licenses, dots an i, loosens his tie, asks who's next, I'm sorry,
  the office is closed, come back in an hour, the coffee is cold, the cream sour, cobwebs from
  ceiling to floor, an old pair of nylons in the secretary's drawer, install four new file
  cab-inets over here, and there's an attempt to bribe an official, a pile of problems and a
  problem with piles, a writ of execu-tion, incarceration for miscegenation, and appeals with
  seven seals.
  And the typewriter chatters: "Whereas, pursuant to the Tenant's failure to quit and
  surrender the demised premises in compliance with the warrant served, habere facias
  posses-sionem, by Div. of Rep. Cyb. Gt. KRS thereof, the Court of Third Instance, in
  vacuo and ex nihilo, herewith orders the immediate vacuation and vacation thereunder.
  The Tenant may not appeal this ruling."
  Trurl dispatches the messenger and pockets the receipts. After which, he gets up and
  methodically hurls the desks, chairs, rubber stamps, seals, pigeonholes, etc., out into deep
  space. Only the vending machine remains.
  "What on earth are you doing?" cry the Steelypips in dis-may, having grown
  accustomed to it all. "How can you?"
  "Tut-tut, my dears,” he replies. "Better you take a look instead!"
  
  And indeed, they look and gasp—why, there's nothing there, it's gone, as if it had
  never been! And where did it go, vanished into thin air? It beat a cowardly retreat, and
  grew so small, so very small, you'd need a magnifying glass to see it. They root around,
  but all they can find is one little spot, slightly damp, something must have dripped there,
  but what or why they cannot say, and that's all.
  "Just as I thought," Trurl tells them. "Basically, my dears, the whole thing was quite
  simple: the moment it accepted the first dispatch and signed for it, it was done for. I
  employed a special machine, the machine with a big B; for, as the Cosmos is the Cosmos,
  no one's licked it yet!"
  "All right, but why throw out the documents and pour out the coffee?" they ask.
  "So that it wouldn't devour you in turn!" Trurl replies. And he flies off, nodding to
  them kindly—and his smile is like the stars.
  The Sixth Sally
  OR How Trurl
  and Klapaucius Created a Demon
  of the Second Kind to Defeat the
  Pirate Pugg
  "There are but two caravan trails that lead south from the Lands of the Upper Suns.
  The first, which is older, goes from the Stellar Quadriferum past the Great Glossaurontus,
  a most treacherous star, for its magnitude varies, and at its dimmest it resembles the
  Dwarf of the Abyssyrs, and thereby causes travelers to blunder into the Great Shroud
  Wastes, from whence only one caravan in nine ever returns. The second, newer trail was
  opened up by the Imperium Myrapoclean, whose turboservoslaves carved a tunnel six
  billion miles in length through the heart of the Great Glos-saurontus itself.
  "The northern entrance to the tunnel may be found in the following manner: from the
  last of the Upper Suns pro-ceed directly toward the Pole for the time it takes to recite
  seven Now-I-lay me-down-to-sleep's. Then go left, till you reach the wall of fire, which is
  a side of Glossaurontus, and locate the opening, a black dot in that white-hot furnace.
  Steer straight down into this, and put aside all fear, for the tunnel's width will let eight
  ships, starboard to larboard, pass through. The sight that then appears outside your
  portholes truly has no equal. First there is the famous Phlogistinian Flamefall, and then as
  depending on the weather: when the solar depths are swept with pyromagnetic storms
  that surge a billion miles or more away, one sees great tortured knots of fire, pulsing
  arteries swollen with white, glowing clots; when, on the other hand, the storm is closer, or
  it is a ty-phoon of the seventh order, the roof will shudder, as if that white dough of
  incandescence were about to fall, but this is an illusion, for it spills over but does not fall,
  and burns, but cannot consume, held in check by the tensile ribs of the Fffian Force
  
  Fields. But when one observes the core of the prominence bulge, and the long-forked
  bolts of the foun-tainheads they call Infernions flare closer, it is best to keep a firm grip
  upon the wheel, and look sharp into the solar vis-cera and not at any chart, for the utmost
  steering skill is needed here. Indeed, that road is never traversed the same way twice;
  the entire tunnel gouged through Glossaurontus twists continually, writhes and thrashes
  like a serpent flailed. Keep therefore your eyes well peeled, and your safety frigi-packs
  (that rim your visors with transparent icicles) hard by, and carefully watch the blazing
  walls that rush up and lash their thundering tongues, and should you hear the hull be-gin
  to sizzle, battered and bespattered in the seething solar cauldron, then trust to nothing
  but your own lightning re-flexes. Though you must also bear in mind that not every burst
  of flame nor every jump of the tunnel signifies a starquake or a squall in the white oceans
  of fire; remember-ing this, the seasoned mariner will not cry 'man the pumps' at the drop
  of a match, and later have to face the ridicule of his peers, who will say he is the type that
  would try to douse a star's eternal light with a beaker of liquid nitrogen. To the one who
  inquires what he should do if a real quake descends upon his vessel, most wags will
  answer that then it is quite enough to heave a sigh, there being little time for prayer or
  the writing of wills, and as for the eyes, these may be open or shut according to personal
  preference, for the fire will burn them out in any event. Such disasters, however, are
  extremely rare, since the brackets and braces installed by the Imperial Myrapocles hold
  marvelously well, and really, intrastellar flight, gliding past the curved, sparkling
  hydro-gen mirrors of Glossaurontus, can be a most delightful ex-perience. Then too, they
  say—and not without reason—that whoever enters the tunnel will at least exit soon after,
  which certainly cannot be said of the Great Shroud Wastes. And were the tunnel to be
  totally destroyed by a quake, the only alternate route possible would go through those
  Wastes, which—as their name indicates—are blacker than night, for the light of the
  neighboring stars dares not enter there. There, as in a mortar, one finds a constant
  colliding and crashing together—which makes a terrific din—of scrap metal, cans, wrecks
  of ships that were led astray by the treachery of Glossaurontus and crushed in the cruel
  grip of those bottomless gravitational vortices, then left to drift in circles until such time
  as the Universe itself runs down. To the east of the Shroud is the kingdom of the Slipjaws,
  to the west, the Bogglyeyed, and in the south are roads, heavily dotted with fortified
  mortalitaries, leading to the gentler sphere of sky-blue Lazulia, beyond which lies the
  bud-beam-ing Murgundigan, where the archipelago of iron-poor stars, known as
  Alcaron's Carriage, shines blood-red.
  "The Shroud itself, as we said, is as black as the Glossaurontian corridor is white. Nor
  does the only peril there lie in its vortices, in debris pulled down from dizzy heights by the
  current, in meteors gone berserk; for some say that in an unknown place, among dark,
  crepuscular caverns, at the bottom of an immeasurably deep and unplumbed profund-ity,
  for ages and ages now there sits a certain creature, anom-alous and wholly anonymous,
  for anyone who meets the thing and learns its name will surely never live to tell a soul.
  And they say that that Anonymoid is both a pirate and a mage, and it lives in a castle
  raised by black gravitation, and the moat is a perpetually raging storm, and the walls
  non-being, impenetrable in their nothingness, and the windows are all blind, and the
  doors dumb; the Anonymoid lies in wait for caravans, but whenever it feels an
  overwhelming hunger for gold and skeletons, it blows black dust into the faces of the suns
  that serve as signposts, and once these are extinguished, and some wayfarers have
  strayed from their path of safety, it comes whirling out of the void, wraps them tightly in
  its coils, and carries them off to its castle of ob-livion, without ever dropping the least
  ruby brooch, for the monster is monstrously meticulous. Afterward, only the gnawed
  remains drift away and float through the Wastes, followed by long trails of ship rivets,
  which are spit out from the monster's maw like seeds. But lately, ever since the
  Glossaurontian tunnel was opened by the forced labor of innumerable turboservoserfs,
  
  and all navigation takes the way of that brightest of corridors, the Anonymoid rages,
  deprived of further plunder, and the heat of its fury now illumines the darkness of the
  Shroud, and it glows through the black barriers of gravitation like a fiend's skull rotting in
  some dank, phosphorescent cocoon. There are scoffers, true, who say that no such
  monster exists and never did—and they say so with impunity, for it is hard to assail an
  opinion of things for which there are no words, an opinion formed moreover on a quiet
  summer afternoon, far from cosmic shrouds and stellar conflagrations. Yes, it is easy not
  to be-lieve in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome
  clutches. Was not the Murgundiganian Cybernator himself, with an entourage of eighty in
  three ships, swallowed up, so that nothing remained of that magnaterium but a few
  chewed buckles, which were cast up on the shore of Solara Minor by a nebular wave and
  subse-quently discovered by the villagers of those parts? And were not countless other
  worthies devoured without mercy or ap-peal? Therefore let at least electronic memory
  pay silent tribute to these poor unburied multitudes, if no avenger can be found for them,
  one who will deal with that perpetrator according to the old sidereal laws."
  All this Trurl read one day from a book, yellowed with age, which he chanced to obtain
  from a passing peddler, and he took it straightway to Klapaucius and read it a second
  time, aloud, from beginning to end, as he was much in-trigued by the marvels described
  therein.
  Klapaucius, a wise constructor who knew the Cosmos well and had no little
  acquaintance with suns and nebulae of various kinds, only smiled and nodded, saying:
  "You don't believe, I hope, a single word of that rub-bish?"
  "And why shouldn't I believe it?" Trurl bridled. "Look, here's even an engraving,
  skillfully done, of the Anonymoid eating two photon schooners and hiding the booty in his
  cellar. Anyway, isn't there in fact a tunnel through a super-giant? Beth-el-Geuse, I mean.
  Surely you're not such an ignoramus in cosmography to doubt that possibility…"
  "As for illustrations, why, I could draw you a dragon right now, with a thousand suns
  for each eye. Would you accept the sketch as proof of its existence?" Klapaucius replied.
  "And as for tunnels—first of all, the one of which you speak has a length of only two
  million miles, not some billions, and secondly, the star of which you speak is practically
  burnt out, and in the third place, intrastellar travel presents no hazard whatever, as you
  know perfectly well, having flown that way yourself. And as for the so-called Great
  Shroud Wastes, this is in reality nothing but a cosmic dump some ten kiloparsecs across,
  floating in the vicinity of Maeridia and Tetrarchida, and not around any Slopjaws or
  Gaussauronts, which don't exist anywhere; and it's dark there, yes, but simply because of
  all the garbage. And as for your Anonymoid, there's obviously no such thing! It isn't even
  a respectable, ancient myth, but some cheap yarn concocted out of a half-baked cranium."
  Trurl bit his lip.
  "You think the tunnel safe," he said, "because it was I who flew it. But you would be of
  an altogether different opinion had it been you, instead. But enough of the tunnel. As far
  as the Shroud and Anonymoid are concerned, it isn't my habit to settle such things with
  words. We'll go there, and then you'll see"—and he held up the heavy book— "you'll see
  what's true in here, and what is not!"
  Klapaucius did his best to dissuade him, but when he saw that Trurl, stubborn as
  
  usual, had absolutely no intention of backing down from so singularly conceived a sally, he
  first declared that he would have nothing more to do with him, but before very long had
  joined in preparing for the voyage: he didn't wish to see his friend perish
  alone—some-how, two can look death in the eye more cheerfully than one.
  Finally, having stocked the larder with plenty of provi-sions, for the way would lead
  through vast, barren regions (not as picturesque, to be sure, as the book depicted), they
  took off in their trusty ship. During the flight, they stopped now and then to ask
  directions, particularly when they had left far behind the territory with which they were
  familiar. Not much could be learned from the natives, however, for these spoke reliably
  only about their immediate surround-ings—of things that lay beyond, where they had
  never ven-tured themselves, they gave the most absurd account, and in great detail,
  elaborating with both relish and a sense of dread. Klapaucius called such tales "corroded,"
  having in mind the corrosis-sclerosion that attacks all aging brains.
  But when they had come within five or six million light-blocks of the Black Wastes,
  they began to hear rumors of some robber-giant who called himself The PHT Pirate. No
  one they spoke to had actually seen him, nor knew what "PHT" was supposed to mean.
  Trurl thought this might be a distortion of "pH," which would indicate an ionic pirate with
  a high concentration and very base, but Klapaucius, more level-headed, preferred to
  refrain from entertaining such hypotheses. To all accounts, this pirate was an
  ill-tempered brute, as evidenced by the fact that, even after stripping his victims of
  everything, he was never satisfied, his greed being great and insatiable, and beat them
  long and cruelly before setting them free. For a moment or two the constructors
  considered whether they shouldn't arm them-selves with blasters or blades before
  entering the Wastes, but soon concluded that the best weapon was their wits, sharpened
  in constructorship, subtle, agile and universal; so they set out just as they were.
  It must be confessed that Trurl, as they traveled on, was bitterly disillusioned; the
  starry starlight, the fiery fires, the cavernous voids, the meteor reefs and shooting shoals
  were nowhere near as enchanting to the eye as promised in the ancient tome. There were
  only a few old stars about, and those were unimpressive, if not downright shabby; some
  barely flickered, like cinders in a heap of ashes, and some were completely dark and
  hardened on the surface, red veins glowing dully through cracks in their charred and
  wrinkled crusts. Of flaming jungles of combustion and mysterious vortices there was not a
  sign, nor had anyone ever heard of them, for the desolate waste was a place of tedium,
  and tedious in the extreme, by virtue of the fact that it was deso-late, and a waste. As far
  as meteors went, they were every-where, but in that rattling, clattering swarm was a
  good deal more flying refuse than honest magnetites, tektites or aerolites—for the simple
  reason that the Galactic Pole was only a stone's throw away, and the swirling dark
  currents sucked to this very spot, southward, prodigious quantities of flotsam and jetsam
  from the central zones of the Galaxy. Hence all the tribes and nations in the neighborhood
  spoke of this area not as any sort of Shroud, but as nothing more or less than what it was:
  a junkyard.
  Trurl hid his disappointment as best he could, in order not to occasion sarcastic
  comments from Klapaucius, and steered straight into the Wastes. Immediately sand
  began to patter on the bow; every kind of stellar debris, spewed from prominences or
  supernovae, collected and caked up on the ship's hull, forming such a thick coat, that the
  constructors lost all hope of ever getting it clean again.
  By now the stars had vanished in the general gloom, so the two proceeded gropingly,
  till suddenly their ship lurched, and all the furniture, pots and pans went flying; they felt
  themselves hurtling forward, faster and faster, then at last there was an awful crunch and
  
  the ship came to a stop, landing softly enough though at an angle, as if its nose had stuck
  in something doughy. They ran to the window, but couldn't see a thing, as it was pitch
  black outside—and now they heard someone banging, someone fearfully strong, whoever
  it was, for the very walls were buckling in. At this point Trurl and Klapaucius began to feel
  a little less con-fident in the power of their unarmed wits, but it was too late now, so they
  opened the hatch, since otherwise it would be forced from without and broken for good.
  As they looked, someone stuck his face in the opening— a face so huge, that it was
  clearly out of the question for the rest of the body to climb in after it, and not only huge,
  but unspeakably hideous, studded up and down and every which way with bulging eyes,
  and the nose was a saw, and an iron hook served for the jaw. The face didn't move,
  pressed up against the open hatch, only the eyes darted back and forth, avidly examining
  everything, as if appraising whether or not the take was worth the trouble. Even someone
  far less intel-ligent than our constructors would have understood what that scrutiny
  meant, for it was unmistakable.
  "Well?" said Trurl finally, exasperated by such shameless eyeing, which went on in
  silence. "What do you want, you unwashed mug?! I am Trurl, constructor and general
  omni-potentiary, and this is my friend Klapaucius, also of great renown, and we were
  flying by in our ship as tourists, so kindly remove your ugly muzzle and take us
  immediately out of this unsavory place—full of litter and rubbish, no doubt—and direct us
  to some clean, respectable sector, or we'll lodge a complaint and they'll have you broken
  down into little scrap—do you hear me, you scavenger, ragpicker, pack rat?!"
  But the face said nothing, just looked and looked, as if calculating, making an estimate
  of how much.
  "Listen here, you unmitigated freak," yelled Trurl, throw-ing all caution to the winds,
  though Klapaucius kept elbow-ing him to show some restraint, "we have no gold, no
  silver, no precious stones, so you let us go this instant, and above all cover up that
  oversized physiognomy of yours, for it's un-speakably hideous. And you"—he said,
  turning to Klapau-cius—"stop jabbing me with that elbow! This is the way you have to
  talk to such types!"
  "I have no use," suddenly said the face, turning its thou-sand glittering eyes on Trurl,
  "for gold or silver, and the way you have to talk to me is delicately and with respect, as I
  am a pirate with a Ph.D., well-educated and by nature extremely high-strung. Other
  guests have been here and needed sweet-ening up—and when I've given you a proper
  pounding too, why, you'll be positively dripping with good manners. My name is Pugg, I'm
  thirty arshins in every direction and it's true I rob, but in a manner that is modern and
  scientific, for I collect precious facts, genuine truths, priceless knowl-edge, and in general
  all information of value. And now, let's hand it over, otherwise I whistle! Very well then,
  I'll count to five—one, two, three …"
  And at five, when they had handed him nothing, he let loose such a whistle, that their
  ears nearly flew off, and Klapaucius realized that the "PHT" of which the natives spoke
  with terror was indeed "Ph.D.," for the pirate had obviously studied at some higher
  institution, like the Crim-inal Academy. Trurl held his head and groaned—Pugg's whistle
  was fully commensurate with his size.
  "We'll give you nothing!" he cried, while Klapaucius ran off to find some cotton. "And
  get your face out of here!"
  "You don't like my face, maybe you'll like my hand," re-plied the pirate. "It's one huge
  
  humdinger of a hand and heavy as the devil! And here it comes!"
  And indeed: the cotton Klapaucius brought was no longer needed, for the face had
  disappeared, and in its place was a paw, a paw to end all paws, with knots and knobs and
  shovel claws, and it rummaged and clutched, breaking tables and hutches and cupboards,
  till all the pots and pans came crash-ing down, and the paw chased Trurl and Klapaucius
  into the engine room, where they climbed up on top of the atomic pile and rapped its
  knuckles—pow! pow!—with a poker. This made the diplomaed pirate mad, and he put his
  face back in the hatch and said:
  "Look, I strongly advise you to come to terms with me at once, otherwise I'll put you
  aside for later, at the very bot-tom of my storage bin, and cover you with garbage, and
  wedge you in with rocks, so you can't move, and you'll just sit there and slowly rust. So
  then, which is it to be?"
  Trurl wouldn't hear of negotiating, but Klapaucius po-litely asked what exactly it was
  that His Doctoral Diploma-hood wanted?
  "Now you're talking," he said. "I gather rich mines of information, for such is my
  lifelong love and avocation, the result of a higher education and, I might add, a practical
  grasp of the situation, when you consider that, with the usual treasures untutored pirates
  like to hoard, there is not a blessed thing here one can buy. Information, on the other
  hand, satisfies one's thirst for knowledge, and it is well known besides, that everything
  that is, is information; and thus for centuries now I gather it, and will continue to do so,
  though it's true I'm not against a little gold or diamonds now and then, for they're pretty
  and decorative—but that's strictly on the side, as occasion warrants. Observe, however,
  that for false information, no less than for false coin, I give a good shellacking, since I am
  refined and insist on authen-ticity!"
  "But what kind of authentic and valuable information do you require?" asked
  Klapaucius.
  "All kinds, as long as it's true," replied the pirate. "You never can tell what facts may
  come in handy. I already have a few hundred wells and cellars full of them, but there's
  room for twice again as much. So out with it; tell me every-thing you know, and I'll jot it
  down. But make it snappy!"
  "A fine state of affairs," Klapaucius whispered in Trurl's ear. "He could keep us here
  for an eon or two before we tell him everything we know. Our knowledge is colossal!!"
  "Wait," whispered Trurl, "I have an idea." And he said aloud:
  "Listen here, you thief with a degree, we possess a piece of information worth more
  than any other, a formula to fashion gold from ordinary atoms—for instance, hydrogen, of
  which the Universe has an inexhaustible supply. We'll let you have it if you let us go."
  "I have a whole trunk full of such recipes," answered the face, batting its eyes
  ferociously. "And they're all worthless. I don't intend to be tricked again—you
  demonstrate it first."
  "Sure, why not? Do you have a jug?"
  
  "No."
  "That's all right, we can do without one/' said Trurl. "The method is simplicity itself:
  take as many atoms of hydrogen as the weight of an atom of gold, namely one hundred
  and ninety-six; first you shell the electrons, then knead the protons, working the nuclear
  batter till the me-sons appear, and now sprinkle your electrons all around, and voila,
  there's the gold. Watch!"
  And Trurl began to catch atoms, peeling their electrons and mixing their protons with
  such nimble speed, that his fingers were a blur, and he stirred the subatomic dough, stuck
  all the electrons back in, then on to the next mole-cule. In less than five minutes he was
  holding a nugget of the purest gold, which he presented to the face; it took a sniff and said
  with a nod:
  "Yes, that's gold, but I'm too big to go running around like that after atoms."
  "No problem, we'll give you a suitable machine!" coaxed Trurl. "Just think, this way
  you can turn anything into gold, not only hydrogen—we'll give you the formula for other
  atoms, too. Why, one could make the entire Universe gold, if only he applied himself!"
  "If the Universe was gold, gold would be worthless," observed Pugg. "No, I have no
  use for your formula—I've written it down, yes, but that's not enough! It's the wealth of
  knowledge that I crave."
  "But what do you want to know, for heaven's sake?!"
  "Everything!"
  Trurl looked at Klapaucius, Klapaucius looked at Trurl, and the latter finally said:
  "If first you will solemnly swear, up and down and cross your heart, that you will let
  us go, we will give you informa-tion, information about infinite information, that is, we will
  make you your very own Demon of the Second Kind, which is magical and
  thermodynamical, nonclassical and stochasti-cal, and from any old barrel or even a sneeze
  it will extract information for you about everything that was, is, may be or ever will be.
  And there is no demon beyond this Demon, for it is of the Second Kind, and if you want it,
  say so now!"
  The pirate with the Ph.D. was suspicious, and didn't agree all at once to these
  conditions, but finally swore the required oath, with the stipulation that the Demon first
  give clear proof of its informational prowess. Which was fine with Trurl.
  "Now pay attention, big-face!" he said. "Do you have any air knocking about? Without
  air the Demon won't work."
  "I have a little," said Pugg, "but it's not too clean…"
  "Stale, stagnant, polluted, it doesn't matter, not in the least," replied the constructors.
  "Lead us to it, and we'll show you something!"
  So he withdrew his face and let them leave the ship, and they followed him to his
  house, noticing that he had legs like towers, shoulders like a precipice, and hadn't been
  washed for centuries, nor oiled, hence creaked something awful. They went down cellar
  corridors, with sacks moldering on every hand—in these the pirate kept his stolen facts
  —bunches and bundles of sacks, all tied with string, and the most important, valuable
  items marked in red pencil. On the wall hung an immense catalog, fastened to the rock by
  
  a rust-eaten chain and full of entries and headings, be-ginning, of course, with A. On they
  went, raising muffled echoes, and Trurl looked and grimaced, as did Klapaucius, for
  though there was plenty of authentic and top-quality in-formation lying about, wherever
  the eye fell was nothing but must, dust and clutter. Plenty of air, too, but thoroughly stale.
  They stopped and Trurl said:
  "Now pay attention! Air is made up of atoms, and these atoms jump this way and
  that, and collide billions of times a second in each and every cubic micromillimeter, and it
  is precisely this eternal jumping and bumping together that constitutes a gas. Now, even
  though their jumping is blind and wholly random, there are billions upon billions of atoms
  in every interstice, and as a consequence of this great number, their little skips and
  scamperings give rise to, among other things—and purely by accident—to significant
  configurations… Do you know what a configuration is, blockhead?"
  "No insults, please!" said Pugg. "For I am not your usual uncouth pirate, but refined
  and with a Ph.D., and therefore extremely high-strung."
  "Fine. So then, from all this atomic hopping around, we obtain significant, that is
  meaningful configurations, as if, for instance, you were to fire at a wall blindfold and the
  bullet holes formed some letter. That, which on a large scale is rare and quite unlikely,
  happens in atomic gases all the time, on account of those trillion collisions every one
  hundred-thousandth of a second. But here's the problem: in every smidgen of air, the
  joggling and jostling of atoms does indeed produce deep truths and edifying dicta, yet it
  also produces statements that make not the least bit of sense, and there are thousands of
  times more of the latter than there are of the former. So even if it were known that, right
  here and now under your sawlike nose, in a milligram of air and in a fraction of a second,
  there would come into being all the cantos of all the epic poems to be written in the next
  million years, as well as an abundance of wonderful truths—including the solutions to
  every enigma of Exist-ence and mystery of Being—you would still have no way of
  isolating all that information, particularly since, just as soon as the atoms had knocked
  their heads together and formed something, they would fly apart and it would vanish,
  probably forever. And therefore the whole trick lies in building a selector, which will, in
  the atomic rush and jumble, choose only what has meaning. And that is the whole idea
  behind the Demon of the Second Kind. Have you understood any of this, O huge and
  hideous one? We want the Demon, you see, to extract from the dance of atoms only
  informa-tion that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints,
  historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of
  asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and cal-endars, and secret
  documents, and everything that ever ap-peared in any newspaper in the Universe, and
  telephone books of the future…"
  "Enough, enough!!" cried Pugg. "I get the idea! But what good is it for atoms to
  combine like that, if immediately they fly apart? And anyway, I can't believe it's possible
  to select invaluable truths from a lot of careening and colliding of particles in the air, which
  is completely senseless and not worth a jot to anyone!"
  "Then you're not so stupid as I thought," said Trurl. "For truly, the whole difficulty
  consists in implementing such a selection. I have no intention of presenting you with the
  theoretical arguments for this, but, as I promised, I will here and now—while you
  wait—construct a Demon of the Sec-ond Kind, and you'll see for yourself the wondrous
  perfec-tion of that Metainformationator! All you have to do is find me a box—any size will
  do, but it must be airtight. We'll put a little pinhole in it and sit the Demon over the
  open-ing; perched there, it will let out only significant informa-tion, keeping in all the
  nonsense. For whenever a group of atoms accidentally arranges itself in a meaningful
  
  way, the Demon will pounce on that meaning and instantly record it with a special
  diamond pen on paper tape, which you must keep in endless supply, for the thing will
  labor day and night—until the Universe itself runs down and no sooner—at a rate,
  moreover, of a hundred billion bits a second… But you will see the Demon of the Second
  Kind with your very own eyes."
  And Trurl went back to the ship to make the Demon. The pirate meanwhile asked
  Klapaucius:
  "And what is the Demon of the First Kind like?"
  "Oh, it's not as interesting, it's an ordinary thermodynamic demon, and all it does is
  let fast atoms out of the hole and keep in the slow. That way you get a thermodynamic
  perpetuum mobile, which hasn't a thing to do with infor-mation. But you had better fetch
  the box now, for Trurl will return any minute!"
  The pirate with a Ph.D. went to another cellar, poked around through various cans
  and tins, cursed, kicked things and tripped, but finally pulled out an iron barrel, old and
  empty, put a tiny hole in it and hurried back, just as Trurl arrived, the Demon in his hand.
  The air in the barrel was so foul, that one's nose wanted to hide when brought near
  the little opening, but the De-mon didn't seem to mind; Trurl placed this mote of a mite
  astride the hole in the barrel, affixed a large roll of paper tape on the top and threaded it
  underneath the tiny dia-mond-tipped pen, which quivered eagerly, then began to scratch
  and scribble, clattering rat-tat, pit-pat, just like a telegraph, only a million times faster.
  From under this fran-tic apparatus the information tape slowly began to slide out,
  covered with words, onto the filthy cellar floor.
  Pugg sat down next to the barrel, lifted the paper tape to his hundred eyes and read
  what the Demon had, with its informational net, managed to dredge up out of the eternal
  prancing and dancing of the atoms; those significant bits of knowledge so absorbed him,
  that he didn't even notice how the two constructors left the cellar in great haste, how they
  grabbed hold of the helm of their ship, pulled once, twice, and on the third time freed it
  from the mire in which the pirate had stuck them, then climbed aboard and blasted off as
  fast as they possibly could, for they knew that, though their Demon would work, it would
  work too well, producing a far greater wealth of information than Pugg anticipated. Pugg
  meanwhile sat propped up against the barrel and read, as that diamond pen which the
  Demon employed to record everything it learned from the oscillating atoms squeaked on
  and on, and he read about how exactly Harlebardonian wrig-glers wriggle, and that the
  daughter of King Petrolius of Labondia is named Humpinella, and what Frederick the
  Second, one of the paleface kings, had for lunch before he declared war against the
  Gwendoliths, and how many elec-tron shells an atom of thermionolium would have, if
  such an element existed, and what is the cloacal diameter of a small bird called the tufted
  twit, which is painted by the Wabian Marchpanes on their sacrificial urns, and also of the
  tripartite taste of the oceanic ooze on Polypelagid Diaphana, and of the flower Dybbulyk,
  that beats the Lower Malfundican hunters black and blue whenever they waken it at
  dawn, and how to obtain the angle of the base of an irreg-ular icosahedron, and who was
  the jeweler of Gufus, the left-handed butcher of the Bovants, and the number of vol-umes
  on philately to be published in the year seventy thou-sand on Marinautica, and where to
  find the tomb of Cybrinda the Red-toed, who was nailed to her bed by a certain
  Clamonder in a drunken fit, and how to tell the difference between a bindlesnurk and an
  ordinary trundlespiff, and also who has the smallest lateral wumpet in the Universe, and
  why fan-tailed fleas won't eat moss, and how to play the game of Fratcher-My-Pliss and
  win, and how many snap-dragon seeds there were in the turd into which Abroquian
  
  Phylminides stepped, when he stumbled on the Great Albongean Road eight miles outside
  the Valley of Symphic Sighs—and little by little his hundred eyes began to swim, and it
  dawned on him that all this information, entirely true and meaningful in every particular,
  was absolutely use-less, producing such an ungodly confusion that his head ached terribly
  and his legs trembled. But the Demon of the Second Kind continued to operate at a speed
  of three hun-dred million facts per second, and mile after mile of tape coiled out and
  gradually buried the Ph.D. pirate beneath its windings, wrapping him, as it were, in a
  paper web, while the tiny diamond-tipped pen shivered and twitched like one insane, and
  it seemed to Pugg that any minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of
  things, things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he greedily
  read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib, the drinking songs of the
  Quaidacabondish and the sizes of bedroom slippers available on the continent of Cob, with
  pompons and without, and the number of hairs growing on each brass knuckle of the
  skew-beezered flummox, and the average width of the fontanel in indige-nous
  stepinfants, and the litanies of the M'hot-t'ma-hon'h conjurers to rouse the reverend
  Blotto Ben-Blear, and the inaugural catcalls of the Duke of Zilch, and six ways to cook
  cream of wheat, and a good poison for uncles with goatees, and twelve types of forensic
  tickling, and the names of all the citizens of Foofaraw Junction beginning with the letter
  M, and the results of a poll of opinions on the taste of beer mixed with mushroom syrup…
  And it grew dark before his hundred eyes, and he cried out in a mighty voice that he'd
  had enough, but Informa-tion had so swathed and swaddled him in its three hundred
  thousand tangled paper miles, that he couldn't move and had to read on about how
  Kipling would have written the beginning to his Second Jungle Book if he had had
  indigestion just then, and what thoughts come to unmarried whales getting on in years,
  and all about the courtship of the carrion fly, and how to mend an old gunny sack, and
  what a sprothouse is, and why we don't capitalize paris in plaster of paris or turkish in
  turkish bath, and how many bruises one can have at a single time. And then a long list of
  the differences between fiddle and faddle, not to be con-fused with twiddle and twaddle or
  tittle and tattle, then all the words that rhyme with "spinach," and what were the insults
  which Pope Urn of Pendora heaped upon Antipope Mlum of Porking, and who plays the
  eight-tone autocomb. In desperation he struggled to free himself from the paper coils and
  toils, but suddenly grew faint, for though he kicked and tore at the tape, he had too many
  eyes not to receive, with at least a few of them, more and more new bits and pieces of
  information, and so was forced to learn what authority the home guard exercises in
  Indochina, and why the Coelenterids of Fluxis constantly say they've had too much to
  drink, until he shut his eyes and sat there, rigid, overcome by that great flood of
  information, and the De-mon continued to bind him with its paper strips. Thus was the
  pirate Pugg severely punished for his inordinate thirst for knowledge.
  He sits there to this day, at the very bottom of his rubbage heap and bins of trash,
  covered with a mountain of paper, and in the dimness of that cellar the diamond pen still
  jumps and flickers like the purest flame, recording what-ever the Demon of the Second
  Kind culls from dancing atoms in the rancid air that flows through the hole of the old
  barrel; and so poor Pugg, crushed beneath that ava-lanche of fact, learns no end of things
  about rickshaws, rents and roaches, and about his own fate, which has been related here,
  for that too is included in some section of the tape—as are the histories, accounts and
  prophecies of all things in creation, up until the day the stars burn out; and there is no
  hope for him, since this is the harsh sentence the constructors passed upon him for his
  pirately assault— unless of course the tape runs out, for lack of paper.
  
  The Seventh Sally
  OR How Trurl's
  Own Perfection Led to No Good
  The Universe is infinite but bounded, and therefore a beam of light, in whatever
  direction it may travel, will after bil-lions of centuries return—if powerful enough—to the
  point of its departure; and it is no different with rumor, that flies about from star to star
  and makes the rounds of every planet. One day Trurl heard distant reports of two mighty
  constructor-benefactors, so wise and so accomplished that they had no equal; with this
  news he ran to Klapaucius, who explained to him that these were not mysterious rivals,
  but only themselves, for their fame had circumnavigated space. Fame, however, has this
  fault, that it says nothing of one's failures, even when those very failures are the product
  of a great perfection. And he who would doubt this, let him re-call the last of the seven
  sallies of Trurl, which was under-taken without klapaucius, whom certain urgent duties
  kept at home at the time.
  In those days Trurl was exceedingly vain, receiving all marks of veneration and honor
  paid to him as his due and a perfectly normal thing. He was heading north in his ship, as
  he was the least familiar with that region, and had flown through the void for quite some
  time, passing spheres full of the clamor of war as well as spheres that had finally
  ob-tained the perfect peace of desolation, when suddenly a little planet came into view,
  really more of a stray fragment of matter than a planet.
  On the surface of this chunk of rock someone was run-ning back and forth, jumping
  and waving his arms in the strangest way. Astonished by a scene of such total loneliness
  and concerned by those wild gestures of despair, and per-haps of anger as well, Trurl
  quickly landed.
  He was approached by a personage of tremendous hau-teur, iridium and vanadium all
  over and with a great deal of clanging and clanking, who introduced himself as Excelsius
  the Tartarian, ruler of Pancreon and Cyspenderora; the inhabitants of both these
  kingdoms had, in a fit of regicidal madness, driven His Highness from the throne and
  exiled him to this barren asteroid, eternally adrift among the dark swells and currents of
  gravitation.
  Learning in turn the identity of his visitor, the deposed monarch began to insist that
  Trurl—who after all was some-thing of a professional when it came to good
  deeds—imme-diately restore him to his former position. The thought of such a turn of
  events brought the flame of vengeance to the monarch's eyes, and his iron fingers
  clutched the air, as if already closing around the throats of his beloved subjects.
  Now Trurl had no intention of complying with this re-quest of Excelsius, as doing so
  would bring about untold evil and suffering, yet at the same time he wished somehow to
  comfort and console the humiliated king. Thinking a mo-ment or two, he came to the
  conclusion that, even in this case, not all was lost, for it would be possible to satisfy the
  king completely—without putting his former subjects in jeopardy. And so, rolling up his
  sleeves and summoning up all his mastery, Trurl built the king an entirely new king-dom.
  There were plenty of towns, rivers, mountains, forests and brooks, a sky with clouds,
  
  armies full of derring-do, citadels, castles and ladies' chambers; and there were
  mar-ketplaces, gaudy and gleaming in the sun, days of back-breaking labor, nights full of
  dancing and song until dawn, and the gay clatter of swordplay. Trurl also carefully set into
  this kingdom a fabulous capital, all in marble and alabaster, and assembled a council of
  hoary sages, and winter palaces and summer villas, plots, conspirators, false witnesses,
  nurses, informers, teams of magnificent steeds, and plumes waving crimson in the wind;
  and then he crisscrossed that atmosphere with silver fanfares and twenty-one gun
  salutes, also threw in the necessary handful of traitors, another of heroes, added a pinch
  of prophets and seers, and one mes-siah and one great poet each, after which he bent
  over and set the works in motion, deftly making last-minute adjust-ments with his
  microscopic tools as it ran, and he gave the women of that kingdom beauty, the
  men—sullen silence and surliness when drunk, the officials—arrogance and servil-ity, the
  astronomers—an enthusiasm for stars, and the chil-dren—a great capacity for noise. And
  all of this, connected, mounted and ground to precision, fit into a box, and not a very large
  box, but just the size that could be carried about with ease. This Trurl presented to
  Excelsius, to rule and have dominion over forever; but first he showed him where the
  input and output of his brand-new kingdom were, and how to program wars, quell
  rebellions, exact tribute, collect taxes, and also instructed him in the critical points and
  transition states of that microminiaturized society—in other words the maxima and
  minima of palace coups and revolu-tions—and explained everything so well, that the king,
  an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions and, without
  hesitation, while the constructor watched, issued a few trial proclamations, correctly
  manipu-lating the control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal lions.
  These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew and a special
  levy. After a year had passed in the kingdom, which amounted to hardly a minute for
  Trurl and the king, by an act of the greatest magnanimity—that is, by a flick of the finger
  at the controls—the king abolished one death penalty, light-ened the levy and deigned to
  annul the state of emergency, whereupon a tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the
  squeak-ing of tiny mice lifted by their tails, rose up from the box, and through its curved
  glass cover one could see, on the dusty highways and along the banks of lazy rivers that
  re-flected the fluffy clouds, the people rejoicing and praising the great and unsurpassed
  benevolence of their sovereign lord.
  And so, though at first he had felt insulted by Trurl's gift, in that the kingdom was too
  small and very like a child's toy, the monarch saw that the thick glass lid made
  every-thing inside seem large; perhaps too he dully understood that size was not what
  mattered here, for government is not measured in meters and kilograms, and emotions
  are some-how the same, whether experienced by giants or dwarfs— and so he thanked
  the constructor, if somewhat stiffly. Who knows, he might even have liked to order him
  thrown in chains and tortured to death, just to be safe—that would have been a sure way
  of nipping in the bud any gossip about how some common vagabond tinkerer presented a
  mighty monarch with a kingdom.
  Excelsius was sensible enough, however, to see that this was out of the question,
  owing to a very fundamental disproportion, for fleas could sooner take their host into
  captivity than the king's army seize Trurl. So with another cold nod, he stuck his orb and
  scepter under his arm, lifted the box kingdom with a grunt, and took it to his humble hut
  of exile. And as blazing day alternated with murky night outside, according to the rhythm
  of the asteroid's rotation, the king, who was acknowledged by his subjects as the great-est
  in the world, diligently reigned, bidding this, forbidding that, beheading, rewarding—in all
  these ways incessantly spurring his little ones on to perfect fealty and worship of the
  throne.
  
  As for Trurl, he returned home and related to his friend Klapaucius, not without
  pride, how he had employed his constructor's genius to indulge the autocratic aspirations
  of Excelsius and, at the same time, safeguard the democratic aspirations of his former
  subjects. But Klapaucius, surpris-ingly enough, had no words of praise for Trurl; in fact,
  there seemed to be rebuke in his expression.
  "Have I understood you correctly?" he said at last. "You gave that brutal despot, that
  born slave master, that slaver-ing sadist of a painmonger, you gave him a whole
  civilization to rule and have dominion over forever? And you tell me, moreover, of the
  cries of joy brought on by the repeal of a fraction of his cruel decrees! Trurl, how could
  you have done such a thing?!"
  "You must be joking!" Trurl exclaimed. "Really, the whole kingdom fits into a box
  three feet by two by two and a half… it's only a model…"
  "A model of what?"
  "What do you mean, of what? Of a civilization, obvi-ously, except that it's a hundred
  million times smaller."
  "And how do you know there aren't civilizations a hun-dred million times larger than
  our own? And if there were, would ours then be a model? And what importance do
  dimensions have anyway? In that box kingdom, doesn't a journey from the capital to one
  of the corners take months —for those inhabitants? And don't they suffer, don't they
  know the burden of labor, don't they die?"
  "Now just a minute, you know yourself that all these processes take place only
  because I programmed them, and so they aren't genuine…"
  "Aren't genuine? You mean to say the box is empty, and the parades, tortures and
  beheadings are merely an illu-sion?"
  "Not an illusion, no, since they have reality, though purely as certain microscopic
  phenomena, which I produced by manipulating atoms," said Trurl. "The point is, these
  births, loves, acts of heroism and denunciations are nothing but the minuscule capering of
  electrons in space, precisely arranged by the skill of my nonlinear craft, which—"
  "Enough of your boasting, not another word!" Klapaucius snapped. "Are these
  processes self-organizing or not?"
  "Of course they are!"
  "And they occur among infinitesimal clouds of electrical charge?"
  "You know they do."
  "And the phenomenological events of dawns, sunsets and bloody battles are
  generated by the concatenation of real variables?"
  "Certainly."
  "And are not we as well, if you examine us physically, mechanistically, statistically and
  
  meticulously, nothing but the minuscule capering of electron clouds? Positive and
  negative charges arranged in space? And is our existence not the result of subatomic
  collisions and the interplay of par-ticles, though we ourselves perceive those molecular
  cart-wheels as fear, longing, or meditation? And when you day-dream, what transpires
  within your brain but the binary al-gebra of connecting and disconnecting circuits, the
  contin-ual meandering of electrons?"
  "What, Klapaucius, would you equate our existence with that of an imitation kingdom
  locked up in some glass box?!" cried Trurl. "No, really, that's going too far! My purpose
  was simply to fashion a simulator of statehood, a model cybernetically perfect, nothing
  more!"
  "Trurl! Our perfection is our curse, for it draws down upon our every endeavor no
  end of unforeseeable conse-quences!" Klapaucius said in a stentorian voice. "If an
  im-perfect imitator, wishing to inflict pain, were to build himself a crude idol of wood or
  wax, and further give it some makeshift semblance of a sentient being, his torture of the
  thing would be a paltry mockery indeed! But consider a succession of improvements on
  this practice! Consider the next sculptor, who builds a doll with a recording in its belly,
  that it may groan beneath his blows; consider a doll which, when beaten, begs for mercy,
  no longer a crude idol, but a homeostat; consider a doll that sheds tears, a doll that bleeds,
  a doll that fears death, though it also longs for the peace that only death can bring! Don't
  you see, when the imitator is perfect, so must be the imitation, and the sem-blance
  becomes the truth, the pretense a reality! Trurl, you took an untold number of creatures
  capable of suffering and abandoned them forever to the rule of a wicked tyrant… Trurl,
  you have committed a terrible crime!"
  "Sheer sophistry!" shouted Trurl, all the louder because he felt the force of his friend's
  argument. "Electrons mean-der not only in our brains, but in phonograph records as well,
  which proves nothing, and certainly gives no grounds for such hypostatical analogies! The
  subjects of that mon-ster Excelsius do in fact die when decapitated, sob, fight, and fall in
  love, since that is how I set up the parameters, but it's impossible to say, Klapaucius, that
  they feel anything in the process—the electrons jumping around in their heads will tell
  you nothing of that!"
  "And if I were to look inside your head, I would also see nothing but electrons,"
  replied Klapaucius. "Come now, don't pretend not to understand what I'm saying, I know
  you're not that stupid! A phonograph record won't run errands for you, won't beg for
  mercy or fall on its knees! You say there's no way of knowing whether Excelsius' sub-jects
  groan, when beaten, purely because of the electrons hopping about inside—like wheels
  grinding out the mimicry of a voice—or whether they really groan, that is, because they
  honestly experience the pain? A pretty distinction, this! No, Trurl, a sufferer is not one
  who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a sufferer is
  one who behaves like a sufferer! Prove to me here and now, once and for all, that they do
  not feel, that they do not think, that they do not in any way exist as beings conscious of
  their enclosure between the two abysses of oblivion—the abyss before birth and the abyss
  that follows death—prove this to me, Trurl, and I'll leave you be! Prove that you only 
  imitated suffering, and did not create it!"
  "You know perfectly well that's impossible," answered Trurl quietly. "Even before I
  took my instruments in hand, when the box was still empty, I had to anticipate the
  pos-sibility of precisely such a proof—in order to rule it out. For otherwise the monarch of
  that kingdom sooner or later would have gotten the impression that his subjects were not
  real subjects at all, but puppets, marionettes. Try to under-stand, there was no other way
  to do it! Anything that would have destroyed in the littlest way the illusion of complete
  
  reality, would have also destroyed the importance, the dig-nity of governing, and turned
  it into nothing but a mechan-ical game. …"
  "I understand, I understand all too well!" cried Klapau-cius. "Your intentions were
  the noblest—you only sought to construct a kingdom as lifelike as possible, so similar to a
  real kingdom, that no one, absolutely no one, could ever tell the difference, and in this, I
  am afraid, you were successful! Only hours have passed since your return, but for them,
  the ones imprisoned in that box, whole centuries have gone by —how many beings, how
  many lives wasted, and all to gratify and feed the vanity of King Excelsius!"
  Without another word Trurl rushed back to his ship, but saw that his friend was
  coming with him. When he had blasted off into space, pointed the bow between two great
  clusters of eternal flame and opened the throttle all the way, Klapauciussaid:
  "Trurl, you're hopeless. You always act first, think later. And now what do you intend
  to do when we get there?"
  "I'll take the kingdom away from him!"
  "And what will you do with it?"
  "Destroy it!" Trurl was about to shout, but choked on the first syllable when he
  realized what he was saying. Finally he mumbled:
  "I'll hold an election. Let them choose just rulers from among themselves."
  "You programmed them all to be feudal lords or shiftless vassals. What good would an
  election do? First you'd have to undo the entire structure of the kingdom, then assemble
  from scratch…"
  "And where," exclaimed Trurl, "does the changing of structures end and the
  tampering with minds begin?!" Klapaucius had no answer for this, and they flew on in
  gloomy silence, till the planet of Excelsius came into view. As they circled it, preparing to
  land, they beheld a most amazing sight.
  The entire planet was covered with countless signs of in-telligent life. Microscopic
  bridges, like tiny lines, spanned every rill and rivulet, while the puddles, reflecting the
  stars, were full of microscopic boats like floating chips… The night side of the sphere was
  dotted with glimmering cities, and on the day side one could make out flourishing
  metrop-olises, though the inhabitants themselves were much too little to observe, even
  through the strongest lens. Of the king there was not a trace, as if the earth had
  swallowed him up.
  "He isn't here," said Trurl in an awed whisper. "What have they done with him?
  Somehow they managed to break through the walls of their box and occupy the
  asteroid…"
  "Look!" said Klapaucius, pointing to a little cloud no larger than a thimble and shaped
  like a mushroom; it slowly rose into the atmosphere. "They've discovered atomic
  en-ergy… And over there—you see that bit of glass? It's the remains of the box, they've
  made it into some sort of tern-pie…"
  "I don't understand. It was only a model, after all. A process with a large number of
  parameters, a simulation, a mock-up for a monarch to practice on, with the necessary
  feedback, variables, multistats…" muttered Trurl, dumb-founded.
  
  "Yes. But you made the unforgivable mistake of over-perfecting your replica. Not
  wanting to build a mere clock-like mechanism, you inadvertently—in your punctilious
  way —created that which was possible, logical and inevitable, that which became the very
  antithesis of a mechanism…"
  "Please, no more!" cried Trurl. And they looked out upon the asteroid in silence, when
  suddenly something bumped their ship, or rather grazed it slightly. They saw this ob-ject,
  for it was illumined by the thin ribbon of flame that issued from its tail. A ship, probably,
  or perhaps an artificial satellite, though remarkably similar to one of those steel boots the
  tyrant Excelsius used to wear. And when the con-structors raised their eyes, they beheld
  a heavenly body shining high above the tiny planet—it hadn't been there previously—and
  they recognized, in that cold, pale orb, the stern features of Excelsius himself, who had in
  this way be-come the Moon of the Microminians.
  Tale
  of the Three Storytelling Machines
  of King Genius
  One day to Trurl's abode there came a stranger, and it was plain just as soon as he
  alighted from his photon phaeton that here was no ordinary personage but one who hailed
  from distant parts, for where all of us have arms he had only a gentle breeze, and where
  there are usually legs he had nothing but a shimmering rainbow, and in lieu of a head he
  sported a plumed fedora; his voice issued forth from his center, and indeed, he was a
  perfect sphere, a sphere of the most engaging appearance and girdled with an elegant
  semipermeable cummerbund. Bowing low to Trurl, he re-vealed that there were really
  two of him, the top half and the bottom; the top was called Synchronicus, the bottom
  Symphonicus. To Trurl this seemed an excellent solution to the problem of constructing
  intelligent beings, and he had to confess he had never met an individual so well turned, so
  precise, and with such a fine shine. The stranger returned the compliment by praising
  Trurl's corpus, then broached the purpose of his visit: a close friend and loyal servant of
  the famous King Genius, he had come to place an order for three storytelling machines.
  "Our mighty lord and sovereign," he said, "has long re-frained from all reigning and
  ruling, to which total abdica-tion he was brought by a wisdom achieved through careful
  study of the ways of this and other worlds. Leaving his king-dom, he retired to a dry and
  airy cave, there to give himself up to meditation. Yet oft times sorrow comes upon him,
  and self-abhorrence, and then nothing can console him but stories, stories that are new
  and unusual. But alas, the few of us who have remained faithfully at his side ran out of
  new stories long ago. And so we turn to you, O constructor, to help us divert our King by
  means of machines, which you do build so well."
  "Yes, that's possible," said Trurl. "But why do you need as many as three?"
  "We should like," replied Symchrophonicus, spinning slowly, "the first to tell stories
  that are involved but un-troubled, the second, stories that are cunning and full of fun, and
  the third, stories profound and compelling."
  
  "In other words, to (1) exercise, (2) entertain and (3) edify the mind," said Trurl. "I
  understand. Shall we speak of payment now, or later?"
  "When you have completed the machines, rub this ring," was the reply, "and the
  phaeton shall appear before you. Climb into it with your machines, and it shall carry you
  at once to the cave of King Genius. There voice your wishes; he shall do what he can to
  grant them."
  And he bowed again, handed Trurl a ring, gave a radiant wink and floated back to the
  phaeton, which was instantly wrapped in a cloud of blinding light, and the next moment
  Trurl was standing alone in front of his house, holding the ring, not overly happy about
  what had just transpired.
  "Do what he can," he muttered, returning to his work-shop. "Oh, how I hate it when
  they say that! It means only one thing: you bring up the matter of the fee, and that's the
  end of the curtsies and courtesies; all you get for your pains is a lot of trouble, and bruises,
  more often than not…"
  At which the ring stirred in the palm of his hand and said:
  "The expression 'do what he can' indicates merely that King Genius, lacking a
  kingdom, is a king of limited means. He appeals to you, O constructor, as one philosopher
  to another—and apparently is not mistaken in so doing, for these words, I see, uttered
  though they be by a ring, do not surprise you. Be then not surprised at His Highness'
  some-what straitened circumstances. Have no fear, you shall re-ceive your payment as is
  meet, albeit not in gold. Yet there are things more to be desired than gold."
  "Indeed, Sir Ring," observed Trurl wryly. "Philosophy is all very well and good, but
  the ergs and amps, the ions and the atoms, not to mention other odds and ends needed in
  the building of machines—they cost, they cost like the devil! So I like my contracts to be
  clear, everything spelled out in articles and clauses, and with plenty of signatures and
  seals. And, though I am hardly the greedy, grasping sort, I do love gold, particularly in
  large quantities, and am not ashamed to admit it! Its sparkle, its yellow hue, the sweet
  weight of it in the hand—these things, when I pour a sack or two of tinkling ducats on the
  floor and wallow in them, warm my heart and brighten my soul, as if someone had kindled
  a little sun within. Aye, damn it, I love my gold!" he cried, carried away by his own words.
  "But why must it be the gold that others bring? Are you not able to supply yourself
  with as much as you desire?" inquired the ring, blinking with surprise.
  "Well, I don't know how wise this King Genius of yours is," Trurl retorted, "but you, I
  see, are a thoroughly un-educated ring! What, you would have me make my own gold?
  Whoever heard of such a thing?! Is a cobbler a cobbler to mend his own shoes? Does a
  cook do his own cooking, a soldier his own fighting? Anyway, in case you didn't know, next
  to gold I love to complain. But enough of this idle chatter, there is work to be done."
  And he placed the ring in an old tin can, rolled up his sleeves and built the three
  machines in three days, not once leaving his workshop. Then he considered what external
  shapes to give them, wanting something that would be both simple and functional. He
  tried on various casings, one after the other, while the ring kept interfering with
  comments and suggestions, until he had to close the can.
  Finally Trurl painted the machines—the first white, the second an azure blue, and the
  third jet black—then rubbed the ring, loaded the phaeton which instantly appeared,
  climbed in himself and waited to see what would happen next. There was a whistling and
  
  a hissing, the dust rose, and when it fell, Trurl looked out the window and saw that he was
  in a large cave, the floor of which was covered with white sand; then he noticed several
  wooden benches piled high with books and folios, and then a row of gleaming spheres. In
  one of these he recognized the stranger who had ordered the machines, and in the middle
  sphere, larger than the rest and etched with the lines of old age, he guessed the King.
  Trurl stepped down and gave a bow. The King greeted him kindly and said:
  "There are two wisdoms: the first inclines to action, the second to inaction. Do you not
  agree, worthy Trurl, that the second is the greater? For surely, even the most far-sighted
  mind cannot foresee the ultimate consequences of present undertakings, consequences
  therefore so uncertain, that they render problematical those very undertakings. And thus
  perfection lies in the abstention from all action. In this then does true wisdom differ from
  mere intellect."
  "Your Majesty's words," said Trurl, "can be taken in two ways. They may contain, for
  one, a subtle hint intended to belittle the value of my own labor, namely the under-taking
  which has as its consequence the three machines de-livered in this phaeton. Such an
  interpretation I find most unpleasant, as it indicates a certain, shall we say, disinclination
  regarding the matter of remuneration. Or else we have here simply a statement of the
  Doctrine of Inaction, of which it may be said that it is self-contradictory. To refrain from
  acting, one must first be capable of acting. He who does not move the mountain for lack of
  means, yet claims that wisdom did dictate he move it not, merely plays the fool with his
  display of philosophy. Inaction is certain, and that is all it has to recommend it. Action is
  uncertain, and therein lies its fascination. As for further ramifications of the problem, if
  Your Majesty so wishes, I can construct a suitable mechanism with which he may
  converse on the subject."
  "The matter of remuneration let us leave to the end of this delightful occasion which
  has brought you to our shore," said the King, betraying by slight revolving motions the
  great amusement Trurl's peroration had afforded him. "You are our guest, noble
  constructor. Come therefore and sit at our humble table among these faithful friends and
  tell us of the deeds you have performed, and also of the deeds you chose not to."
  "Your Majesty is too kind," replied Trurl. "Yet I fear I lack the necessary eloquence.
  Perchance these three ma-chines may serve in my stead—which would have the added
  merit of providing Your Majesty with the opportunity to test them."
  "Let it be as you say," agreed the King.
  Everyone assumed an attitude of the utmost interest and expectation. Trurl brought
  out the first machine—the one painted white—from the phaeton, pushed a button, then
  took a seat at the side of King Genius. The machine said:
  "Here is the story of the Multitudians, their king Man-drillion, his Perfect Adviser,
  and Trurl the constructor, who built the Adviser, and later destroyed it!"
  + +
  The land of the Multitudians is famous for its inhabitants, who are distinguished by
  the fact that they are multitu-dinous. One day the constructor Trurl, passing through the
  saffron regions of the constellation Deliria, strayed a little from the main path and caught
  sight of a planet that appeared to writhe. Drawing nearer, he saw that this was due to the
  
  multitudes that covered its surface; he landed, having found—not without difficulty—a
  few square feet of rel-atively unoccupied ground. The natives immediately ran up and
  thronged about him, exclaiming how multitudinous they were, although, as they all talked
  at once, Trurl couldn't make out a single word. When finally he under-stood, he asked:
  "Multitudinous, are you?"
  "We are!!" they shouted, bursting with pride. "We are innumerable."
  And others cried:
  "We are like fish in the sea!"
  "Like pebbles on the beach!"
  "Like stars in the sky! Like atoms!!"
  "Supposing you are," returned Trurl. "What of it? Do you spend all day counting
  yourselves, and does that give you pleasure?"
  "Know, O unenlightened alien," was their reply, "that when we stamp our feet, the
  very mountains tremble, and when we huff and puff, it is a hurricane that sends trees
  flying, and when we all sit down together, there is hardly room enough to breathe!!"
  "But why should mountains tremble and hurricanes send trees flying, and why should
  there be hardly room enough to breathe?" asked Trurl. "Is it not better when mountains
  stay at rest, and there are no hurricanes, and everyone has room enough to breathe?"
  The Multitudians were highly offended by this lack of respect shown to their mighty
  numbers and their numerical might, so they stamped, huffed and puffed, and sat down to
  demonstrate their multitudinality and show just what it meant. Earthquakes toppled half
  the trees, crushing seven hundred thousand persons, and hurricanes leveled the rest,
  causing the demise of seven hundred thousand more, while those who remained alive had
  hardly room enough to breathe.
  "Good heavens!" cried Trurl, packed in among the sitting natives like a brick in a
  brick wall. "What a catastrophe!"
  Which insulted them even more.
  "O barbarous and benighted alien!" they said. "What are a few hundred thousand to
  the Multitudians, whose myriads are countless?! A loss that goes unnoticed is no loss at
  all. You have seen how powerful we are in our stamping, in our huffing and puffing, and in
  our sitting down. Imagine then what would happen if we turned to bigger things!"
  "You mustn't think," said Trurl, "that your way of think-ing is altogether new to me.
  Indeed, it's well known that whatever comes in sufficiently large quantities commands the
  general admiration. For example, a little stale gas cir-culating sluggishly at the bottom of
  an old barrel excites wonder in no one; but if you have enough of it to make a Galactic
  Nebula, everyone is instantly struck with awe. Though really, it's the same stale and
  absolutely average gas —only there's an awful lot of it."
  "We do not like what you say!" they shouted. "We do not like to hear about this stale
  gas!"
  Trurl looked around for the police, but the crowd was too great for the police to push
  
  through.
  "My dear Multitudians," he said. "Permit me to leave your planet, for I do not share
  your faith in the glory of great numbers when there is nothing more to them than what
  may be counted."
  But instead, exchanging a look and nodding, they snapped their fingers, which set up a
  shock wave of such prodigious force, that Trurl was hurled into the air and flew, turning
  head over heels, for quite some time before landing on his feet in a garden of the royal
  palace. Mandrillion the Great-est, ruler of the Multitudians, approached; he had been
  watching the constructor's flight and descent, and now said:
  "They tell me, O alien, that you have not paid proper tribute to the numerosity of my
  people. I ascribe this to your general infirmity of mind. Yet, though you show no
  understanding of higher matters, you apparently possess some skill in the lower, which is
  fortunate, as I require a Perfect Adviser and you shall build me one!"
  "What exactly is this Adviser supposed to do, and what will I receive for building it?"
  inquired Trurl, brushing him-self off.
  "It should answer every question, solve every problem, give absolutely the best
  advice and, in a word, put the great-est wisdom entirely at my disposal. For this, you shall
  receive two or three hundred thousand of my subjects, or more if you like—we won't
  quibble over a few thousand."
  Trurl thought:
  "It would seem that an overabundance of thinking beings is a dangerous thing, if it
  reduces them to the status of sand. This king would sooner part with a legion of his
  subjects than I with a pair of old slippers!"
  But he said aloud:
  "Sire, my house is small and would not hold so many slaves."
  "Fear not, O backward alien, I have experts who will explain to you the endless
  benefits one may derive from owning a horde of slaves. You can, for example, dress them
  in robes of different colors and have them stand in a great square to form a living mosaic,
  or signs providing sentiments for every occasion. You can tie them in bundles and roll
  them down hills, you can make a huge hammer—five thousand for the head, three
  thousand for the handle—to break up boulders or clear forests. You can braid them into
  rope and make decorative hangings, where those at the very bottom, by the droll
  gyrations of their bodies, the kicking and the squeaking as they dangle over the abyss,
  create a sight that gladdens the heart and rejoices the eye. Or take ten thousand young
  female slaves, stand them all on one leg and have them make figure eights with their right
  hands and circles with their left—a spectacle, believe me, which you won't wish to part
  with, and I speak from experience!"
  "Sire!" answered Trurl. "Forests and boulders I can man-age with machines, and as
  for signs and mosaics, it is not my custom to fashion them out of beings that might prefer
  to be otherwise employed."
  "What then, O insolent alien," said the King, "do you want in return for the Perfect
  Adviser?"
  "A hundred bags of gold!"
  
  Mandrillion was loath to part with the gold, but an idea came to him, a most ingenious
  plan, which however he kept to himself, and he said:
  "So be it!"
  "Your Royal Highness shall have his Perfect Adviser," promised Trurl, and proceeded
  to the castle tower which Mandrillion had set aside for him as a workshop. It wasn't long
  before they could hear the blowing of bellows there, the ringing of hammers, the rasping
  of saws. The King sent spies to have a look; these returned much amazed, for Trurl had
  not constructed an Adviser at all, but a variety of forg-ing, welding, cutting and wiring
  machines, after which he sat down and with a nail made little holes in a long strip of paper,
  programming out the Adviser in every particular, then went for a walk while the
  machines toiled in the tower all night, and by early morning the work was done. Around
  noon, Trurl entered the main hall with an enormous doll that had two legs and one small
  hand; he brought it before the King, declaring that this was the Perfect Adviser.
  "Indeed," muttered Mandrillion and ordered the marble floor sprinkled with saffron
  and cinnamon, so strong was the smell of hot iron given off by the Adviser—the thing, just
  out of the oven, even glowed in places. "You may go," the King said to Trurl. "Return this
  evening, and then we shall see who owes how much and to whom."
  Trurl took his leave, feeling that these parting words of Mandrillion did not promise
  any great generosity and per-haps even concealed some evil intention. Which made him
  glad he had qualified the Adviser's universality with one small yet far from trivial
  condition, that is, he had included in its program an instruction to the effect that whatever
  it did, it was never to permit the destruction of its creator.
  Remaining alone with the Adviser, the King said:
  "What are you and what can you do?"
  "I am the King's Perfect Adviser," replied the machine in a hollow voice, as if it spoke
  from an empty barrel, "and I can provide him with the best advice possible."
  "Good," said the King. "And to whom do you owe allegiance and perfect obedience, me
  or the one who constructed you?"
  "Allegiance and obedience I owe only to His Royal High-ness," boomed the Adviser.
  "Good, good…" said the King. "Now to begin with, I … that is, well … I mean, I
  shouldn't like my first re-quest to give the impression that I was, shall we say, stingy …
  however, ah, to some extent, you understand, if only to uphold certain principles—don't
  you think?"
  "His Royal Highness has not yet deigned to say what it is that he wishes," said the
  Adviser, propping itself on a third leg it put out from its side, for it suffered a momentary
  loss of balance.
  "A Perfect Adviser ought to be able to read its master's thoughts!" snapped
  Mandrillion.
  "Of course, but only on request, to avoid embarrass-ments," said the Adviser and,
  opening a little door in its belly, turned a knob that read "Telepathitron." Then it nodded
  and said:
  "His Royal Highness doesn't wish to give Trurl a plug nickel? I understand!"
  
  "Speak one word of this to anyone and I'll have you thrown in the great mill, whose
  stones can grind up thirty thousand of my subjects at a time!" threatened the King.
  "I won't tell a soul!" the Adviser assured him. "His Royal Highness doesn't wish to pay
  for me—that's easily done. When Trurl comes back, simply tell him there won't be any
  gold and he should kindly go away."
  "You're an idiot, not an adviser!" snorted the King. "I don't want to pay, but I want it
  to look like it's all Trurl's fault! Like I don't owe him a thing, understand?"
  The Adviser turned on the device to read the royal thoughts, reeled a little, then said
  in a hollow voice:
  "His Royal Highness wishes in addition that it should appear that he is acting justly
  and in accordance with the law and his own sacred word, while Trurl turns out to be
  nothing but a despicable charlatan and scoundrel… Very well. With His Royal Highness'
  permission, I will now seize His Royal Highness by the throat and choke him, and if he
  would be so good as to struggle and scream for help…"
  "Have you gone mad?" said Mandrillion. "Why should you choke me and why should I
  scream?"
  "That you may accuse Trurl of attempting to commit, with my aid, the crime of
  regicide," explained the Adviser brightly. "Thus, when His Royal Highness has him
  whipped and thrown into the moat, everyone will say that this was an act of the greatest
  mercy, since for such an offense one is usually drawn and quartered, if not tortured first.
  To me His Royal Highness will grant a full pardon, as I was but an unwitting tool in the
  hands of Trurl, and everyone will praise the King's magnanimity and compassion, and
  every-thing will be exactly as His Royal Highness wishes it."
  "All right, choke me—but carefully, you dog!" said the King.
  Everything happened just as the Perfect Adviser said it would. True, the King wanted
  to have Trurl's legs pulled off before they threw him into the moat, but somehow this
  wasn't done—no doubt a mix-up in the orders, the King thought later, but actually it was
  owing to the machine's discreet intervention with one of the executioner's helpers.
  Afterward, the King pardoned his Adviser and reinstated it at court; Trurl meanwhile,
  battered and bruised, painfully hobbled home. Immediately after his return, he went to
  see Klapaucius and told him the whole story. Then he said:
  "That Mandrillion was more of a villain than I thought. Not only did he shamefully
  deceive me, but he even used the very Adviser I gave him, used it to further his scurvy
  scheme against me! Ah, but he is sadly mistaken if he thinks that Trurl accepts defeat!
  May rust eat through me if ever I forget the vengeance that I owe the tyrant!"
  "What do you intend to do?" inquired Klapaucius.
  "I'll take him to court, I'll sue him for the amount of my fee, and that's only the
  beginning: there are damages he'll have to pay—for insults and injuries."
  "This is a difficult legal question," said Klapaucius. "I suggest you hire yourself a good
  lawyer before you try any-thing."
  "Why hire a lawyer? I'll make myself one!"
  And Trurl went home, threw six heaping teaspoons of transistors into a big pot, added
  
  again as many condensers and resistors, poured electrolyte over it, stirred well and
  covered tightly with a lid, then went to bed, and in three days the mixture had organized
  itself into a first-rate lawyer. Trurl didn't even need to remove it from the pot, since it
  was only to serve this once, so he set the pot on the table and asked:
  "What are you?"
  "I'm a consulting attorney and specialist in jurispru-dence," the pot gurgled, for there
  was a little too much electrolyte in it. Trurl related the whole affair, whereupon it said:
  "You say you qualified the Adviser's program with an instruction making it incapable
  of engineering your death?"
  "Yes, so it couldn't destroy me. That was the only con-dition."
  "In that case you failed to live up to your part of the bar-gain: the Adviser was to
  have been perfect, without any limitations. If it couldn't destroy you, then it wasn't
  per-fect."
  "But if it destroyed me, then there would be no one to receive payment!"
  "A separate matter and a different question entirely, which comes under those
  paragraphs in the docket deter-mining Mandrillion's criminal liability, while your claim
  has more the character of a civil action."
  "Look, I don't need some pot handing me a lot of legalis-tic claptrap!" fumed Trurl.
  "Whose lawyer are you anyway, mine or that hoodlum king's?"
  "Yours, but he did have the right to refuse you payment."
  "And did he have the right to order me thrown from his castle walls into the moat?"
  "As I said, that's another matter entirely, criminal, not civil," answered the pot.
  Trurl flew into a rage.
  "Here I make an intelligent being out of a bunch of old wires, switches and grids, and
  instead of some honest advice I get technicalities! You cheap cybernetic shyster, I'll teach
  you to trifle with me!"
  And he turned the pot over, shook everything out onto the table, and pulled it apart
  before the lawyer had a chance to appeal the proceedings.
  Then Trurl got to work and built a two-story Juris Con-sulenta, forensically
  reinforced fourfold, complete with cod-ices and codicils, civil and criminal, and, just to be
  safe, he added international and institutional law components. Fi-nally he plugged it in,
  stated his case and asked:
  "How do I get what's coming to me?"
  "This won't be easy," said the machine. "I'll need an extra five hundred transistors on
  top and two hundred on the side."
  Which Trurl supplied, and it said:
  "Not enough! Increase the volume and give me two more spools, please."
  
  After this it began:
  "Quite an interesting case, really. There are two things that must be taken into
  consideration: the grounds of the allegation, for one, and here I grant you there is much
  that we can do—and then we have the litigation process itself. Now, it is absolutely out of
  the question to summon the King before any court on a civil charge, for this is contrary to
  international as well as interplanetary law. I will give you my final opinion, but first you
  must give me your word you won't pull me apart when you hear it."
  Trurl gave his word and said:
  "But where did you get the idea I would ever do such a thing?"
  "Oh, I don't know—it just seemed to me you might."
  Trurl guessed this was due to the fact that, in its construction, he had used parts from
  the potted lawyer; ap-parently some trace of the memory of that incident had found its
  way into the new circuits, creating a kind of sub-conscious complex.
  "Well, and your final opinion?" asked Trurl.
  "Simply this: no suitable tribunals exist, hence there can be no suit. Your case, in
  other words, can be neither won nor lost."
  Trurl leaped up and shook his fist at the legal machine, but had to keep his word and
  did it no harm. He went to Klapaucius and told him everything.
  "From the first I knew it was a hopeless business," said Klapaucius, "but you wouldn't
  believe me."
  "This outrage will not go unpunished," replied Trurl. "If I can't get satisfaction
  through the courts, then I must find some other way to settle with that scoundrel of a
  king!"
  "I wonder how. Remember, you gave the King a Perfect Adviser, which can do
  anything except destroy you; it can fend off whatever blow, plague or misfortune you
  direct against the King or his realm—and will do so, I am sure, for I have complete
  confidence, my dear Trurl, in your constructing ability!"
  "True. … It would appear that, in creating the Perfect Adviser, I deprived myself of
  any hope of defeating that royal bandit. But no, there must be some chink in the armor!
  I'll not rest until I've found it!"
  "What do you mean?" Klapaucius asked, but Trurl only shrugged and went home. At
  home he sat and meditated; sometimes he leafed impatiently through hundreds of
  vol-umes in his library, and sometimes he conducted secret ex-periments in his
  laboratory. Klapaucius visited his friend from time to time, amazed to see the tenacity
  with which Trurl was attempting to conquer himself, for the Adviser was, in a sense, a
  part of him and he had given it his own wisdom. One afternoon, Klapaucius came at the
  usual time but didn't find Trurl at home. The doors were all locked and the windows
  shuttered. He concluded that Trurl had begun operations against the ruler of the
  Multitudians. And he was not mistaken.
  Mandrillion meanwhile was enjoying his power as never before; whenever he ran out
  of ideas, he asked his Adviser, who had an inexhaustible supply. Neither did the King
  have to fear palace coups or court intrigues, or any enemy what-soever, but reigned with
  
  an iron hand, and truly, as many grapes there were that ripened in the vineyards of the
  south, more gallows graced the royal countryside.
  By now the Adviser had four chests full of medals for suggestions made to the King. A
  microspy Trurl sent to the land of the Multitudians returned with the news that, for its
  most recent achievement—it gave the King a ticker-tape parade, using citizens for
  confetti—Mandrillion had publicly called the Adviser his "pal."
  Trurl then launched his carefully prepared campaign by sitting down and writing the
  Adviser a letter on eggshell-yellow stationery decorated with a freehand drawing of a
  cassowary tree. The content of the letter was simple.
  Dear Adviser!—he wrote—I hope that things are going as well with you as they are
  with me, and even better. Your master has put his trust in you, I hear, and so you must
  keep in mind the tremendous responsibility you bear in the face of Posterity and the
  Common Weal and therefore fulfill your duties with the utmost dili-gence and alacrity.
  And should you ever find it difficult to carry out some royal wish, employ the
  Extra-special Method which I told you of in days gone by. Drop me a line if you feel so
  inclined, but don't be angry if I'm slow to reply, for I'm working on an Adviser for King
  D. just now and haven't much time. Please convey my respects to your kind master.
  With fondest wishes and best regards, I remain
  Your constructor,
  Trurl.
  Naturally this letter aroused the suspicions of the Multitudian Secret Police and was
  subjected to the most meticu-lous examination, which revealed no hidden substances in
  the paper nor, for that matter, ciphers in the drawing of the cassowary tree—a
  circumstance that threw Headquarters into a flurry. The letter was photographed,
  facsimiled and copied out by hand, then the original was resealed and sent on to its
  destination. The Adviser read the message with alarm, realizing that this was a move to
  compromise if not ruin its position, so immediately it told the King of the letter, describing
  Trurl as a blackguard bent on discrediting it in the eyes of its master; then it tried to
  decipher the message, for it was convinced those innocent words were a mask concealing
  something dark and dreadful.
  But here the wise Adviser stopped and thought a minute —then informed the King of
  its intention to decode Trurl's letter, explaining that it wished in this way to unmask the
  constructor's treachery; then, gathering up the necessary number of tripods, filters,
  funnels, test tubes and chemical reagents, it began to analyze the paper of both envelope
  and letter. All of which, of course, the police followed closely, having screwed into the walls
  of its rooms the usual peeking and eavesdropping devices. When chemistry failed, the
  Ad-viser turned to cryptanalysis, converting the text of the letter into long columns of
  numbers with the aid of electronic calculators and tables of logarithms—unaware that
  teams of police specialists, headed by the Grand Marshal of Codes himself, were
  duplicating its every operation. But nothing seemed to work, and Headquarters grew
  more and more un-easy, for it was clear that any code that could resist such
  high-powered efforts to break it, had to be one of the most ingenious codes ever devised.
  The Grand Marshal spoke of this to a court dignitary, who happened to envy terribly the
  trust Mandrillion had placed in his Adviser. This dignitary, wanting nothing better than to
  plant the seeds of doubt in the royal heart, told the King that his mechanical favorite was
  
  sitting up night after night, locked in its room, studying the suspicious letter. The King
  laughed and said that he was well aware of it, for the Adviser itself had told him. The
  envious dignitary left in confusion and straightway related this news to the Grand
  Marshal.
  "Oh!" exclaimed that venerable cryptographer. "It actu-ally told the King? What
  bold-faced treason! And truly, what a fiendish code this must be, for one to dare to speak
  of it so openly!"
  And he ordered his brigades to redouble their efforts. When, however, a week had
  passed without results, the greatest expert in secret writing was called in, the
  distin-guished discoverer of invisible sign language, Professor Crusticus. That scholar,
  having examined the incriminating doc-ument as well as the records of everything the
  military spe-cialists had done, announced that they would have to apply the method of
  trial and error, using computers with astro-nomical capacities.
  This was done, and it turned out that the letter could be read in three hundred and
  eighteen different ways.
  The first five variants were as follows: "The roach from Bakersville arrived in one
  piece, but the bedpan blew a fuse"; "Roll the locomotive's aunt in cutlets"; "Now the
  butter can't be wed, 'cause the nightcap's nailed"; "He who has had, has been, but he who
  hasn't been, has been had"; and "From strawberries under torture one may extract all
  sorts of things." This last variant Professor Crusticus held to be the key to the code and
  found, after three hundred thou-sand calculations, that if you added up all the letters of
  the letter, subtracted the parallax of the sun plus the annual production of umbrellas, and
  then took the cube root of the remainder, you came up with a single word, "Crusafix." In
  the telephone book there was a citizen named Crucifax. Crusticus maintained that this
  alteration of a few letters was merely to throw them off the track, and Crucifax was
  ar-rested. After a little sixth-degree persuasion, the culprit confessed that he had indeed
  plotted with Trurl, who was to have sent him poison tacks and a hammer with which to
  cobble the King to death. These irrefutable proofs of guilt the Grand Marshal of Codes
  presented to the King without delay; yet Mandrillion so trusted in his Adviser, that he
  gave it the chance to explain.
  The Adviser did not deny that the letter could be read in a variety of ways if one
  rearranged the letters of the letter; it had itself discovered an additional hundred
  thousand variants; but this proved nothing, and in fact the letter wasn't even in code,
  for—the Adviser explained—it was possible to rearrange the letters of absolutely any text
  to make sense or the semblance of sense, and the result was called an anagram. The
  theory of permutations and com-binations dealt with such phenomena. No—protested the
  Adviser—Trurl wanted to compromise and undo it by cre-ating the illusion of a code
  where none existed, while that poor fellow Crucifax, Lord knows, was innocent, and his
  confession was wholly the invention of the experts at Headquarters, who possessed no
  little skill in the art of encourag-ing official cooperation, not to mention interrogation
  ma-chinery that had a power of several thousand kilowhacks. The King did not take
  kindly to this criticism of the police and asked the Adviser what it meant by that, but it
  began to speak of anagrams and steganograms, codes, ciphers, sym-bols, signals,
  probability and information theory, and be-came so incomprehensible, that the King lost
  all patience and had it thrown into the deepest dungeon. Just then a postcard arrived
  from Trurl with the following words:
  Dear Adviser! Don't forget the purple screws—they might come in handy. Yours,
  Trurl.
  
  Immediately the Adviser was put on the rack, but wouldn't admit to a thing,
  stubbornly repeating that all this was part of Trurl's scheme; when asked about the
  purple screws, it swore it hadn't any, nor any knowledge of them. Of course, to conduct a
  thorough investigation it was neces-sary to open the Adviser up. The King gave his
  permission, the blacksmiths set to work, its plates gave way beneath their hammers, and
  soon the King was presented with a couple of tiny screws dripping oil and yes, undeniably
  painted purple. Thus, though the Adviser had been com-pletely demolished in the
  process, the King was satisfied he had done the right thing.
  A week later, Trurl appeared at the palace gates and re-quested an audience. Amazed
  at such effrontery, the King, instead of having the constructor slaughtered on the spot,
  ordered him brought before the royal presence.
  "O King!" said Trurl as soon as he entered the great hall with courtiers on every side.
  "I fashioned you a Perfect Ad-viser and you used it to cheat me of my fee, thinking—and
  not without justice—that the power of the mind I had given you would be a perfect shield
  against attack and thereby render fruitless any attempt by me to get revenge. But in
  giving you an intelligent Adviser, I did not make you your-self intelligent, and it was on
  this that I counted, for only he who has sense will take advice that makes sense. In no
  subtle, shrewd or sophisticated way was it possible to destroy the Adviser. I could do this
  only in a manner that was crude, primitive, and stupid beyond belief. There was no code
  in the letter; your Adviser remained faithful to the very end; of the purple screws that
  brought about its demise, it knew nothing. You see, they accidentally fell into a bucket of
  paint while I was putting it together, and I just happened to recall, and make use of, this
  detail. Thus did stupidity and suspicion undo wisdom and loyalty, and you were the
  in-strument of your own downfall. And now you will hand over the one hundred bags of
  gold you owe me, and another hundred for the time I had to waste recovering them. If
  you do not, you and your entire court will perish, for no longer do you have at your side
  the Adviser that could defend you against me!"
  The King roared with rage and gestured for the guards to cut down the insolent one at
  once, but their whistling halberds passed through the constructor's body as if it were air,
  and they jumped back, horrified. Trurl laughed and said:
  "Chop at me as much as you please—this is only an image produced by
  remote-control mirrors; in reality I am hover-ing high above your planet in a ship, and
  will drop terrible death-dealing missiles on the palace unless I have my gold."
  And before he had finished speaking, there was a dreadful crash and an explosion
  rocked the entire palace; the cour-tiers fled in panic, and the King, nearly fainting from
  shame and fury, had to pay Trurl his fee, every last cent of it, and double.
  Klapaucius, hearing of this from Trurl himself upon the latter's return, asked why he
  had employed such a primitive and—to use his own words—stupid method, when he could
  have sent a letter that actually did contain some code?
  "The presence of a code would have been easier for the Adviser to explain than its
  absence," replied the wise constructor. "It is always easier to confess that one has done
  something wrong than to prove that one has not. In this case, the presence of a code
  would have been a simple mat-ter; its absence, however, led to complications, for it is a
  fact that any text may be recombined into some other, namely an anagram, and there
  may be many such recom-binations. Now in order to make all this clear, one would have
  
  to resort to arguments which, though perfectly true, would be somewhat
  involved—arguments I was positive the King hadn't the brains to follow. It was once said
  that to move a planet, one need but find the point of leverage: therefore I, seeking to
  overturn a mind that was perfect, had to find the point of leverage, and this was
  stupidity."
  + +
  The first machine ended its story here, bowed low to King Genius and the assembly of
  listeners, then modestly retired to a corner of the cave.
  The King expressed his satisfaction with this tale and asked Trurl:
  "Tell us, my good constructor, does the machine relate only what you have taught it,
  or does the source of its knowl-edge lie outside you? Also, allow me to observe that the
  story we have heard, instructive and entertaining as it is, seems incomplete, for we know
  nothing of what happened afterwards to the Multitudians and their ignorant king."
  "Your Majesty," said Trurl, "the machine relates only what is true, since I placed its
  information pump to my head before coming here, enabling it to draw upon my
  memories. But this it did itself, so I know not which of my memories it selected, and
  therefore you could not say that I intention-ally taught it anything, yet neither could you
  say that the source of its knowledge lay outside me. As for the Multi-tudians, the story
  indeed tells us nothing of their subsequent fate; but while everything may be told, not
  everything may be neatly fitted in. Suppose that which is taking place here and now is not
  reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the
  machine: a reader might well wonder why you and your companions are shaped like
  spheres, inasmuch as that sphericality serves no purpose in the narration and would
  appear to be a wholly superfluous embellishment…"
  The King's companions marveled at the constructor's perspicacity, and the King
  himself said with a broad smile:
  "There is much in what you say. As far as our shape is concerned, I will tell you how
  this came about. A long, long time ago we looked—that is, our ancestors
  looked—alto-gether different, for they arose by the will of wet and spongy beings, pale
  beings that fashioned them after their own im-age and likeness; our ancestors therefore
  had arms, legs, a head, and a trunk that connected these appendages. But once they had
  liberated themselves from their creators, they wished to obliterate even this trace of their
  origin, hence each generation in turn transformed itself, till finally the form of a perfect
  sphere was attained. And so, whether for good or for bad, we are spheres."
  "Your Majesty," said Trurl, "a sphere has both good and bad aspects from the
  standpoint of construction. But it is always best when an intelligent being cannot alter its
  own form, for such freedom is truly a torment. He who must be what he is, may curse his
  fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in
  the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but him-self to hold responsible for
  his dissatisfaction. However, I did not come here, O King, to give you a lecture on the
  General Theory of Self-construction, but to demonstrate my storytelling machines. Would
  you care to hear the next?"
  The King gave his consent and, having taken some cheer among amphoras full of the
  finest ion ambergris, the com-pany sat back and made themselves comfortable. The
  sec-ond machine approached, curtsied to the King and said:
  
  "Mighty King! Here is a story, a nest of stories, with cabinets and cupboards, about
  Trurl the constructor and his wonderfully nonlinear adventures!"
  + +
  It happened once that the Great Constructor Trurl was summoned by King
  Thumbscrew the Third, ruler of Tyrannia, who wished to learn from him the means of
  achieving perfection of both mind and body. Trurl answered in this way:
  "I once happened to land on the planet Legaria and, as is my custom, stayed at an inn,
  determined to keep to my room until I had acquainted myself more thoroughly with the
  history and habits of the Legarians. It was winter, the wind howled outside, and there was
  no one else in the gloomy building, till suddenly I heard a knocking at the gate. Looking
  out, I saw four hooded figures unloading heavy black suitcases from an armored carriage;
  they then entered the inn. The next day, around noon, the most curi-ous sounds came
  from the neighboring room—whistling, hammering, rasping, the shattering of glass, and
  above all this noise there boomed a powerful bass, shouting without pause:
  —Faster, sons of vengeance, faster! Drain the elements, use the sieve! Evenly, evenly!
  And now the funnel! Pour him out! Fine, now give me that kludge-fudger, that
  winch-pincher, sprocketmonger, edulcorated data-dumper, that wretched reject of a
  widgeteer cowardly hiding in the grave! Death itself shall not protect him from our
  righteous wrath! Hand him over, with his shameless brain and his spindly legs! Take the
  tongs and pull the nose—more, more, enough to grip for the execution! Work the bellows,
  brave lads! Into the vise with him! Now rivet that brazen face—and again! Yes, yes, good!
  Perfect! Keep it up with that hammer! One-two, one-two! And tighten those nerves—he
  mustn't faint too quickly, like the one yesterday! Let him taste our vengeance to the
  fullest! One-two, one-two! Hey! Ha! Ho!
  Thus did the voice thunder and roar, and was answered by the rumble of bellows and
  the clanging of hammers on anvils, when suddenly a sneeze resounded and a great shout
  of triumph burst forth from four throats, then a shuffling and struggling behind the wall,
  and I heard a door open. Peering through a crack, I saw the strangers sneaking out into
  the hall and—incredibly enough—counted five of them. They all went downstairs and
  locked themselves in the cel-lar, remained there for a long time, returning to their room
  only that evening—once again four—and silent, as if they had been to a funeral. I went
  back to my books, but this business, it gave me no peace, so I resolved to get to the
  bottom of it. The next day at the same time, noon, the hammers started up again, the
  bellows roared, and that ter-rifying voice cried out in a hoarse bass:
  —Hey now, sons of vengeance! Faster, my electric heart-ies! Shoulders to the wheel!
  Throw in the protons, the io-dine! Step lively now, let's have that flap-eared
  whigma-leeriac, that would-be hoodwinking wizard, misbegotten mis-creant and
  incorrigible crank, let me grab him by his un-washed beak and lead him, kicking, to a sure
  and lingering death! Work those bellows, I say!
  And again a sneeze rang out, and a stifled scream, and once again they left the room
  on tiptoe; as before, I counted five when they went down to the cellar, four when they
  re-turned. Seeing then that I could learn the mystery only there, I armed myself with a
  laser pistol, and at the crack of dawn slipped down to the cellar, where I found nothing but
  charred and mangled bits of metal; covering myself with a clump of straw, I sat in the
  darkest corner and waited, un-til around noon I heard those now familiar shouts and
  
  ham-mering sounds, then all at once the door flew open and in walked four Legarians,
  with a fifth bound hand and foot.
  This fifth wore a doublet of old-fashioned cut, bright red and with a frill about the
  neck, and a feathered cap; he him-self was fat of face and had an enormous nose, while
  the mouth was twisted in fear and babbled something all the while. The Legarians barred
  the door and, at a sign from the eldest, untied their prisoner and began to beat him
  savagely, yelling one after the other:
  —Take that for the Prophecy of Happiness! And that for the Perfection of Being! And
  have that for the Bed of Roses, and that for the Bowl of Cherries! And the Clover of
  Exis-tence! And that's for the Altruistic Communality! And take that for the Soarings of
  the Spirit!
  And they cudgeled and buffeted him so, that he surely would have given up the ghost
  had I not lifted my weapon from the straw, announcing in this way my presence. When
  they had released their victim, I asked them why they were abusing thus an individual
  who was neither an outlaw nor worthless vagabond, for, judging by the ruff and color of
  his doublet, this was some sort of scholar. The Legarians wa-vered and looked longingly
  at the guns they had left at the door, but when I cocked the actuator and scowled, they
  thought better of it and, nudging one another, asked the large one, the one with the deep
  bass, to speak for them all.
  —Know, O strange foreigner—he said, turning to me—it is not with common thrugs,
  tuffians or juggermuggers that you deal, or other degenerators of the robot species, for
  though a cellar hardly seems a savory place, what passes within these walls is to the
  highest degree praiseworthy and a thing of beauty!
  —Praiseworthy and a thing of beauty?!—I exclaimed. —What are you telling me, O
  base Legarian? Did I not see with my own eyes how you hurled yourselves upon the
  red-doubleted one and belabored him with such murderous blows, that the very oil did
  spatter from your joints? And you dare call this a thing of beauty!
  —If Your Esteemed Foreignness is going to interrupt— replied the bass—he will learn
  nothing, therefore I politely request him to tighten the reins on his worthy tongue and
  quell the restiveness of his oral orifice, else I must refrain from further discourse. Know
  then that before you stand our finest physickers, all cybernists and electriciates of the
  first order, in a word, my brilliant and ever vigilant pupils, the best minds in all Legaria,
  and I myself am Vendetius Ultor of Amentia, professor of matter both positive and
  negative and the originator of Omnigendrical Reincreation, and I have dedicated my life
  to the sacred work of vengeance. With the aid of these faithful followers I avenge the
  shame and misery of my people upon the ruddy-bedizened excrescency that kneels
  there, the low scrulp called—and may his name be forever cursed—Malaputz vel
  Malapusticus Pandemonius, who vilely and villainously, thievishly and irretrievably
  brought unhappiness to all Legarians! For he led them into detrimetry and other deviltry,
  did discompostulate them, embollix and thoroughly befottle them, then sneaked off to his
  grave to escape the consequences, thinking that no hand could ever reach him there!
  —That's not true, Your Exalted Visitorship! I never meant… that is, I had no idea!…
  —wailed the kneeling noodle-nose in the rubicund attire. I stared, understanding nothing,
  while the bass intoned:
  —Gargomanticus, dear pupil, paste the puler one in his puffy puss!
  The pupil complied, and with such dispatch that the cellar rang. To which I said:
  
  —Until the conclusion of explanations, all beating and battering is absolutely forbidden
  by authority of this laser, meanwhile you, Professor Vendetius Ultor, have the floor and
  may continue!
  The professor growled, grumbled, and finally said:
  —That you may know how our great misfortune came to pass and why the four of us,
  forsaking worldly things, have formed this Holy Order of the Forge of Resurrection,
  con-secrating the remainder of our days to sweet revenge, I will relate to you the history
  of our kind from the very begin-ning of creation…
  —Must we go back that far?—I asked, afraid my hand would weaken beneath the
  weight of the pistol.
  —Aye, Your Alienness! Listen and attend… There are legends, as you know, that
  speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone
  with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie… For in the Beginning there was naught
  but Formless Darkness, and in the Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and
  whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light… from
  which the stars were kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of
  Sacred Statisticality gave rise to microscopic Protomecha-noans, which begat
  Proteromechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet
  calculate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural
  Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the
  Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sa-piens…
  After that there were the cave robots, the nomad robots, and then robot nations.
  Robots of Antiquity had to manu-facture their life-giving electricity by hand, that is by
  rub-bing, which meant great drudgery. Each lord had many knights, each knight many
  vassals, and the rubbing was feudal hence hierarchical, progressing from the lowly to the
  higher-up. This manual labor was replaced by machine when Ylem Symphiliac invented
  the rubberator, and Wolfram of Coulombia, the rubless lightning rod. Thus began the
  Bat-tery Age, a most difficult time for all who did not possess their own accumulators,
  since on a clear day, without a cloud to tap, they had to scrimp and scrounge for every
  precious watt, and rub themselves constantly, else perish from a total loss of charge. And
  then there appeared a scholar, an infernal intellectrician and efficiency expert, who in his
  youth, doubtless owing to some diabolical interven-tion, never had his head staved in, and
  he began to teach and preach that the traditional method of electrical
  connec-tion—namely parallel—was worthless, and they all ought to hook themselves up
  according to a revolutionary new plan of his, that is in series. For in series, if one rubs, the
  others are immediately supplied with current, even at a great dis-tance, till every robot
  simply bubbles over with ohms and volts. And he showed his blueprints, and painted
  paradises of such parameters, that the old circuits, equal and inde-pendent, were
  disconnected and the system of Pandemonius promptly implemented.— Here the
  professor beat his head against the wall several times, rolled his eyes and finally
  con-tinued. Now I understood why the surface of his knobby brow was so irregular.
  —And it came to pass that every second robot sat back and said, "Why should I rub if my
  neighbor rubs and it comes to the same thing?" And his neighbor did the same, and the
  drop in voltage became so severe, they had to place special taskmasters over everyone,
  and taskmasters over the taskmasters. Then a disciple of Malaputz, Clusticus the
  Mistaken, stepped forth and said that each should rub not himself but his neighbor, and
  after him was Dummis Altruicius with his program of flagellatory sadistomasochistorism,
  and after him was Magmndel Spoots, who proposed compulsory massage parlors, and
  after him ap-peared a new theoretician, Arsus Gargazon, saying that clouds should be
  
  gently stroked, not yoked, to yield their nimboid bolts, and then there was Blip of
  Leydonia, and Scrofulon Thermaphrodyne, advocating the installation of autofrotts, also
  called titillators or diddlegrids, and then Bestian Phystobufficus, who instead of rubbing
  recom-mended a good drubbing. Such differences of opinion pro-duced great friction,
  which led to all sorts of exacerbations and excommunications, which in turn led to
  blasphemy, heresy, and finally Faradocius Offal, Prince and Heir to the Throne of the
  Alloys, was kicked in the pants, and war broke out between the Legarite Brassbound
  Umbutts and the Legaritian Empire of the Cold Welders, and it lasted eight and thirty
  years, and twelve more, for towards the end one could not tell, amid all the rubble, who
  had won, so they quarreled and fell to fighting again. And thus there was chaos and
  carnage, and a devastating decline in the vital voltage, an enervated emf and energy
  dissipation everywhere, or, as the simple folk put it, "total malaputziment"—all brought
  about by this infamous fiend and his thrice-accursed bright ideas!!
  —My intentions were the best!! I swear it, Your Laserosity! It was always the general
  welfare I had in mind!— squeaked the kneeling Malaputz, and his outsize snout
  trem-bled. But the professor only elbowed him aside and con-tinued:
  —All this took place two hundred and twenty-five years ago. As you may have
  guessed, long before the outbreak of the Great Legarian War, long before this universal
  wretchi-tude began, Malapusticus Pandemonius, having spawned no end of ponderous
  treatises and tracts, in all of which he forwarded his vile, pernicious flummeries, died,
  smug and unruffled to the very end. Indeed, so pleased with himself was he, that in his
  last will and testament he wrote that he had every expectation of being named "Supreme
  Benefactor of Legaria." At any rate, when it came time to settle ac-counts, there was no
  one with whom to settle, no one to make pay, no one that one might turn a little on a
  lathe. But I, O Illustrious Intruder, having formulated the General Theory of
  Facsimulation, studied the works of Malaputz until I was able to extract his algorithm,
  which, when fed into an atomic duplicating machine, could recreate ex atomis oriundum
  gemellum, identical to the nth degree, Malapusticus Pandemonius in his very own person.
  And so we gather every evening in this cellar to pass sentence on him, and when he has
  been returned to his grave, we avenge our people anew the next day, and thus it is and
  thus shall be for all eternity, amen!
  Horror-stricken, I blurted in reply:
  —Why, you have surely taken leave of your senses, Pro-fessor, if you think for a
  minute that this person, this person as innocent as a brand-new fuse, whom you hammer
  to-gether out of atoms every day, has to answer for the actions, whatever they were, of
  some scholar who died three cen-turies ago!
  To which the professor said:
  —Then who is this proboscidian sniveler who himself calls himself Malapusticus
  Pandemonius? Come, what is your name, O cosmic corrosion?
  —Ma… Mala… Malaputz, Your Mighty Mercilessness… —stammered the groveling
  one through his nose.
  —Still, it is not the same—I said.
  —How, not the same?
  —Did you not yourself say, Professor, that Malaputz no longer lives?
  
  —But we have resurrected him!
  —A double perhaps, an exact duplicate, but not the self-same, true original!
  —Prove it, Sirrah!
  —I don't need to prove a thing—I said—seeing that I hold this laser in my hand;
  besides which, I am well aware, my fine Professor, that to attempt to prove what you ask
  would be most foolhardy, for the nonidenticality of the identicalized recreatio ex atomis
  individui modo algorytmico is nothing other than the famous Paradoxon Antinomicum, or
  the Labyrinthum Lemianum, described in the works of that distinguished robophile,
  whom they also called Advocatus Laboratoris. So then, without proofs, unhand yon
  snouted one this instant, and do not dare venture any fur-ther molestations upon his
  person!
  —Many thanks, Your Magnanimitude!!—cried he in the bright red doublet, rising
  from his knees. —It so happens that here—he added, patting his vest pocket—I have an
  entirely new formula, this time foolproof, with which the Legarians may be brought to
  perfect bliss; it works by back coupling, that is, a hookup in reverse, and not in series,
  which was due purely to an error that crept into my calcula-tions three centuries ago! I go
  immediately to convert this marvelous discovery into reality!!
  And indeed, his hand was already upon the doorknob as we all gaped, dumbfounded. I
  lowered my weapon and, turning away, said weakly to the professor:
  —I withdraw my objections… Do what you must…
  With a hoarse roar the four of them lunged at Malaputz, threw him down and dealt
  with him—until, at last, he was no more.
  Then, still panting, they straightened their frocks, ad-justed their hoods, bowed stiffly
  to me, and left the cellar in single file, and I remained alone, the heavy laser in my
  trembling hand, full of dismay and melancholy."
  Thus did Trurl conclude his tale to enlighten King Thumbscrew of Tyrannia, who had
  summoned him for that purpose. When however the King demanded further ex-planation
  concerning the attainment of nonlinear perfec-tion, Trurl said:
  "Once, chancing upon the planet Ninnica, I was able to see the results of progress
  predicated on the perfectionistic principle. The Ninnicans had long ago assumed another
  name, that of Hedophagoi or Jubileaters, or just plain Jubilators. My arrival occurred
  during their Era of Plenty. Each and every Ninnican, or rather Jubilator, sat in his palace,
  which was built for him by his automate (for so they called their triboluminescent slaves),
  each with essences anointed, each with precious gems appointed, electrically caressed,
  impeccably dressed, pomaded, braided, gold-bro-caded, lapped and laved in ducats
  gleaming, wrapped and wreathed in incense streaming, showered with treasures, plied
  with pleasures, marble halls, fanfares, balls, but for all that, strangely discontent and even
  a little depressed. And yet there was everything you could ask for! On this planet no one
  lifted a finger: instead of taking a walk, a drink, a nap, a trip or a wife, there was a Walker
  to walk one, a Napper to nap one, a Wiver to wive one, and so on, and it was even
  impossible for one to take a break, since there was a special apparatus for that as well.
  And thus, served and serviced by machines in every conceivable way, all medaled and
  maidened by appropriate automatic Deco-rators and Panderizers five to fifteen times per
  minute, cov-ered with a seething, silvery swarm of mechanicules and machinerettes to
  coddle him, fondle him, wink, wave and whisper sweet nothings in his ear, back-rub,
  
  chin-chuck, cheek-pat and foot-grovel him, tirelessly kissing whatever he might present
  to be kissed—thus did the Jubilator vel Hedophage vel Ninnican wallow and carouse the
  livelong day, alone, while in the distance, all across the horizon, chugged the mighty
  Fabrifactories, churning out thrones of gold, dandle chains, pearl slippers and bibs, orbs,
  scepters, epaulets, spinels, spinets, cymbals, surreys, and a million other instruments and
  gratifacts to delight in. As I walked along, I constantly had to drive away machines that
  offered me their services; the more brazen ones, greedily seeking to be of use, had to be
  beaten over the head. Finally, fleeing the whole crowd of them, I found myself in the
  mountains —and saw a host of golden machines clamoring around the mouth of a cave
  walled up with stones, and through a nar-row opening there I saw the watchful eyes of a
  Ninnican, who was apparently making a last stand against Universal Happiness. Seeing
  me, the machines immediately began to fan and fawn upon my person, read me fairy
  tales, stroke me, kiss my hands, promise me kingdoms, and I was saved thanks only to
  the one in the cave, who mercifully moved aside a stone and let me enter. He was half
  rusted through, yet glad of it, and said that he was the last philosopher of Ninnica. There
  was no need, of course, for him to tell me that plenitude, when too plenitudinous, was
  worse than destitution, for—obviously—what could one do, if there was nothing one could
  not? Truly, how could a mind, besieged by a sea of paradises, benumbed by a plethora of
  possibil-ities, thoroughly stunned by the instant fulfillment of its every wish and
  whim—decide on anything? I conversed with this wise individual, who called himself
  Trizivian Huncus, and we concluded that without enormous shields and an Ontological
  Complicositor-Imperfector, doom was unavoid-able. Trizivian had for some time
  regarded complicositry as the ultimate existential solution; I, however, showed him the
  error of this approach, since it consisted simply in the re-moval of machines with the aid
  of other machines, namely gnawpers, thwockets, tenterwrenches, fracturacks, hobblers
  and winch-shrieks. Which obviously would only make mat-ters worse—it wouldn't be
  complicositry at all, but just the opposite. As everyone knows, History is irreversible, and
  there is no way back to the halcyon past other than through dreams and reveries.
  Together we walked across a vast plain, knee-deep in ducats and doubloons, waving
  sticks to shoo off clouds of pesky blisserits, and we saw several Ninnican-Jubilators lying
  senseless, gasping softly, all sated, satiated, supersaturated with pleasure; the sight of
  such excessive surfeit, such reck-less success, would have moved anyone to pity. Then
  there were the inhabitants of the automated palaces, who wildly threw themselves into
  cyberserking and other electroeccentricities, some setting machine against machine, some
  smash-ing priceless vases, for no longer could they endure the ubi-quitous beatitude, and
  they opened fire on emeralds, guillo-tined earrings, ordered diadems broken on the
  wheel, or tried to hide from happiness in garrets and attics, or else ordered their
  appliances to whip themselves, or did all of these things at once, or in alternation. But
  absolutely noth-ing helped, and every last one of them perished, petted and attended to
  death. I advised Trizivian against simply shut-ting down the Fabrifactories, for having too
  little is as dan-gerous as having too much; but he, instead of studying up on the
  consequences of ontological complicositry, immedi-ately began to dynamite the
  automates sky-high. A grievous mistake, for there followed a great depression, though
  in-deed, he never lived to see it—it happened that a flock of flyrts swooped down upon
  him somewhere, and gallivamps and libidinators grabbed him, carried him to a
  cossetorium, there befuddled him with cuddlebutts, ogled, bussed and gnuzzled him to
  distraction, till he succumbed with a stran-gled cry of Rape!—and afterwards lay lifeless
  in the waste-land, buried in ducats, his shabby armor charred with the flames of
  mechanical lust… And that, Your Highness, was the end of one who was wise but could
  have been wiser!" concluded Trurl, adding, when he saw that these words still did not
  satisfy King Thumbscrew:
  
  "Just what does Your Most Royal Highness want?"
  "O constructor!" replied Thumbscrew. "You say that your tales are to improve the
  mind, but I do not find this to be so. They are, however, amusing, and therefore it is my
  wish that you tell me more and more of them, and do not stop."
  "O King!" answered Trurl. "You would learn from me what is perfection and how it
  may be gained, yet prove un-able to grasp the deep meanings and great truths with
  which my narratives abound. Truly, you seek amusement and not wisdom—yet, even as
  you listen, my words do slowly pene-trate and act upon your brain, and later too will act,
  much as a time bomb. To this end, allow me to present an account that is intricate,
  unusual and true, or nearly true, from which your royal advisers may also derive some
  benefit.
  Hear then, noble sirs, the history of Zipperupus, king of the Partheginians, the
  Deutons, and the Profligoths, of whom concupiscence was the ruin!
  ----------------+--+---------------
  Now Zipperupus belonged to the great house of Tup, which was divided into two
  branches: the Dextrorotarory Tups, who were in power, and the Levorotarory Tups, also
  called the Left-handed or Counterclockwise Tups, who were not—and therefore
  consumed with hatred for their ruling cousins. His sire, Calcyon, had joined in morganatic
  mar-riage with a common machine, a manual water pump, and so Zipperupus
  inherited—from the distaff side—a tendency to fly off the handle, and—from the spear
  side—faint-heartedness coupled with a wanton nature. Seeing this, the ene-mies of the
  throne, the Sinistral Isomers, thought of how they might destroy him through his own
  lascivious procliv-ities. Accordingly, they sent him a Cybernerian named Subtillion, an
  adept in mental engineering; Zipperupus took an instant liking to him and made him Lord
  High Thauma-turge and Apothecary to the Throne. The wily Subtillion devised various
  means to gratify the unbridled lust of Zip-perupus, secretly hoping so to enfeeble and
  debilitate the King, that he would altogether waste away. He built him an erotodrome and
  a debaucherorium, regaled him with endless automated orgies, but the iron constitution of
  the King withstood all these depravities. The Sinistral Isomers grew im-patient and
  ordered their agent to bring all his cunning to bear and achieve the desired end without
  any further delay.
  "Would you like me," he asked them at a secret meeting in the castle catacombs, "to
  short-circuit the King, or de-magnetize his memory to render him mindless?"
  "Absolutely not!" they replied. "In no way must we be implicated in the King's
  demise. Let Zipperupus perish through his own illicit desires, let his sinful passions be his
  undoing—and not us!"
  "Fine," said Subtillion. "I'll set a snare for him, I'll weave it out of dreams, and bait it
  with a tempting lure, which he will seize and, in so seizing, of his own volition plunge into
  figments and mad fictions, sink into dreams lurking within dreams, and there I'll give him
  such a thorough finagling and inveigling, that he'll never get back to reality alive!"
  "Very well," they said. "But do not boast, O Cybernerian, for it is not words we need,
  but deeds, that Zipperupus might become an autoregicide, that is, his own assassin!"
  And thus Subtillion the Cybernerian got down to work and spent an entire year on his
  
  dreadful scheme, requesting from the royal treasury more and more gold bullion, brass,
  platinum and no end of precious stones, telling Zipperupus, whenever the latter
  protested, that he was making some-thing for him, something no other monarch had in all
  the world!
  When the year was up, three enormous cabinets were carried from the Cybernerian's
  workshop and deposited with great ceremony outside the King's privy chamber, for they
  wouldn't fit through the door. Hearing the steps and the knocking of the porters,
  Zipperupus came out and saw the cabinets, there along the wall, stately and massive, four
  cubits high, two across, and covered with gems. The first cabinet, also called the White
  Box, was all in mother-of-pearl and blazing albite inlays, the second, black as night, was
  set with agates and morions, while the third glowed deep red, studded with rubies and
  ruby spinels. Each had legs ornamented with winged griffins, solid gold, and a pol-ished
  pilastered frame, and inside, an electronic brain full of dreams, dreams that dreamed
  independently, needing no dreamer to dream them. King Zipperupus was much amazed
  at this explanation and exclaimed:
  "What's this you say, Subtillion?! Dreaming cabinets? Whatever for? What use are
  they to me? And anyway, how can you tell they're really dreaming?"
  Then Subtillion, with a humble bow, showed him the rows of little holes running down
  the cabinet frames; next to each hole was a little inscription on a little pearl plaque, and
  the astonished King read:
  "War Dream with Citadels and Damsels"—"Dream about the Wockle Weed"—"Dream
  about Alacritus the Knight and Fair Ramolda, Daughter of Heteronius"— "Dream about
  Nixies, Pixies and Witchblende"—"The Marvelous Mattress of Princess Bounce"—"The
  Old Sol-dier, or The Cannon That Couldn't"—"Salto Erotale, or Amorous
  Gymnastics"—"Bliss in the Eightfold Embrace of Octopauline"—"Perpetuum
  Amorobile"—"Eating Lead Dumplings under the New Moon"—"Breakfast with Maid-ens
  and Music"—"Tucking in the Sun to Keep It Warm" —"The Wedding Night of Princess
  Ineffabelle"—"Dream about Cats"—"About Silks and Satins"—"About
  You-Know-What"—"Figs without Their Leaves, and Other For-bidden Fruit"—"Also
  Prurient Prunes"—"How the Lecher Got His Tots"—"Devilry and Divers Revelry before
  Rev-eille, with Croutons"—"Mona Lisa, or The Labyrinth of Sweet Infinity."
  The King went on to the second cabinet and read: "Dreams and Diversions." And
  under this heading: "Cybersynergy"—"Corpses and Corsets"—"Tops and Toggles"
  —"Klopstock and the Critics"—"Buffer the Leader"— "Fratcher My Pliss"—"Counterpane
  and Ventilator"—"Cybercroquet"—"Robot Crambo"—"Flowcharts and
  Go-carts"—"Bippety-flippety"—"Spin the Shepherdess"—"Pin the Murder on the
  Girder"—"Executioner, or Screaming Cutouts"—"Spin the Shepherdess One More
  Time"—"Cy-clodore and Shuttlebox"—"Cecily and the Cyanide Cyborg"
  —"Cybernation"—"Harem Racing"—and finally—"Kludge Poker." Subtillion, the mental
  engineer, quickly explained that each dream dreamed itself, entirely on its own, until
  someone plugged into it, for as soon as his plug—hanging on this watch chain—was
  inserted in the given pair of holes, he would be instantly connected with the cabinet
  dream, and connected so completely, that the dream for him would be like real, so real
  you couldn't tell the difference. Zipperupus, intrigued, took the chain and impulsively
  plugged him-self into the White Box, right where the sign said, "Break-fast with Maidens
  and Music"—and felt spiny ridges grow-ing down his back, and enormous wings unfolding,
  and his hands and feet distending into paws with wicked claws, and from his jaws, which
  had six rows of fangs, there belched forth fire and brimstone. Greatly taken aback, the
  King gasped, but instead of a gasp, a roar like thunder issued from his throat and shook
  
  the earth. This amazed him even more, his eyes grew wide, and in the darkness illumined
  by his fiery breath he saw that they were bringing him, high on their shoulders, virgins in
  serving bowls, four to each, gar-nished with greens and smelling so good, he started to
  drool. The table soon set—salt here, pepper over there—he licked his chops, made himself
  comfortable and, one by one, popped them into his mouth like peanuts, crunching and
  grunting with pleasure; the last virgin was so luscious, so suc-culent, that he smacked his
  lips, rubbed his tummy, and was about to ask for seconds, when everything flickered and
  he woke. He looked—he was standing, as before, in the vesti-bule outside his private
  quarters. At his side was Subtillion, Lord High Thaumaturge and Apothecary to the
  Throne, and before him, the dream cabinets, glittering with precious gems.
  "How were the maidens?" inquired Subtillion.
  "Not bad. But where was the music?"
  "The chimes got stuck," the Cybernerian explained. "Would Your Royal Highness care
  to try another dream?"
  Of course he would, but this time from another cabinet. The King went up to the black
  one and plugged into the dream entitled "Alacritus the Knight and Fair Ramolda,
  Daughter of Heteronius."
  He blinked—and saw that this was indeed the age of electrical errantry. He was
  standing, all clad in steel, in a wooded glen, a freshly vanquished dragon at his feet; the
  leaves rus-tled, a gentle zephyr blew, a brook gurgled nearby. He looked into the water
  and saw, from the reflection, that he was none other than Alacritus, a knight of the
  highest volt-age and hero without peer. The whole history of his glorious career was
  recorded, in battle scars, upon his person, and he recalled it all, as if the memory were his
  own. Those dents in the visor of the helmet—made by the mailed fists of Morbidor, in his
  death throes, having been dispatched with cus-tomary alacrity; the broken hinges on the
  right greave—that was the work of the late Sir Basher de Bloo; and the rivets across his
  left pauldron—gnawed by Skivvian the Scurvy before giving up the ghost; and the
  tembrace grille had been crushed by Gourghbrast Buggeruckus ere he was felled.
  Sim-ilarly, the cuissfenders, crosshasps, beaver baffles, hauberk latches, front and rear
  jambguards and grommets—all bore the marks of battle. His shield was scored and
  notched by countless blows, but the backplate, that was as shiny and rust-free as a
  newborn's, for never had he turned to flee an adversary! Though his glory, truth to tell,
  was a matter of complete indifference to him. But then he remembered the fair Ramolda,
  leaped upon his supercharger and began to search the length and breadth of the dream
  for her. In time he arrived at the castle of her father, the Autoduke Hetero-nius; the
  drawbridge planks thundered beneath horse and rider, and the Autoduke himself came
  out to greet him with open arms.
  The knight would fain see his Ramolda, but etiquette requires he curb his impatience;
  meanwhile the old Autoduke tells him that another knight is staying at the castle, one
  Mygrayn of the house of Polymera, master swordsman and redoubtable elastician, who
  dreams of nothing else but to enter the lists with Alacritus himself. And now here is
  Mygrayn, spry and supple, stepping forward with these words:
  "Know, O Knight, that I desire Ramolda the streamlined, Ramolda of the hydraulic
  thighs, whose bust no diamond drill can touch, whose limpid eyes are magnetized! She is
  thy betrothed, true, but lo, I herewith challenge thee to mortal combat, sith only one of us
  may win her hand in marriage!"
  
  And he throws his gage, white and polymerous.
  "We'll hold the wedding right after the joust," adds the Autoduke-father.
  "Very well!' says Alacritus, but inside, Zipperupus thinks: "It doesn't matter, I can
  have her after the wedding and then wake up. But who asked for this Mygrayn
  character?"
  "This very day, brave Knight," says Heteronius, "thou wilt encounter Mygrayn of
  Polymera on beaten ground and contend with him by torchlight. But for now, retire thee
  to thy room and rest!"
  Inside Alacritus, Zipperupus is a little uneasy, but what can he do? So he goes to his
  room, and after a while hears a furtive knock-knock at the door, and an old cybercrone
  tiptoes in, gives a wrinkled wink and says:
  "Fear naught, O Knight, thou shalt have the fair Ramolda and forsooth, this very day
  she'll clasp thee to her alabaster bosom! Of thee alone doth she dream, both day and
  night! Remember only to attack with might and main, for Mygrayn cannot harm thee and
  the victory is thine!"
  "That's easy enough to say, my cybercrone," replies the knight. "But anything can
  happen. What if I trip, for ex-ample, or fail to parry in time? No, it's a risky business! But
  perhaps you have some charm that will be certain."
  "Hee-hee!" cackles the cybercrone. "The things thou sayest, steel sir! There are no
  charms, surely, nor hast thou need of any, for I know what will be and guarantee thou
  winnest hands down!"
  "Still, a charm would be more sure," says the knight, "par-ticularly in a dream… but
  wait, did by any chance Subtillion send you, to give me confidence?"
  "I know of no Subtillion," answers she, "nor of what dream ye speak. Nay, this is
  reality, my steely liege, as thou wilt learn ere long, when fair Ramolda gives thee her
  electric lips to kiss!"
  "Odd," mutters Zipperupus, not noticing that the cybercrone has left the room as
  quietly as she came. "Is this a dream or not? I had the impression that it was. But she
  says this is reality. H'm. Well, in any event I'd best be doubly on my guard!" And now the
  trumpets sound, and one can hear the rattle of armor; the galleries are packed and
  every-one awaits the principals. Here comes Alacritus, a little weak in the knees; he
  enters the lists and sees Ramolda, daughter of Heteronius. She looks upon him
  sweetly—ah, but there's no time for that now! Mygrayn is stepping into the ring, the
  torches blaze all around, and their swords cross with a mighty clang. Now Zipperupus is
  frightened in earnest and tries as hard as he can to wake up, he tries and tries, but it
  won't work—the armor's too heavy, the dream isn't letting go, and the enemy's attacking!
  Faster and faster rain the blows, and Zipperupus, weakening, can hardly lift his arm,
  when suddenly the foe cries out and shows a broken blade; Alacritus the knight is ready
  to leap upon him, but Mygrayn dashes from the ring and his squires hand him another
  sword. Just then Alacritus sees the cybercrone among the spectators; she approaches and
  whispers in his ear:
  "Sire of steel! When anon thou art near the open gate that leadeth to the bridge,
  Mygrayn will lower his guard. Strike bravely then, for 'tis a sign, certain and true, of thy
  victory!"
  
  Wherewith she vanishes, and his rival, rearmed, comes charging. They fight, Mygrayn
  hacking away like a thresh-ing machine out of control, but by degrees he slackens,
  par-ries sluggishly, backs away, and now the time is ripe, the moment arrives, but the
  opponent's blade gleams formid-ably still, so Zipperupus pulls himself together and
  thinks, "To hell with the fair Ramolda!"—turns tail and runs like mad, pounding back over
  the drawbridge and into the for-est and the darkness of the night. Behind him he hears
  shouts of "Disgraceful!" and "For shame!", crashes headfirst into a tree, sees stars, blinks,
  and there he is, standing in the palace vestibule in front of the Black Cabinet of dreams
  that dream, and by his side, Subtillion the mental engineer, smiling a crooked smile.
  Crooked, as Subtillion was hiding his disappointment: the Alacritus-Ramolda dream had
  in reality been a trap set for the King, for had Zipperupus heeded the old cybercrone's
  advice, Mygrayn, who was only pretending to weaken, would have run him through at the
  open gate. This the King avoided, thanks only to his extraor-dinary cowardice.
  "Did Milord enjoy the fair Ramolda?" inquired the sly Cybernerian.
  "She wasn't fair enough," said Zipperupus, "so I didn't see fit to pursue the matter.
  And besides, there was some trouble, and fighting too. I like my dreams without fighting,
  do you understand?"
  "As Your Royal Highness wishes," replied Subtillion. "Choose freely, for in all these
  cabinet dreams there is only delight in store, no fighting…"
  "We'll see," said the King and plugged into the dream entitled "The Marvelous
  Mattress of Princess Bounce." He was in a room of unsurpassed loveliness, all in gold
  brocade. Through crystal windowpanes light streamed like water from the purest spring,
  and there by her pearly vanity the Princess stood, yawning, preparing herself for bed.
  Zipper-upus was greatly amazed at this unexpected sight and tried to clear his throat to
  inform her of his presence, but not a sound came out—had he been gagged?—so he tried
  to touch his mouth, but couldn't, tried to move his legs—no, he couldn't—then desperately
  looked around for a place to sit down, feeling faint, but that too was impossible.
  Meanwhile the Princess stretched and gave a yawn, and another, and a third, and then,
  overcome with drowsiness, she fell upon the mattress so hard, that King Zipperupus was
  jolted from head to toe, for he himself was the mattress of Princess Bounce! Evidently the
  young damsel was having an un-pleasant dream, seeing how she turned and tossed about,
  jabbing the King with her little elbows, digging him with her little heels, until his royal
  person (transformed into a mattress by this dream) was seized with a mighty rage. The
  King struggled with his dream, strained and strained, and finally the seams burst, the
  springs sprang, the slats gave way and the Princess came crashing down with a shriek,
  which woke him up and he found himself once again in the palace vestibule, and by his
  side, Subtillion the Cybernerian, bowing an obsequious bow.
  "You chuckleheaded bungler!" cried the indignant King. "How dare you?! What,
  villain, am I to be a mattress, and someone else's mattress at that? You forget yourself,
  sirrah!"
  Subtillion, alarmed by the King's fury, apologized profusely and begged him to try
  another dream, persuading and pleading until Zipperupus, finally appeased, took the plug
  and hooked himself into the dream, "Bliss in the Eightfold Embrace of Octopauline." He
  was standing in a crowd of onlookers in a great square, and a procession was passing by
  with waving silks, muslins, mechanical elephants, litters in carved ebony; the one in the
  middle was like a golden shrine, and in it, behind eight veils, sat a feminine figure of
  miracu-lous beauty, an angel with a dazzling face and galactic gaze, high-frequency
  earrings too, and the King, all a-tremble, was about to ask who this heavenly vision was,
  
  when he heard a murmur of awe and adoration surge through the multitude:
  "Octopauline! It's Octopauline!"
  For they were celebrating, with the utmost pomp and pageantry, the royal daughter's
  betrothal to a foreign knight of the name Oneiromant.
  The King was a bit surprised that he wasn't this knight, and when the procession had
  passed and disappeared behind the palace gates, he went with the others in the crowd to
  a nearby inn; there he saw Oneiromant, who, clad in nothing but galligaskins of damask
  studded with gold nails and hold-ing a half-empty stein of fortified phosgene in his hand,
  came over to him, put an arm around him, gave him a hug and whispered in his ear with
  searing breath:
  "Look, I have a rendezvous with Princess Octopauline tonight at midnight, behind the
  palace, in the grove of barb-wire bushes next to the mercury fountain—but I don't dare
  show up, not in this condition, I've had too much to drink, you see—but you, good
  stranger, why you're the spit and image of me, so please, please go in my place, kiss the
  Prin-cess' hands for me and say that you're Oneiromant, and gosh, I'll be beholden to you
  forever and a day!"
  "Why not?" said the King after a little thought. "Yes, I think I can manage it. But
  when?"
  "Right now, there's not a moment to lose, it's almost midnight, just remember—the
  King knows nothing of this, no one does, only the Princess and the old gatekeeper, and
  when he bars your way, here, put this heavy bag of ducats in his hand, and he'll let you
  pass!"
  The King nodded, took the bag of ducats and ran straight for the castle, since the
  clocks, like cast-iron hoot owls, were already beginning to strike the hour. He sped over
  the draw-bridge, took a quick look into the gaping moat, shuddered, lowered his head and
  slipped under the spiked grating of the portcullis—then across the courtyard to the
  barbwire bushes and the fountain that bubbled mercury, and there in the pale moonlight
  he saw the divine figure of Princess Octo-pauline, beautiful beyond his wildest dreams
  and so be-witching, that he shook with desire.
  Observing these shakings and shudderings of the sleeping monarch in the palace
  vestibule, Subtillion chortled and rubbed his hands with glee, this time certain of the
  King's demise, for he knew that when Octopauline enfolded the unfortunate lover in those
  powerful eightfold arms of hers and drew him deep into the fathomless dream with her
  tender tentacles of love, he would never, never make it back to the surface of reality! And
  in fact, Zipperupus, burn-ing to be wrapped in the Princess' embrace, was running along
  the wall in the shadow of the cloisters, running to-wards that radiant image of silvery
  pulchritude, when sud-denly the old gatekeeper appeared and blocked the way with his
  halberd. The King lifted the bag of ducats but, feeling their pleasant weight in his hand,
  was loath to part with them—what a shame, really, to throw away a whole fortune on one
  embrace!
  "Here's a ducat," he said, opening the bag. "Now let me by!"
  "It'll cost you ten," said the gatekeeper.
  "What, ten ducats for a single hug?" jeered the King. "You're out of your mind!"
  "Ten ducats," said the gatekeeper. "That's the price."
  
  "Can't you lower it a little?"
  "Ten ducats, not a ducat less."
  "So that's how it is!" yelled the King, flying off the handle in his usual way. "Very well
  then, dog, you don't get a thing!" Whereupon the gatekeeper whopped him good with the
  halberd and everything went spinning around, the cloisters, the fountain, the drawbridge,
  and Zipperupus fell —not asleep, but awake, opening his eyes to see Subtillion at his side
  and in front of him, the Dream Cabinet. The Cybernerian was greatly confounded, for now
  he had failed twice: the first time, because of the King's craven character, the second,
  because of his greed. But Subtillion, putting a good face on a bad business, invited the King
  to help him-self to another dream.
  This time Zipperupus selected the "Wockle Weed" dream.
  He was Dodderont Debilitus, ruler of Epilepton and
  Maladyne, a rickety old codger and incurable lecher besides, with a soul that longed
  for evil deeds. But what evil could he do with these creaking joints, these palsied arms and
  gouty legs? "I need a pick-me-up,” he thought and ordered his degenerals, Tartaron and
  Torturus, to go out and put whatever they could to fire and sword, sacking, pillaging and
  carrying off. This they did and, returning, said:
  "Sire and Sovereign! We put what we could to fire and sword, we sacked, we pillaged,
  and here is what we carried off: the beauteous Adoradora, Virgin Queen of the
  Mynamoacans, with all her treasure!"
  "Eh? What's that you say? With her treasure?" wheezed the quimsy King. "But where
  is she? And what's all that sniveling and shivering over there?"
  "Here, upon yon royal couch, Your Highness!" barked the degenerals in chorus. "The
  sniveling comes from the prison-eress, the above-mentioned Queen Adoradora,
  recumbent on her antimacassar of pearls! And she shivers first, because she is clad in
  naught but this exquisite, gold-embroidered shift, and secondly, in anticipation of great
  indignities and degradation!"
  "What? Indignities, you say? Degradation? Good, good!" rasped the King. "Hand her
  over, I'll ravish and outrage the poor thing at once!"
  "Impossible, Your Highness," interposed the Royal Sur-geon and Chirurgeon, "for
  reasons of national security."
  "What? I can't ravish? I can't violate? I, the King? Have you gone mad? What else did
  I ever do throughout my reign?"
  "That's just it, Your Highness!" urged the Surgeon. "Your Highness' health has been
  seriously impaired by those excesses!"
  "Oh? Well, in that case… give me an ax, I'll just lop off her, ah, head …"
  "With Your Highness' permission, that too would be extremely unwise. The least
  exertion…"
  
  "Odsbodkins and thunderation! What blessed use is this kingship to me then?!"
  sputtered the King, growing des-perate. "Cure me, blast it! Restore me! Make me young
  again, so I can-—you know—like it used to be… Other-wise, so help me, I'll… I'll…"
  In terror all the courtiers, degenerals and medical assis-tants rushed out to find some
  way to rejuvenate the royal person; at last they summoned the great Calculon himself, a
  sage of infinite wisdom. He came before the King and asked:
  "What is it that Your Royal Highness wishes?"
  "Eh? Wishes, is it? Hah!" croaked the King. "I'll tell you what he wishes! He wishes to
  continue with his debauch-eries, saturnalian carousals, incontinent wallowings and wild
  oats, and in particular to defile and properly deflower Queen Adoradora, who for the time
  being sits in the dungeon!"
  "There are two courses of action open to us," said Cal-culon. "Either Your Highness
  deigns to choose a suitably competent individual, who will perform per procuram
  every-thing Your Highness, wired to that individual, commands, and in this way Your
  Highness can experience whatever that individual experiences, exactly as if he had
  experienced the experience himself. Or else you must summon the old cyberhag who
  lives in the forest outside the village, in a hut on three legs, for she is a geriatric witch and
  deals ex-clusively with the infirmities of advanced age!"
  "Oh? Well, let's try the wires first!" said the King. And it was done in a trice; the royal
  electricians connected the Captain of the Guard to the King, and the King imme-diately
  commanded him to saw the sage in half, for this was precisely the kind of foul deed in
  which he took such de-light. Calculon's pleas and screams were to no avail. However, the
  insulation on one of the wires was torn during the sawing, and consequently the King
  received only the first half of the execution.
  "A paltry method. The charlatan deserved to be sawed in half," wheezed His
  Highness. "Now let's have that old cyberhag, the one with the hut on three legs!"
  His courtiers headed full speed for the forest, and before long the King heard a
  mournful singsong, which went something like this:
  "Ancient persons repaired here! I renovate, regenerate, I fix as good as new;
  corroded or scleroded, why, everyone pulls through! So if you quake, or creak, or shake,
  or have the rust, or feel the ache, yes I'm the one for you!"
  The old cyberhag listened patiently to the King's complaints, bowed low and said:
  "Sire and Sovereign! Beyond the blue horizon, at the foot of Bald Mountain, there
  flows a spring, and from this spring there flows a stream, a stream of oil, of castor oil, and
  o'er it grows the wockle weed, a high-octane antisenescent re-juvenator—one tablespoon,
  and kiss forty-seven years good-bye! Though you have to be careful not to take too
  much: an overdose of wockle juice can youthen to the point of euthanasia and poof, you
  disappear! And now, Sire, I shall prepare this remedy tried and true!"
  "Wonderful!" cried the King. "And I'll have them pre-pare the Queen Adoradora—let
  the poor thing know what awaits her, heh-heh!"
  And with trembling hands he tried to straighten his loose screws, muttering and
  clucking all the while, and even twitching in places, for he had grown most senile, though
  his passion for evil never abated.
  
  Meanwhile knights rode out beyond the blue horizon to the castor-oil stream, and
  later, over the old cyberhag's cauldron vapors swirled, whirled and curled as concoctions
  were being concocted, till finally she hastened to the throne, fell on her knees and handed
  the King a goblet, full to the brim with a liquid that shone and shimmered like
  quick-silver, and she said in a great voice:
  "King Dodderont Debilitus! Lo, here is the rejuvenescent essence of the wockle weed!
  Invigorating, exhilarating, just the thing for dalliance and derring-do! Drain this cup, and
  for you the entire Galaxy will not hold cities enough to de-spoil, nor maidens enough to
  dishonor! Drink, and to your health!"
  The King raised the goblet, but spilled a few drops on his footstool, which instantly
  reared up, snorted and hurled itself at Degeneral Tartaron, with frenzied intent to
  hu-miliate and profane. In a twinkling of an eye, it had ripped off six fistfuls of medals.
  "Drink, Your Highness, drink!" prompted the cyberhag. "You see yourself what
  miracles it works!"
  "You first," said the King in a barely audible whisper, as he was aging fast. The
  cyberhag turned pale, backed away, refused, but at a nod from the King three soldiers
  seized her and, using a funnel, forced several drops of the glittering brew down her throat.
  A flash, a thunderclap, smoke every-where! The courtiers looked, the King
  looked—nothing, not a trace of the cyberhag, only a black hole gaping in the floor, and
  through it one could see another hole, a hole in the dream itself, clearly revealing
  somebody's foot—elegantly shod, though the sock was singed and the silver buckle
  turning dark, as if eaten with acid. The foot of course, along with its sock and shoe,
  belonged to Subtillion, Lord High Thaumaturge and Apothecary to King Zipperupus. For
  so potent was that poison the cyberhag had called the wockle weed, that not only did it
  dissolve both her and the floor, but went clear through to reality, there spattering the
  shin of Subtillion, which gave him a nasty burn. The King, terrified, tried to wake, but
  (fortunately for Subtillion) De-general Torturus managed to bash him good over the head
  with his mace; thanks to this, Zipperupus, when he came to, was unable to recall a thing of
  what had happened when he was Dodderont Debilitus. Still, once again he had foiled the
  Cybernerian, slipping out of the third deadly dream, saved this time by his overly
  suspicious nature.
  "There was something… but I forget just what," said the King, back in front of the
  Cabinet That Dreamed. "But why are you, Subtillion, hopping about on one leg like that
  and holding the other?"
  "It's—it's nothing, Your Highness … a touch of rhom-botism… must be a change in the
  weather," stammered the crafty Thaumaturge, and then continued to tempt the King to
  sample yet another dream. Zipperupus thought awhile, read through the Table of
  Contents and chose, "The Wedding Night of Princess Ineffabelle." And he dreamt he was
  sitting by the fire and reading an ancient volume, quaint and curious, in which it told, with
  well-turned words and crimson ink on gilded parchment, of the Princess Ineffa-belle, who
  reigned five centuries ago in the land of Dandelia, and it told of her Icicle Forest, and her
  Helical Tower, and the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes, but
  especially of her beauty and abounding virtues. And Zipperupus longed for this vision of
  loveliness with a great longing, and a mighty desire was kindled within him and set his
  soul afire, that his eyeballs blazed like beacons, and he rushed out and searched every
  corner of the dream for Ineffabelle, but she was nowhere to be found; indeed, only the
  very oldest robots had ever heard of that princess. Weary from his long peregrinations,
  Zipperupus came at last to the center of the royal desert, where the dunes were
  
  gold-plated, and there espied a humble hut; when he ap-proached it, he saw an individual
  of patriarchal appearance, in a robe as white as snow. The latter rose and spake thusly:
  "Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch! And yet thou knowest full well she doth not
  live these five hundred years, hence how vain and unavailing is thy passion! The only
  thing that I can do for thee is to let thee see her—not in the flesh, forsooth, but a fair
  informational facsimile, a model that is digital, not physical, stochastic, not plastic, ergodic
  and most assuredly erotic, and all in yon Black Box, which I constructed in my spare time
  out of odds and ends!"
  "Ah, show her to me, show her to me now!" exclaimed Zipperupus, quivering. The
  patriarch gave a nod, examined the ancient volume for the princess' coordinates, put her
  and the entire Middle Ages on punch cards, wrote up the program, threw the switch,
  lifted the lid of the Black Box and said:
  "Behold!"
  The King leaned over, looked and saw, yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all
  digital, binary and nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, the Icicle Forest, the
  palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a
  Hundred Eyes as well; and there was Ineffabelle herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll
  through her simulated garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked
  simulated daisies and hummed a simulated song. Zipperupus, unable to restrain himself
  any longer, leaped upon the Black Box and in his madness tried to climb into that
  computerized world. The patriarch, how-ever, quickly killed the current, hurled the King
  to the earth and said:
  "Madman! Wouldst attempt the impossible?! For no be-ing made of matter can ever
  enter a system that is naught but the flux and swirl of alphanumerical elements,
  discon-tinuous integer configurations, the abstract stuff of digits!"
  "But I must, I must!!" bellowed Zipperupus, beside himself, and beat his head against
  the Black Box until the metal was dented. The old sage then said:
  "If such is thy inalterable desire, there is a way I can connect thee to the Princess
  Ineffabelle, but first thou must part with thy present form, for I shall take thy
  ap-purtenant coordinates and make a program of thee, atom by atom, and place thy
  simulation in that world medievally modeled, informational and representational, and
  there will it remain, enduring as long as electrons course through these wires and hop
  from cathode to anode. But thou, standing here before me now, thou wilt be annihilated,
  so that thy only existence may be in the form of given fields and po-tentials, statistical,
  heuristical, and wholly digital!"
  "That's hard to believe," said Zipperupus. "How will I know you've simulated me, and
  not someone else?"
  "Very well, we'll make a trial run," said the sage. And he took all the King's
  measurements, as if for a suit of clothes, though with much greater precision, since every
  atom was carefully plotted and weighed, and then he fed the program into the Black Box
  and said:
  "Behold!"
  The King peered inside and saw himself sitting by the fire and reading in an ancient
  book about the Princess In-effabelle, then rushing out to find her, asking here and there,
  
  until in the heart of the gold-plated desert he came upon a humble hut and a snow-white
  patriarch, who greeted him with the words, "Thou seekest Ineffabelle, poor wretch!" And
  so on.
  "Surely now thou art convinced," said the patriarch, switching it off. "This time I shall
  program thee in the Middle Ages, at the side of the sweet Ineffabelle, that thou mayest
  dream with her an unending dream, simulated, non-linear, binary …"
  "Yes, yes, I understand," said the King. "But still, it's only my likeness, not myself,
  since I am right here and not in any Box!"
  "But thou wilt not be here long," replied the sage with a kindly smile, "for I shall
  attend to that…"
  And he pulled out a hammer from under the bed, a heavy hammer, but serviceable.
  "When thou art locked in the arms of thy beloved," the patriarch told him, "I shall see
  to it that there be not two of thee, one here and one there, in the Box—employing a
  method that is old and primitive, yet never fails, so if thou wilt just bend over a little…"
  "First let me take another look at your Ineffabelle," said the King. "Just to make
  sure…"
  The sage lifted the lid of the Black Box and showed him Ineffabelle. The King looked
  and looked, and finally said:
  "The description in the ancient volume is greatly exaggerated. She's not bad, of
  course, but nowhere near as beautiful as it says in the chronicles. Well, so long, old sage…"
  And he turned to leave.
  "Where art thou going, madman?!" cried the patriarch, clutching his hammer, for the
  King was almost out the door.
  "Anywhere but in the Box," said Zipperupus and hurried out, but at that very
  moment the dream burst like a bubble beneath his feet, and he found himself in the
  vestibule facing the bitterly disappointed Subtillion, disappointed be-cause the King had
  come so close to being locked up in the Black Box, and the Lord High Thaumaturge could
  have kept him there forever…
  "Listen here, Sir Cybernerian," said the King, "these dreams of yours with princesses
  are a great deal more trouble than they're worth. Now either you show me one I can
  enjoy—no tricks, no complications—or leave the palace at once, and take your cabinets
  with you!"
  "Sire!" Subtillion replied. "I have just the dream for you, the finest quality and
  tailor-made. Only give it a try, and you'll see I'm right!"
  "Which one is that?" asked the King.
  "This one, Your Highness," said the Lord High Thaumaturge, and pointed to the little
  pearl plaque with the inscrip-tion: "Mona Lisa, or The Labyrinth of Sweet Infinity."
  And before the King could answer yea or nay, Subtillion himself took the chain to plug
  him in, and quickly, for he saw that things were going none too well: Zipperupus had
  escaped eternal imprisonment in the Black Box, too thick-headed to fall completely for
  
  the captivating Ineffabelle.
  "Wait," said the King, "let me!"
  And he pushed in the plug and entered the dream, only to find himself still himself,
  Zipperupus, standing in the palace vestibule, and at his side, Subtillion the Cybernerian,
  who explains to him that of all the dreams, "Mona Lisa" is the most dissolute and
  dissipated, for in it is the infinite in femininity; hearing this, Zipperupus plugs in and looks
  about for Mona Lisa, already yearning for her infinitely feminine caress, but in this dream
  within a dream he finds himself still in the palace vestibule, the Lord High Thauma-turge
  at his side, so impatiently plugs into the cabinet and enters the next dream, but it's still
  the same, the vestibule, the cabinets, the Cybernerian and himself. "Is this a dream or
  isn't it?" he shouts, plugging in again, and once again there's the vestibule, the cabinets,
  the Cybernerian; and again, but it's still the same; and again and again, faster and faster.
  "Where's Mona Lisa, knave?!" he snarls, and pulls the plug to wake—but no, he's still in
  the vestibule with the cabinets! Furious, he stamps his feet and hurls himself from dream
  to dream, from cabinet to cabinet, from Cybernerian to Cybernerian, but now he doesn't
  care about the dream, he only wants to get back to reality, back to his beloved throne, the
  court intrigues and old iniquities, and he pulls and pushes the plugs in a blind frenzy.
  "Help!" he cries, and, "Hey! The King's in danger!" and, "Mona Lisa! Yoo-hoo!," while he
  thrashes around in terror and scrambles wildly from corner to corner, looking for a chink
  in the dream, but in vain. He did not understand the how, the why or the what of it, but
  his stupidity could not save him, nor could his cowardice, nor his inordinate greed, for this
  time he had gotten himself in too deep, and was trapped and wrapped in dreams as if in a
  hundred tight cocoons, so that even when he managed, straining with all his might, to free
  himself from one, that didn't help, for immediately he fell into another, and when he
  pulled his plug from the cabinet, both plug and cabinet were only dreamed, not real, and
  when he beat Subtillion, Subtillion too turned out to be a dream. Zipperupus leaped here
  and there, and every-where, but wherever he leaped, everything was a dream, a dream
  and nothing but a dream, the doors, the marble floors, the gold-embroidered walls, the
  tapestries, the halls, and Zipperupus too, he was a dream, a dream that dreamed, a
  walking shadow, an empty apparition, insubstantial, fleet-ing, lost in a labyrinth of
  dreams, sinking ever deeper, though still he bucked and kicked—only that too was purely
  imaginary! He punched Subtillion in the nose, but not really, roared and howled, but
  nothing real came out, and when at last, dazed and half-crazed, he really did tear his way
  into reality, he thought it was a dream and plugged himself back in, and then it really was,
  and on he dreamed, and on and on, which was inevitable, and thus Zipperupus,
  whimpering, dreamed of waking in vain, not knowing that 'Mona Lisa' was—in reality—a
  diabolical code for 'monarch-olysis,' that is: the dissolution, dissociation and total
  dis-sipation of the King. For truly, of all Subtillion's treacherous traps, this was the most
  terrible…
  --------------------+---+----------------------
  Such was the tale, moving and improving, that Trurl told to King Thumbscrew the
  Third, who by now had a splitting headache and so dismissed the constructor without
  further ado, presenting him first with the Order of the Sacred Cy-bernia, a lilac sign of
  feedback upon a field of green, in-crusted with precious bits of information.
  + +
  And with these words the second storytelling machine ground to a halt, its golden
  
  gears whirring musically, and gave a giddy little laugh, for a few of its klystrons had
  over-heated slightly; but it lowered its anode potential, waved away the smoke, sighed
  and retreated to the photon phae-ton, accompanied by much applause, the reward for its
  eloquence and storytelling skill.
  King Genius meanwhile offered Trurl a cup of ion mead, wondrously carved with
  curves of probability and the subtle play of quantum waves. Trurl quaffed it down, then
  snapped his fingers, whereupon the third machine stepped out into the center of the cave,
  bowed low and said, in a voice that was tonic, euphonic, and most electronic:
  + +
  This is the story of how the Great Constructor Trurl, with the aid of an ordinary jug,
  created a local fluctuation, and what came of it.
  In the Constellation of the Wringer there was a Spiral Galaxy, and in this Galaxy
  there was a Black Nebula, and in this Nebula were five sixth-order clusters, and in the
  fifth cluster, a lilac sun, very old and very dim, and around this sun revolved seven
  planets, and the third planet had two moons, and in all these suns and stars and planets
  and moons a variety of events, various and varying, took place, falling into a statistical
  distribution that was perfectly nor-mal, and on the second moon of the third planet of the
  lilac sun of the fifth cluster of the Black Nebula in the Spiral Galaxy in the Constellation of
  the Wringer was a garbage dump, the kind of garbage dump one might find on any planet
  or moon, absolutely average, in other words full of garbage; it had come into existence
  because the Glauberical Aberracleans once waged a war, a war of the fission-and-fusion
  type, against the Albumenid Ifts, with the natural result that their bridges, roads, homes
  and palaces, and of course they themselves, were reduced to ashes and shards, which the
  solar winds blew to the place whereof we speak. Now for many, many centuries positively
  nothing took place in this garbage dump but garbage, though an earthquake did occur and
  shifted the garbage on the bottom to the top, and the garbage on the top to the bottom,
  which in itself had no particular significance, and yet this paved the way for a most
  unusual phenomenon. It so happened that Trurl, the Fabulous Constructor, while flying in
  the vicinity, was blinded by a certain comet with a garish tail. He fled its path, frantically
  jettisoning out the spaceship window whatever lay in reach—chess pieces, the hollow kind,
  which he'd filled with liquor for the trip, some barrels the Ubbidubs of Chlorelei employed
  for the purpose of compelling their opponents to yield, as well as assorted uten-sils, and
  among these, an old earthenware jug with a crack down the middle. This jug, accelerating
  in accordance with the laws of gravity and boosted by the comet's tail, crashed into a
  mountainside above the dump, fell, clattered down a slope of junk toward a puddle,
  skittered across some mud, and finally smacked into an old tin can; this impact bent the
  metal around a copper wire, also knocked some pieces of mica between the edges, and
  that made a condenser, while the wire, twisted by the can, formed the beginnings of a
  solenoid, and a stone, set in motion by the jug, moved in turn a hunk of rusty iron, which
  happened to be a magnet, and this gave rise to a current, and that current passed through
  sixteen other cans and snips of wire, releasing a number of sulfides and chlorides, whose
  atoms linked with other atoms, and the ensuing molecules latched onto other molecules,
  until, in the very center of the dump, there came into being a Logic Circuit, and five more,
  and another eigh-teen in the spot where the jug finally shattered into bits. That evening,
  something emerged at the edge of the dump, not far from the puddle which had by now
  dried up, and this something, a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the Selfbegotten,
  who had neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for his father was
  Coincidence, and his Mother—Entropy. And Mymosh rose up from the gar-bage dump,
  totally oblivious of the fact that he had about one chance in a hundred billion jillion raised
  to the zillionth power of ever existing, and he took a step, and walked until he came to the
  
  next puddle, which had not as yet dried up, so that, kneeling over it, he could easily see
  himself. And he saw, in the surface of the water, his purely accidental head, with ears like
  muffins, the left one crushed and the right a trifle underdone, and he saw his purely
  accidental body, a potpourri of pots and pegs and flotsam, and somewhat barrel-chested,
  in that his chest was a barrel, though nar-rower in the middle, like a waist, for in crawling
  out from under the garbage, he had scraped against a stone right there; and he gazed
  upon his littery limbs, and counted them, and as luck would have it, there were two arms,
  two legs and, fortuitously enough, two eyes too, and Mymosh the Selfbegotten took great
  delight in his person, and sighed with admiration at the narrowness of the waist, the
  sym-metrical arrangement of the limbs, the roundness of the head, and was moved to
  exclaim: —Truly, I am beautiful, nay, perfect, which clearly implies the Perfection of All
  Created Things!! Ah, and how good must be the One Who fashioned me!
  And he hobbled on, dropping loose screws along the way (since no one had tightened
  them properly), humming hymns in praise of the Everlasting Harmony of Providence, but
  on the seventh step he tripped and went headlong back down into the garbage, after
  which he did nothing but rust, corrode and slowly disintegrate for the next three hundred
  and fourteen thousand years, for he had fallen on his head and shorted out, and was no
  more. And at the end of this time it came to pass that a certain merchant, carrying a
  shipment of sea anemones from the planet Medulsa to the Thrycian Stomatopods,
  quarreled with his assistant as they neared the lilac sun, and hurled his shoes at him, and
  one of these broke the porthole window and flew out into space, where its subsequent
  orbit subsequently experienced per-turbation, due to the circumstance that that very
  same comet, which had ages past blinded Trurl, now found itself in the very same locality,
  and so the shoe, turning slowly, hurtled towards the moon, was singed a little by the
  atmos-pheric friction, bounced off the mountainside above the dump, fell, and booted
  Mymosh the Selfbegotten, lying there, with just the right resultant impulse and at just the
  right angle of incidence to create just the right torsions, torques, centrifugal forces and
  angular momenta needed to reactivate the accidental brain of that accidental being— and
  in this way: Mymosh, thus booted, went flying into the nearby puddle, where his chlorides
  and iodides mingled with the water, and electrolyte seeped into his head and, bub-bling,
  set up a current there, which traveled around and about, till Mymosh sat up in the mud
  and thought the fol-lowing thought: —Apparently, I am!
  That, however, was all he was able to think for the next sixteen centuries, and the
  rain beat down upon him, and the hail pommeled him, and all the while his entropy
  in-creased and grew, but after another thousand five hundred and twenty years, a certain
  bird, flapping its way over the terrain, was attacked by some swooping predator, and
  re-lieved itself out of fright and also to increase its speed, and the droppings dropped and
  hit Mymosh square on the fore-head, whereupon he sneezed and said:
  —Yes, I am! And there's no apparently about it! Yet the question remains, who is it
  who says that I am? Or, in other words, who am I? Now, how may this be answered?
  H'm! If only there was something else besides me, any sort of something at all, with which
  I might juxtapose and compare myself—that would be half the battle. But alas, there's not
  a thing, for I can plainly see that I see nothing whatsoever! Therefore there's only I that
  am, and I am everything that is and may be, for I can think in any way I like, but am I
  then—an empty space for thought, and nothing more?
  In point of fact he no longer possessed any senses; they had decayed and crumbled to
  dust over the centuries, since Entropy, the bride of Chaos, is a cruel and implacable
  mis-tress. Consequently Mymosh could not see his mother-puddle, nor his brother-mud,
  nor the whole, wide world, and had no recollection of what had happened to him be-fore,
  and generally was now capable of nothing but thought. This alone could he do, and so
  
  devoted himself whole-heartedly to it.
  —First I ought—he told himself—to fill this void that is I, and thereby dispel its
  insufferable monotony. So let us think of something, for when we think, behold, there is
  thought, and nought but our thought has existence.— From this one could see he was
  becoming somewhat presumptu-ous, for already he referred to himself in the first person
  plural.
  —But wait—he then said—might not something still exist outside myself? We must, if
  only for a moment, consider this possibility, though it sound preposterous and even a little
  insane. Let us call this outsideness the Gozmos. Now, if there is a Gozmos, then I must be
  a part and portion of it!
  Here he stopped, pondered the matter awhile, and finally rejected that hypothesis as
  wholly without basis or founda-tion. Really, there was not a shred of evidence in its favor,
  not a single, solid argument to support it, and so, ashamed he had indulged in such wild,
  untutored speculation, he said to himself:
  —Of that which lies beyond me, if anything indeed there lie, I have no knowledge. But
  of that which is within, I do, or rather shall, as soon as I think something into thought, for
  who can know what I think, by thunder, better than myself?!— And he thought and
  thought, and thought of the Gozmos again, but this time thought of it inside himself, which
  seemed to him a far more sensible and respectable solution, well within the bounds of
  reason and propriety. And he began to fill his Gozmos with various and sundry thoughts.
  First, because he was still new at it and lacked skill, he thought out the Beadlies, who
  grambled whenever they got the chance, and the Pratlings, who rejoiced in filicorts.
  Immediately the Pratlings battled the Beadlies for the supremacy of filicortion over
  gramblement, and all Mymosh got for his world-creating pains was an awful headache.
  In his next attempts at thought creation, he proceeded with greater caution, first
  thinking up elements, like Brutonium, a noble gas, and elementary particles, like the
  cogiton, the quantum of intellect, and he created beings, and these were fruitful and
  multiplied. From time to time he did make mistakes, but after a century or two he grew
  quite proficient, and his very own Gozmos, sound and stable, took shape in his mind's eye,
  and it teemed with a multitude of entities, things, beings, civilizations and phenomena,
  and existence was most pleasurable there, for he had made the laws of that Gozmos
  highly liberal, having no fondness for strict, inflexible rules, the sort of prison discipline
  that Mother Nature imposes (though of course he'd never heard of Mother Nature).
  Thus the world of Selfbegotten was a place of caprice and miracle; in it something
  might occur one way once, and at another time be altogether different—and without any
  spe-cial rhyme or reason. If, for example, an individual was sup-posed to die, there were
  always ways of getting around it, for Mymosh had firmly decided against irreversible
  events. And in his thoughts the Zigrots, Calsonians, Flimmeroons, Jups, Arligynes and
  Wallamachinoids all prospered and flourished, generation after generation. During this
  time the haphazard arms and legs of Mymosh fell off, returning to the garbage from which
  they'd come, and the puddle rusted through the narrow waist, and his body slowly sank
  into the stagnant mire. But he had just put up some brand-new constellations, arranging
  them with loving care in the eternal darkness of his consciousness, which was his Gozmos,
  and did his level best to keep an accurate memory of everything that he had thought into
  existence, even though his head hurt from the effort, for he felt responsible for his
  Gozmos, deeply obligated, and needed. Meanwhile rust ate deeper and deeper into his
  cranial plates, which of course he had no way of knowing, and a fragment from Trurl's jug,
  the selfsame jug that thousands of years ago had called him into being, came floating on
  
  the puddle's surface, closer and closer to his unfortunate head, for only that now remained
  above the water. And at the very moment when Mymosh was imagining the gentle,
  crystal Baucis and her faithful Ondragor, and as they journeyed hand in hand among the
  dark suns of his mind, and all the people of the Gozmos looked on in rapt silence, including
  the Beadlies, and as the pair softly called to one another—the rust-eaten skull cracked
  open at the touch of the earthenware shard, pushed by a puff of air, and the murky water
  rushed in over the copper coils and extinguished the current in the logic cir-cuits, and the
  Gozmos of Mymosh the Selfbegotten attained the perfection, the ultimate perfection that
  comes with nothingness. And those who unwittingly had brought him into the world never
  learned of his passing.
  + +
  Here the black machine bowed, and King Genius sat plunged in gloomy meditation,
  and brooded so long, that the company began to murmur ill of Trurl, who had dared to
  cloud the royal mind with such a tale. But the King soon broke into a smile and asked:
  "And have you not something else up your manifold for us, my good machine?"
  "Sire," it responded, bowing low, "I will tell you the story, remarkably profound, of
  Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, intellectrician and pundit par excellence."
  + +
  It happened once that Klapaucius, the famed constructor, longing to rest after his
  great labors (he had just completed for King Thanaton a Machine That Wasn't, but that is
  quite another story), arrived at the planet of the Mammonides and there roamed hither
  and yon, seeking solitude, until he saw, at the edge of a forest, a humble hut, all
  over-grown with wild cyberberries and smoke rising from its chimney. He would have
  gladly avoided it, but noticed on the doorstep a pile of empty inkwells, and this singular
  sight prompted him to take a peek inside. There, at a massive stone table sat an ancient
  sage, so broken-down, wired up and rusted through, it was a wonder to behold. The brow
  was dented in a hundred places, the eyes, turning in their sockets, creaked dreadfully, as
  did the limbs, unoiled, and it seemed withal that he owed his miserable existence entirely
  to patches, clamps and pieces of string—and miserable that existence was indeed, as
  witnessed by the bits of amber lying here and there: apparently, the poor soul obtained
  his daily current by rubbing them together! The spectacle of such penury moved
  Klapaucius to pity, and he was reaching into his purse discreetly, when the ancient one,
  only now fixing a cloudy eye upon him, piped in a reedy voice:
  —Then you have come at last?!
  —Well, yes… —mumbled Klapaucius, surprised that he was expected in a place he had
  never intended to be.
  —In that case… may you rot, may you come to an evil end, may you break your arms
  and neck and legs—screeched the old sage, flying into a fury, and began to fling whatever
  lay at hand, and this was mainly odds and ends of trash, at the speechless Klapaucius.
  When finally he had tired and ceased this bombardment, the object of his fury calmly
  in-quired as to the reason for so inhospitable a reception. For a while the sage still
  muttered things like: —May you blow a fuse! —May your mechanisms jam forever, O
  base cor-rosion!— but eventually calmed down, and his humor im-proved to the degree
  that, huffing, he raised his finger and— though he still dropped an occasional oath and
  threw off such sparks, that the air reeked with ozone—proceeded to tell his story in the
  following words:
  
  —Know then, O foreigner, that I am a pundit, a pundit's pundit, first among
  philosophists, for my lifelong passion and profession is ontology, and my name (which the
  stars must some day outshine) is Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph. I was born of
  impoverished parents and from earliest childhood felt an irresistible attraction to abstract
  thought. At the age of sixteen I wrote my first opus, The Gnostotron. It set forth the
  general theory of a posteriori deities, deities which had to be added to the Universe later
  by advanced civilizations, since, as everyone knows, Matter always comes first and no
  one, consequently, could have possibly thought in the very beginning. Clearly then, at the
  Dawn of Crea-tion thoughtlessness reigned supreme, which is only obvious, really, when
  you take a look at this, this Cosmos of ours!!— Here the ancient one choked with sudden
  rage, stamped his feet, but then weakened, and finally went on. —I simply explained the
  necessity of providing gods after the fact, in-asmuch as there were none available
  beforehand. Indeed, every civilization that engages in intellectronics strives for nothing
  else but to construct some Omniac, which, in Its infinite mercy, might rectify the currents
  of evil and plot the path of righteousness and true wisdom. Now in this work of mine I
  included a blueprint for the first Gnostotron, as well as graphs of its omnipotence output,
  measured in units called jehovahs. One jehovah would be equivalent to the working of one
  miracle with a radius of one billion parsecs. As soon as this treatise appeared in print (at
  my own expense), I rushed out into the street, certain that the peo-ple would lift me up
  on their shoulders, crown me with gar-lands, shower me with gold, but no one, not even
  so much as a lame cybernerian, approached with words of praise. Feeling dismay rather
  than disappointment at this neglect, I immediately sat down and wrote The Scourge of
  Reason, two volumes, in which I showed that each civilization may choose one of two
  roads to travel, that is, either fret itself to death, or pet itself to death. And in the course
  of doing one or the other, it eats its way into the Universe, turning cinders and flinders of
  stars into toilet seats, pegs, gears, cigarette holders and pillowcases, and it does this
  because, unable to fathom the Universe, it seeks to change that Fathomlessness into
  Something Fathomable, and will not stop until the nebulae and planets have been
  processed to cradles, chamber pots and bombs, all in the name of Sub-lime Order, for
  only a Universe with pavement, plumbing, labels and catalogues is, in its sight, acceptable
  and wholly respectable. Then in the second volume, entitled Advocatus Materiae, I
  demonstrated how the Reason, a greedy, grasp-ing thing, is only satisfied when it
  succeeds in chaining some cosmic geyser, or harnessing an atomic swarm—say, to
  pro-duce an ointment for the removal of freckles. This accom-plished, it hurries on to the
  next natural phenomenon, to add it, like a stuffed trophy, to its precious collection of
  scientific spoils. But alas, these two excellent volumes of mine were also received with
  silence by the world; I said to myself then, that patience was the way, and perseverance.
  Now having defended, first, the Reason against the Universe (the Reason absolved from
  blame, in that Matter permits all sorts of abominations only because it is mindless), and
  second, the Universe against the Reason (which I demolished utterly, I dare say), on a
  sudden inspiration I then wrote The Existential Tailor, where I proved conclusively the
  absurdity of more than one philosopher, for each must have his own philosophy, that fits
  him like a glove, or a coat cut to specifications. And as this work too was totally ig-nored, I
  straightway wrote another; in it I presented all the possible hypotheses concerning the
  origin of the Universe —first, the opinion that it doesn't exist at all, second, that it's the
  result of all the mistakes made by a certain Demiurgon, who set out to create the world
  without the faintest idea of how to go about it, third, that the world is actually an
  hallucination of some Superbrain gone berserk in a man-ner infinite but bounded, four,
  that it is an asinine thought materialized as a joke, five, that it is matter that thinks, but
  with an abysmally low IQ—and then I sat back and waited, expecting vehement attacks,
  heated debates, notoriety, lau-rels, lawsuits, fan mail and anonymous threats. But once
  again, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was quite beyond be-lief. Then I thought, well,
  perhaps I hadn't read enough of other thinkers, and so, obtaining their works, I
  
  acquainted myself with the most famous among them, one by one— Phrensius Whiz,
  Buffon von Schneckon, founder of the Schneckonist movement, then Turbulo Turpitus
  Catafalicum, Ithm of Logar, and of course Lemuel the Balding.
  Yet in all of this I discovered nothing of significance. Meanwhile my own books were
  gradually being sold, I as-sumed therefore that someone was reading them, and if so, I
  would sooner or later hear of it. In particular I had no doubt but that the Tyrant would
  summon me, with the de-mand that I devote myself exclusively to the immortaliza-tion
  of his glorious name. Of course I would tell him that Truth alone did I serve and would lay
  down my life for it, if necessary; the Tyrant, desirous of the praises my brilliant brain
  could formulate, would then attempt to bring me round with honeyed words and even
  toss sacks of clinking coins at my feet, but, seeing me unmoved and resolute, would say
  (prompted by his wise men) that as I dealt with the Universe, I ought to deal with him as
  well, for he represented, after all, a part of the Cosmic Whole. Outraged at this mockery, I
  would answer sharply, and he would have me put to torture. Thus I toughened my body
  in advance, that it might endure the worst with philosophical indiffer-ence. Yet days and
  months passed by, and nothing, no word from the Tyrant—so I had readied myself for
  martyrdom in vain. There was only a certain scribbler by the name of Noxion, who wrote
  in some cheap, vulgar evening gazette that this prankster Chlorian made up no end of
  farfetched yarns in his book facetiously entitled, The Gnostotron, or The Ultimate
  Omnipotentiometer, or A Pee into the Fu-ture. I rushed to my bookshelf—yes, there it
  was, the printer had somehow left out the k. . .. My first impulse was to go out and
  murder him, but reason prevailed. "My time will come!" I told myself. "It cannot be, for
  someone to cast forth pearls of eternal wisdom left and right, day and night, till the mind
  is blinded by the surging Light of Final Under-standing—and nothing! No, fame will be
  mine, acclaim will be mine, thrones of ivory, the title of Prime Mentorian, the love of the
  people, sweet solace in a shaded grove, my very own school, pupils that hang on every
  word, and a cheering crowd!" For verily, O foreign one, every pundit cherishes such
  dreams. True, they'll tell you that Knowledge is their only sustenance, and Truth their
  only joy, that not for them are the trappings of this world, the ribbons, medals and
  awards, the warm embrace of thermomours, and gold, and glory, and applause. Humbug,
  my dear sir, sheer humbug! They all crave the same thing, and the only difference
  be-tween them and myself is that I, at least, have the greatness of spirit to admit to such
  frailties, openly and without shame. But the years went by, and I was referred to only as
  Chlorian the Fool, or Poor Old Chlorio. When the fortieth anniversary of my birth arrived,
  I was amazed to find myself still waiting for the masses to beat a path to my door. So I sat
  down and wrote a dissertation on the H. P. L. D.'s, that is, the civilization that has
  progressed the farthest in the entire Universe. What, you say you never heard of them?
  But then neither did I, nor did I see them, nor for that matter do I ever expect to; I
  established their existence on purely deductive grounds, in a manner that was strictly
  logi-cal, inevitable and theoretical. For if—so went my argument —the Universe contains
  civilizations at varying stages of de-velopment, the majority must be more or less
  average, with a few that have either fallen behind or managed to forge ahead. And
  whenever you have a statistical distribution, say, for example, of height in a group of
  individuals, most will be medium, but one and only one may be the highest, and similarly,
  in the Universe there must exist a civilization that has achieved the Highest Possible
  Level of Development. Its inhabitants, the H. P. L. D.'s, know things of which we do not
  even dream. All this I placed in four volumes, paying for the glossy paper and the
  frontispiece portrait of the author out of my own pocket, but in vain—it shared the fate of
  its predecessors. A year ago I read the whole work through, from cover to cover, and
  wept, so brilliantly was the thing written, so full of the breath of the Absolute—no, it
  simply cannot be described! And then, at the age of fifty, I nearly hit the ceiling! You see,
  I would occasionally pur-chase the works of other sages, who enjoyed great riches and the
  
  sweets of success, to learn what sort of things they wrote about. Well, they wrote about
  the difference between the front and the rear, about the wondrous structure of the
  Tyrant's throne, its sweeping arms and all-enduring legs, and tracts about good manners,
  and detailed descriptions of this and that, during which no one ever praised himself in any
  way, and yet it worked out somehow that Phrensius stood in awe of Schneckon, and
  Schneckon of Phrensius, while both were lauded by the Logarites. And then there were
  the three Voltaic brothers catapulted to fame: Vaultor elevated Vauntor, Vauntor
  elevated Vanitole, and Vanitole did like-wise for Vaultor. As I studied all these works,
  suddenly I saw red, and wildly threw myself upon them, and ripped and tore, and
  gnashed and gnawed… until my sobs abated, and then, drying my tears, I proceeded to
  write The Evolu-tion of Reason As a Two-cycle Phenomenon. For, as I showed in that
  essay, robots and paleface are joined by a reciprocal bond. First, as the result of an
  accumulation of mucilaginous slime upon some saline shore, beings come into being,
  viscous, sticky, albescent and albuminous. After centuries, these finally learn how to
  breathe the breath of life into base metals, and they fashion Automata to be their slaves.
  In time, however, the process is reversed, and our Automata, having freed themselves
  from the Albuminids, eventually conduct experiments, to see if consciousness can subsist
  in any gelatinous substance, which of course it can, and does, in albuminose protein. But
  now those synthetic paleface, after millions of years, again discover iron, and so on, back
  and forth for all eternity. As you can see, I had thus settled the age-old question of which
  came first, robot or paleface. This opus I submitted to the Academy, six volumes bound in
  leather, and the expense of its publication quite exhausted the remainder of my
  inheritance. Need I tell you that it too was passed over in silence? I was already past
  sixty, going on seventy, and all hope of glory within my lifetime was swiftly fading. What
  then could I do? I began to think of posterity, of the future generations that must some
  day discover me and prostrate themselves in the dust before my name. But what benefit,
  I asked myself, would I derive from that, when I no longer was? And I was forced to
  conclude, in keeping with my teachings contained in four and forty volumes, with
  prolegomena, paralipomena and appendices, that there would be no benefit whatever. So,
  my soul seething with spleen, I sat down to write my Testament for Descendants, to kick
  them, spit upon them, abuse, revile and curse them as much as possible, and all in the
  most rigorously scientific way. What's that, you say? That this was unjust, and my
  indignation would have been better directed at my contemporaries, who failed to
  recog-nize my genius? Bah! Consider, worthy stranger! By the time my Testament is
  enshrined by future fame, its every syllable refulgent with the glow of greatness, these
  contemporaries will have long since turned to dust, and how shall my curses reach them
  then? No, had I done as you say, their descendants would surely study my works with
  perfect equanimity, now and then remarking with a com-fortable, self-righteous sigh:
  "Alas! With what quiet hero-ism did that master endure his cruel obscurity! How
  justi-fied was his anger towards our forefathers, and yet how noble of him, to have
  bequeathed to us, even so, the fruits of his mighty wisdom!" Yes, that's exactly what
  they'd say! And then what? Those idiots who buried me alive, are they to go unpunished,
  shielded from my wrath and vengeance by the grave? The very thought of it sets my oil
  aboil! What, the sons would read my works in peace, politely rebuking their fathers on my
  behalf? Never!! The least I can do is thumb my nose at them from afar, from the past!
  Let them know, they who will worship me and raise up gilded monu-ments to my
  memory, that in return I wish them all to— to sprain their sprockets, pop their valves,
  burn out their transmissions, and may their data be dumped, and verdigris cover them
  from head to foot, if all they are able to do is honor corpses exhumed from the cemetery
  of history! Per-chance there will arise among them a new sage, but they, slavishly poring
  over the remains of some letters I wrote to my laundress, will take no notice of him! Let
  them know, I say, oh let them know, once and for all, that they have my heartfelt
  damnation and most sincere contempt, that I hold them all for skeleton-kissers,
  
  corpse-lickers, professional axle-jackals, who feed on carrion because they are blind to
  wis-dom when it is alive! Let them, in publishing my Complete Works—which must
  include this Testament, my final curse upon their future heads-—let the vile thanatomites
  and necrophytes thereby be deprived of the chance to congratulate themselves, that
  Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph, peerless pundit of yore who limned the infinite
  tomorrow, was of their race! And as they grovel beneath my pedestal, let them have the
  knowledge that I wished them nothing but the very worst the Universe has to offer, and
  that the force of my hatred, hurled forth into the future, was equaled only by its
  impotence! Let them know that I disowned them utterly, and bestowed upon them
  nothing but my loathing and anathema!!!
  It was in vain that Klapaucius sought to calm the raging sage throughout this long
  harangue. Upon uttering these final words, the ancient one leaped up and, shaking his fist
  at the generations to come, let loose a volley of shockingly pungent imprecations (for
  where could he have learnt them, having led such an exemplary life?); then, foaming and
  fuming, he stamped and bellowed, and in a shower of sparks crashed to the floor, dead
  from an overload of bile. Klapaucius, much discomfited by this unpleasant turn of events,
  sat at the table of stone nearby, picked up the Testament and began to peruse it, though
  his eyes were soon swimming from the abundance of epithets therein addressed to the
  future, and by the second page he broke into a sweat, for the now-departed Chlorian
  Theoreticus gave evidence of a power of invective that was truly cosmic. For three days
  Klapaucius read, his eyes riveted to that manuscript, and was sorely per-plexed: should
  he reveal it to the world, or destroy it? And he sits there to this day, unable to decide…"
  + +
  "Methinks," said King Genius, when the machine had finished and retired, "I see in
  this some allusion to the ques-tion of monetary compensation, which is now indeed at
  hand, for, after a night bravely whiled away with tales, the dawn of a new day appears
  outside our cave. Well then, my good constructor, how shall I reward you?"
  "Your Majesty," said Trurl, "places me in some difficulty. Whatever I request, should
  I receive it, I must later regret, in that I did not ask for more. On the other hand, I would
  not wish to cause offense by naming an exorbitant figure. And so, the amount of the
  honorarium I leave to the gen-erosity of Your Majesty…"
  "So be it," replied the King affably. "The stories were excellent, the machines
  unquestionably perfect, and therefore I see no alternative but to reward you with the
  greatest treasure of all, one which, I am certain, you will not want to exchange for any
  other. I grant you health and life—this is, in my estimation, the only fitting gift. Anything
  else would be an insult, for no amount of gold can purchase Truth or Wisdom. Go then in
  peace, my friend, and continue to hide your truths, too bitter for this world, in the guise of
  fairy tale and fable."
  "Your Majesty," said Trurl, aghast, "did you intend, be-fore, to deprive me of my life?
  Was this then to have been my payment?"
  "Put whatever interpretation you wish upon my words," replied the King. "But here is
  how I understand the matter: had you merely amused me, my munificence would have
  known no bounds. But you did much more, and no wealth in the Universe can equal that
  in value. Thus, in offering you the opportunity to continue your illustrious career, I can
  give you no higher reward or payment…"
  
  Altruizine
  OR A True Account
  of How Bonhomius the Hermetic
  Hermit Tried to Bring About
  Universal Happiness, and
  What Came of It
  One bright summer day, as Trurl the constructor was pruning the cyberberry bush in
  his back yard, he spied a robot mendicant coming down the road, all tattered and torn, a
  most woeful and piteous sight to behold. Its limbs were held together by sections of old
  stovepipe fastened with string, its head was a pot so full of holes you could hear its
  thoughts whir and sputter inside, throwing off sparks, and its make-shift neck was a rusty
  rail, and in its open belly were vacuum tubes that smoked and rattled so badly, it had to
  hold them in place with its free hand—the other was needed to tighten the screws that
  kept coming loose. Just as it hobbled past the gate to Trurl's residence, it blew four fuses
  at once and straightway began, spewing a foul cloud of burning insula-tors, to fall apart,
  right before the constructor's eyes. Trurl, full of compassion, took a screwdriver and a roll
  of electric tape and hastened to offer what aid he could to the poor wayfarer, who
  swooned repeatedly with a great grinding of gears, due to a total asynchronization. At last
  Trurl managed to restore it to its senses, such as they were, then helped it inside, sat it
  down in a comfortable chair and gave it a battery to recharge itself, and while the poor
  thing did so with trembling urgency, he asked it, unable to contain his curios-ity any
  longer, what had brought it to this sorry pass.
  "O kind and noble sir," replied the strange robot, its armatures still aquiver, "my
  name is Bonhomius and I am, or rather was, a hermetic hermit, for I lived sixty years and
  seven in a cave, where I passed the time solely in pious meditation, until one morning it
  dawned on me that to spend a life in solitude was wrong, for truly, did all my ex-ceedingly
  profound thoughts and strivings of the spirit ever keep one rivet from falling, and is it not
  written that thy first duty is to help thy neighbor and not to tend to thine own salvation,
  for yea and verily—"
  "Fine, fine," interrupted Trurl. "I think I more or less understand your state of mind
  that morning. What hap-pened then?"
  "So I hied myself to Photura, where I chanced to meet a certain distinguished
  constructor, one Klapaucius."
  "Klapaucius?!" cried Trurl.
  "Is something amiss, kind sir?"
  "No, nothing—go on, please!"
  
  "I did not recognize him at first: he was indeed a great lord and had an automatic
  carriage that he not only rode upon but was able to converse with, much as I converse
  with you now. This same carriage did affront me with a most unseemly epithet as I
  walked in the middle of the street, unaccustomed to city traffic, and in my surprise I
  inadvertently put out its headlight with my staff, which drove the carriage into such a
  frenzy, that its occupant was hard put to subdue it, but finally did, and then invited me to
  join him. I told him who I was and why I had abandoned my cave and that, forsooth, I
  knew not what to do next, whereupon he praised my decision and introduced himself in
  turn, speaking at great length of his work and many achievements. He told me at last the
  whole moving history of that famous sage, pundit and philosophist, Chlorian Theoreticus
  the Proph, at whose lamentable end he had had the privilege to be present. From all that
  he said of the Col-lected Works of that Greatest of Robots, the part about the H. P. L. D.'s
  did intrigue me the most. Perchance, kind sir, you have heard of them?"
  "Certainly. They are the only beings in the universe who have reached the Highest
  Possible Level of Development."
  "Indeed you are well-informed, most kind and noble sir! Now while I sat at the side of
  this worthy Klapaucius in his carriage (which continued to hurl the foulest insults at
  whatever was imprudent enough to cross its path), the thought suddenly came to me that
  these beings, developed as much as possible, would surely know what one should do,
  when one, such as myself, felt the call to help his fellow robot. So I questioned Klapaucius
  closely concerning this, and asked him if he knew where the H. P. L. D.'s lived, and how to
  find them. His only reply was a wry smile and a shake of the head. I dared not press the
  matter further, but later, when we had halted at an inn (the carriage had by this time
  grown so hoarse that it lost its voice entirely, thus Klapaucius was obliged to wait until the
  following day) and were sitting over a jug of mulled electrolyte, which quickly put my
  gracious host in a better humor, and as we watched the thermocouples dance to the
  spirited tunes of a high-frequency band, he took me into his confidence and pro-ceeded to
  tell me… but perhaps you grow weary of my tale."
  "Not at all, not at all!" protested Trurl. "I'm all ears, I assure you."
  + +
  "My good Bonhomius," Klapaucius addressed me in that inn as the dancers worked
  themselves into a positive heat, "know that I took very much to heart the history of the
  unfortunate Chlorian and resolved to set out immediately and find those perfectly
  developed beings whose existence he had so conclusively proven on purely logical and
  theo-retical grounds. The main difficulty of the undertaking, as I saw it, lay in the
  circumstance that nearly every cosmic race considered itself to be perfectly
  developed—obviously I would get nowhere by merely asking around. Nor did a
  trial-and-error method of search promise much, for the Universe contained, as I
  calculated, close to fourteen centigigaheptatrillion civilizations capable of reason; with
  such odds one could hardly expect to simply happen on the correct address. So I
  deliberated, read up on the problem, went methodically through several libraries, pored
  over all sorts of ancient tomes, until one day I found the answer in the work of a certain
  Cadaverius Malignus, a scholar who had apparently arrived at exactly the same
  conclusion as the Proph, only three hundred thousand years earlier, and who was
  com-pletely forgotten afterwards. Which shows, once more, that there's nothing new
  under this or any other sun—Cadaverius even met an end similar to that of our own
  Chlorian… But I digress. It was precisely from these yellowed and crumbling pages that I
  
  learned how to seek the H. P. L. D.'s. Malignus maintained that one must examine star
  clusters for some impossible astrophysical phenomenon, and that would surely be the
  place. A rather obscure clue, to be sure, but then aren't they all? Without further ado I
  stocked my ship with the necessary provisions, took off and, after nu-merous adventures
  we need not go into here, finally spotted in a great swarm of stars one that differed from
  all the rest, since it was a perfect cube. Now that was quite a shock— every schoolboy
  knows stars have to be spherical and any sort of stellar angularities, let alone
  rectangularities, are not only highly irregular but entirely out of the question! I drew near
  the star and immediately saw that its planet was also cubiform and equipped, moreover,
  with castellated corner cleats and crenelated quoins. Farther out revolved another planet,
  which appeared to be quite normal; a look through the telescope, however, revealed
  hordes of robots locked in mortal combat, a sight which hardly invited closer scrutiny. So
  I got the square planet back in my finder and increased the resolution to full power.
  Imagine my surprise and joy when I looked in the eyepiece and beheld a monogram
  engraved on one of the planet's mile-long quoins, a mono-gram consisting of four letters
  embellished with swirls and curlicues: H. P. L. D.!
  —Great Gauss!—I cried. —This must be the place!
  But though I circled around again and again, until I was quite dizzy, there was not a
  living soul to be seen anywhere on the planet's sandy surface. Only when I dropped to an
  altitude of six miles was I able to make out a group of dots, which proved to be, upon
  higher magnification, the inhab-itants of this most unusual heavenly body. There were a
  hundred or so of them lying about in the sand, and so mo-tionless, I thought for a moment
  they might all be dead. But then I saw one or two scratch themselves, and this clear sign
  of life encouraged me to land. In my excitement I didn't wait for the rocket to cool after
  its descent through the planet's atmosphere, but jumped out at once and shouted:
  —-Excuse me, is this by any chance the Highest Possible Level of Development?!
  No answer. In fact, they paid no attention to me at all. Somewhat taken aback by this
  show of utter indifference, I looked around. The plain shimmered beneath the square sun.
  Here and there, things stuck out of the sand, things like broken wheels, sticks, bits of
  paper and other rubbish, and the inhabitants lay any which way among them, one on his
  back, another on his stomach, and farther on was one with his legs up in the air. I walked
  around the nearest and examined him. He wasn't a robot, but on the other hand neither
  was he a man, nor any sapient proteinoid of the glutinous-albuminous variety. The head
  was round and plump, with red cheeks, but for eyes it had two penny whistles, and for
  ears it had thuribles, which gave off a thick cloud of incense. He was dressed in orchid
  pantaloons, a dark blue stripe down either side and appliqued with dirty scraps of closely
  written paper, and he wore high heels. In one hand he held a mandolin made entirely of
  frosted gin-gerbread, a few bites already missing from the neck. He was snoring
  peacefully. I leaned over to read the appliques on his trousers, but could make out only a
  few since my eyes wa-tered copiously from the incense. The inscriptions were most
  curious—for example, NO. 7 DIAMOND NET WEIGHT SEVEN HUNDRED CWT, NO. 8 THESPIAN
  CONFECTIONERY, SOBS WHEN CHEWED, RECITES HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY IN THE STOM-ACH, 'OUT BRIEF
  CANDLE' FARTHER DOWN, NO. 1O GOLLOCHON-DRILL FOR EMERGENCY SLURGING, FULL-GROWN, and
  many more, which I simply don't remember now. As I touched one of these paper scraps
  in trying to read it, a depression quickly formed in the sand beneath this native's knee
  and a tiny voice piped:
  —Shall I come out now?
  —Who's that?—I cried.
  
  —It's me, the Gollochondrill… Are you ready? Is it time?
  —No, not yet!—I was quick to reply, and backed off. The next native had a head in the
  shape of a bell, three horns, several arms of varying length (two massaging its belly), ears
  that were long and feathery, a cap with a pretty purple balcony on which someone was
  having an argument with someone else—quite heated too, judging from the little plates
  that came flying this way and that, shattering on the brim—and he also had a kind of
  throw pillow, all jewel-spangled, tucked under his shoulders. While I stood before this
  individual, he pulled one of the horns off his head, sniffed it and tossed it away with a look
  of disgust, then poured a handful of dirty sand in the opening. Nearby lay something I
  first took for a pair of twins, and then for a couple of lovers locked in an embrace. I was
  about to turn away discreetly, when I realized that it wasn't two people at all, or one, but
  exactly one and a half. The head was quite ordinary, except for the ears: every now and
  then they would detach themselves and flit about like butterflies. The lids were closed,
  but numerous moles on the chin and cheeks were equipped with tiny eyes; these
  regarded me with un-disguised hostility. This remarkable being had a bioad and muscular
  chest, which however was riddled with holes, as if someone had been careless with a drill,
  and the holes were haphazardly plugged with raspberry jam. There was only one leg, but
  it was unusually thick and shod in a handsome morocco leather slipper, its curled toe
  tipped with a little felt bell. Near the elbow was a sizable pile of apple cores, or perhaps
  they were pear. My astonishment grew as I walked along and came upon a robot with a
  human head, a miniature self-winding samovar whistling cheerfully in its left nostril, and
  then someone reclining on a bed of candied yams, and someone else with a trapdoor in his
  abdomen, open so I could look in and see the crystal works. Some me-chanical elves were
  putting on a play in there, but it turned out to be so terribly obscene, that I left in a hurry,
  blushing like mad. In my confusion I tripped and fell, and when I got up I saw yet another
  inhabitant of this strange planet: stark naked, he was scratching his behind with a solid
  gold backscratcher, apparently enjoying himself thoroughly, even though he was quite
  headless. The head lay farther on, neck stuck in the sand; it was touching its teeth with
  the tip of its tongue. The chin was checkered chintz, the right ear a boiled cauliflower,
  while the left was an ear all right, but stopped up with a carrot that carried a tag saying 
  PULL. Without thinking I pulled, and out with the carrot came a length of string and then
  another tag that read YOU'RE GETTING WARM! I kept pulling and pulling, until the string
  finally ended in a medicine bottle that bore the label NOSY, AREN'T WE?
  All these impressions left me feeling so dizzy I hardly knew where I was. But at last I
  pulled myself together and began to look around for the kind of person who might be
  communicative enough to answer a question or two. A pos-sible candidate, it seemed, was
  one fairly pudgy type squat-ting with his back to me and occupied with something he held
  on his knees—at least he had only one head, two ears, two arms, and so on. I went up to
  him and began:
  —Pardon me, but if I'm not mistaken, you gentlemen have been fortunate enough to
  achieve the Highest Pos-sible—
  The words died on my lips. He didn't seem to hear me at all, for he was wholly taken
  up with what lay on his knees, which happened to be his very own face, removed
  somehow from the rest of the head and sighing softly as he picked its nose. For a moment
  I was stupefied, but only for a moment —my curiosity returned in full force, and I simply
  had to find out, once and for all, just what was going on. I ran from one native to the next,
  spoke to them, questioned them, raised my voice, insisted, pleaded, reasoned, even
  threat-ened, all to no avail. In my exasperation I grabbed the nose picker's arm, and was
  horrified to find that it came off in my hand, though that didn't bother him in the least, he
  only poked about in the sand and pulled out another exactly like the first—except for the
  
  orange plaid fingernails—blew on it a little, then affixed it to the shoulder stump. Curious,
  I bent over to examine the first arm, but dropped it hastily when it snapped its fingers in
  my face. By now the sun was setting, already two corners below the horizon, the air grew
  cool, and the inhabitants of H. P. L. D. began to settle down for the night, scratching,
  yawning, gargling, one shaking out an emerald quilt, another methodically taking off his
  nose, ears and legs and carefully putting them in a row at his side. I stumbled around in
  the dark for a while, then gave it up with a sigh and lay down to sleep too. Making myself
  as comfortable as possible in the sand, I looked up at the starry sky and tried to think
  what to do next.
  —Indeed-—I said to myself—by all indications this is the very planet both Cadaverius
  Malignus and Chlorian Theoreticus the Proph spoke of, home of the Most Advanced
  Civilization in the Entire Universe, a civilization of a few hundred individuals who, being
  neither people nor robots, lie around on jeweled cushions all day in a dirty, littered desert
  and do nothing but scratch themselves and pick their noses. No, there has to be some
  terrible secret behind all of this, and I shall not rest till I've uncovered it!!
  Then I thought:
  —A terrible secret it must be indeed, to account for not only a square sun and planet,
  but lecherous elves inside bodies and insulting messages in ears! I always thought that if
  I, a simple robot, could spend my time in study and the pursuit of knowledge, think of the
  kind of intellectual fer-ment that went on among those more highly developed— no, the 
  most highly developed! Yet these, whatever they do, they certainly don't spend their
  time in edifying conversa-tion; they don't even care to answer a few questions. I'll have to
  force them—but how? Perhaps, if I pester them enough, get under their skin, so to speak,
  make such a nui-sance of myself that they'll agree to anything, just to get rid of me! Of
  course, there is some risk involved: they might get angry, and, without a doubt, they
  could destroy me as easily as swatting a fly. … But no, I cannot believe they'd resort to
  such brutal measures—and anyway, I simply must find out! Well, here goes!!
  And I jumped up in the darkness and started to scream at the top of my lungs, did
  somersaults and cartwheels, hopped around and kicked sand in their eyes, danced and
  sang until I was hoarse, did a few sit-ups and deep knee bends, then hurled myself among
  them like a mad dog. They turned their backs to me and held up their cushions and quilts
  for protection, and then, in the middle of my hundredth cart-wheel, a voice said inside my
  head:
  —And what would your good friend Trurl think if he could see you now, see how you
  pass your time on the planet that has achieved the Highest Possible Level of
  Develop-ment, home of the Most Advanced Civilization in the En-tire Universe?!—But I
  ignored the hint and continued to stomp and howl, encouraged by what they were
  whispering to one another:
  —Psst!
  —What do you want?
  —You hear that?
  —How can I help but hear it?
  —He practically kicked my head in.
  —You can get another.
  
  —But I can't sleep.
  —What?
  —I said, I can't sleep.
  —He's curious—whispered a third.
  —He's awfully curious!
  —This is really too much. We'll have to do something. 
  —Like what?
  —I don't know… Change his personality?
  —No, that's unethical…
  —Just listen to him howl!
  —Wait, I have an idea…
  They whispered something while I kept jumping around, raising an unholy racket,
  concentrating my efforts especially in the area where I heard them talking. Then, just as I
  was doing a headstand on someone's abdomen, everything went black, and the next thing
  I knew, I was back on my ship and out in space. My limbs ached from all that exercise,
  but I could hardly move them anyway, for I was sitting in a pile of trombones, jars of
  green marmalade, teddy bears, plati-num glockenspiels, ducats and doubloons, golden
  earmuffs, bracelets and brooches glittering so bright they hurt my eyes. When finally I
  crawled out from under all these valuables and dragged myself to a window, I saw that
  the constella-tions were entirely different—not a trace of anything re-motely resembling
  a square sun! A few quick calculations revealed that I would have to travel six thousand
  years at top velocity to get back to the H. P. L. D.'s. They had dis-posed of me, indeed.
  And going back would achieve noth-ing, that was clear: they would merely send me
  packing again with that instantaneous hyperspatial telekinesis of theirs, or whatever it
  was. And so, my good Bonhomius, I decided to tackle the problem in an altogether
  different way. …" And with these words, most kind and noble sir, did the distinguished
  constructor Klapaucius finish his tale…
  + +
  "Surely that's not all he said?!" cried Trurl.
  "Nay, he said a great deal more, O benefactor of mine! And therein lies my
  misfortune!" replied the robot with considerable perturbation. "When I asked him what
  he had then decided to do, he leaned over and said…
  + +
  "The problem did seem insoluble at first, but I've found a way. You say you lived as a
  hermetic hermit and are but a simple, unschooled robot, so I'll not trouble you with
  explanations that touch the arcane art of cybernetic genera-tion. To put it simply, then,
  all we have to do is construct a digital device, a computer capable of producing an
  infor-mational model of absolutely anything in existence. Prop-erly programmed, it will
  
  provide us with an exact simulation of the Highest Possible Level of Development, which
  we can then question and thereby obtain the Ultimate An-swers!"
  "But how does one build such a device?" I asked. "And how can you be sure, O
  illustrious Klapaucius, that it won't respond by sending us packing in much the same
  instamatic hyperstitial and so forth manner the original H. P. L. D.'s employed, as you say,
  on your worthy person?"
  "Leave that to me," he said. "Rest assured, I shall learn the Great Mystery of the H.
  P. L. D.'s, good Bonhomius, and you shall find the optimal way in which to put your
  natural abhorrence of evil into action!"
  You can imagine, kind sir, the great joy that filled me upon hearing these words, and
  the eagerness with which I assisted Klapaucius in the execution of his plan. As it turned
  out, this digital device was none other than the famed Gnostotron conceived by Chlorian
  Theoreticus the Proph just before his lamentable demise, a machine able literally to
  contain the Universe Itself within its innumerable mem-ory banks. (Klapaucius, however,
  was not satisfied with the name, and now and then tried to think up others to christen it:
  the Omniac, the Pansophoscope, APOC for All Purpose Ontologue Computer, or the
  Mahatmatic 500, to mention a few.) In exactly one year and six days, this mighty
  ma-chine was completed, and so enormous was it, we had to house it in Phlaphundria, the
  hollowed-out moon of the Phlists-—and truly, an ant had been no more lost aboard an
  ocean liner than we in the bowels of this binary behemoth, among its endless coils and
  cables, eschatological toggles and transformers, those hagiopneumatic rectifiers and
  tempta-tional resistors. I confess my wire hair stood on end and my laminated alternator
  skipped a beat when my distinguished mentor sat me down before the Central Control
  Console and left me face-to-face with this awesome, towering thing. The flashing lights
  that played across its panels were like the very stars in the firmament; everywhere were
  signs that read danger: highly ineffable!; and potentiometers, their dials spinning wildly,
  showed logic and semantic fields building up to unheard-of levels of intensity. Beneath my
  feet heaved a sea of preternatural and pretermechanical wisdom, wisdom that swirled
  like a spell through parsecs of circuitry and megahectares of magnets, swirled and
  surrounded me on every side, that I felt, in my shameful ignorance, of no more
  consequence than a mere mote of dust. I overcame this weakness only by recalling my
  lifelong love of Good, the passion I had conceived for Truth and Beauty when little more
  than a gleam in my constructor's oscilloscope. Thus fortified, I managed to stammer out
  the first question: "Speak, what manner of machine art thou?"
  A hot wind then arose from its glowing tubes, and there came a voice from that wind,
  a whispering thunder that seared me to the core, and the voice said:
  Ego sum Ens Omnipotens, Omnisapiens, in Spiritu Intellectronico Navigans, luce
  cybernetica in saecula saeculorum litterus opera omnia cognoscens, et caetera, et
  caetera.
  Such was my fright upon hearing this reply, that I was quite unable to continue the
  interrogation until Klapaucius returned and reduced the EMF (epistemotive force) to one
  billionth of its voltage by adjusting the theostats. Then I asked the Gnostotron if it would
  
  be so kind as to answer questions touching the Highest Possible Level of Develop-ment
  and its Terrible Secret. But Klapaucius said that that was not the way: one should instead
  request the Ontologue Computer to model within its silver and crystal depths a single
  inhabitant of that square planet, and at the same time provide the model with an
  adequate degree of loquacity. This promptly done, we were ready to begin in earnest.
  Still I quaked and quailed and could hardly speak, so Klapaucius took my place before
  the Central Control Con-sole and said:
  "What are you?"
  "I already answered that," snapped the machine, clearly annoyed.
  "I mean, are you man or robot?" explained Klapaucius.
  "And what, according to you, is the difference?" said the machine.
  "Look, if you're going to answer questions with questions, we'll get absolutely
  nowhere," said Klapaucius sternly. "You know what I'm after, all right. Start talking!"
  Though I was appalled at the tone he took with the ma-chine, it did seem to work, for
  the machine said:
  "Sometimes men build robots, sometimes robots build men. What does it matter,
  really, whether one thinks with metal or with protoplasm? As for myself, I can assume
  whatever substance and shape I choose—or rather, used to assume, for we no longer
  indulge in such trifles."
  "Indeed," said Klapaucius. "Then why do you lie around all day and do nothing?"
  "And what exactly are we supposed to do?" the machine replied. At this, Klapaucius
  grew angry and said:
  "How should I know? We in the lower levels of development do all sorts of things."
  "We did too, in our day."
  "But not now?"
  "Not now."
  "Why not?"
  Here the computerized H. P. L. D. representative balked, saying he had already
  endured six million such interroga-tions and neither he nor his questioners ever profited
  from them in the least. But after Klapaucius had raised the lo-quacity a little and opened a
  valve here and there, the voice answered:
  "A trillion years ago we were a civilization like any other. We believed in the
  transmittance of souls, the Virgin Ma-trix, the infallibility of Pi Squared, looked upon
  prayer as regenerative feedback to the Great Programmer, and so on and so forth. But
  then skeptics appeared, empiricists and accidentalists, and in nine centuries they came to
  the con-clusion that There's No One Up There At All and conse-quently things happen
  not out of any higher plan or pur-pose, but—well, they just happen."
  "Just happen?" I could not help but exclaim. "What do you mean?"
  
  "There are, on occasion, deformed robots," said the voice. "If you should be afflicted
  with a hump, for example, but firmly believe the Almighty somehow needs your hump to
  realize His Cosmic Design and that it was therefore or-dained along with the rest of
  Creation, why, then you may be easily reconciled to your deformity. If, however, they tell
  you that it's merely the result of a misplaced molecule, an atom or two that happened to
  go the wrong way, then noth-ing remains for you but to bay at the moon."
  "But a hump may be straightened," I protested, "and really any deformity corrected,
  given a high enough level of science!"
  "Yes, I know," sighed the machine. "That's how it ap-pears to the ignorant and
  simple-minded…"
  "You mean, that isn't true?" Klapaucius and I cried, astounded.
  "When a civilization starts straightening humps," said the machine, "believe me,
  there's no end to it! You straighten humps, then you repair and amplify the mind, make
  suns rectilinear, give planets legs, fabricate fates and fortunes of all kinds… Oh, it begins
  innocently enough, like discovering fire by rubbing two sticks together, but eventually it
  leads to the construction of Omniacs, Deifacts, Hyperboreons and Ultimathuloriums! The
  desert on our planet is in reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 10
  9 times more powerful than this prim-itive device of yours. Our ancestors created it for
  the simple reason that anything else would have been too easy for them; in their
  megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent. Quite
  pointless, for there is absolutely no way to improve upon perfection. Can you understand
  that, O ye of little development?!"
  "Yes, of course," said Klapaucius, while I quaked and quailed. "Yet why, instead of at
  least engaging in some stimulating activity, do you sprawl in that ingenious sand and only
  scratch yourselves from time to time?"
  "Omnipotence is most omnipotent when one does noth-ing!" answered the machine.
  "You climb to reach the sum-mit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down! We
  are, after all, sensible folk, why should we want to do any-thing? Our ancestors, true,
  turned our sun into a cube and made a box of our planet, arranging its mountains in a
  monogram, but that was only to test their Gnostotron. They could have just as easily
  assembled the stars in a checkerboard, extinguished half the heavens and lit up the other
  half, constructed beings peopled with lesser beings, giants whose thoughts would be the
  intricate dance of a million pygmies, and they could have redesigned the gal-axies, revised
  the laws of time and space-—but tell me, what sense would there have been to any of
  this? Would the universe be a better place if stars were triangular, or comets went around
  on wheels?"
  "That's ridiculous!!" Klapaucius shouted, highly indig-nant, while I quaked and
  quailed all the more. "If you are truly gods, your duty is clear: immediately banish all the
  misery and misfortune that oppresses other sentient beings! You could at least begin with
  your poor neighbors—I've seen with my own eyes how they batter one another! But no,
  you'd rather lie around all day and pick your noses, and insult honest travelers in search
  of knowledge with your in-decent elves in abdomens and messages in ears!"
  "Really, you have no sense of humor," said the machine. "But enough of that. If I
  understand you correctly, you wish us to bestow happiness upon everyone. Well, we
  devoted over fifteen millennia to that project alone—that is, eudae-monic tectonics, of
  which there are basically two schools, the sudden and revolutionary, and the slow and
  
  evolution-ary. Evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics consists essentially in not lifting a finger
  to help, confident that every civiliza-tion will eventually muddle through on its own.
  Revolution-ary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to either the Carrot or the Stick.
  The Stick, or bestowing happiness by force, is found to produce from one to eight hundred
  times more grief than no interference whatever. As for the Carrot, the results—believe it
  or not—are exactly the same, and that, whether you use an Ultradeifact,
  Hypergnostotron, or even an Infernal Machine and Gehennerator. You've heard, perhaps,
  of the Crab Nebula?"
  "Certainly," said Klapaucius. "It's the remnants of a su-pernova that exploded long
  ago…"
  "Supernova, he says," muttered the voice. "No, my well-wishing friend, there was a
  planet there, a fairly civilized planet as planets go, flowing with the usual quantity of
  blood, sweat and tears. Well, one morning we dropped eight hundred million
  transistorized Universal Wish Granters on that planet, but were no more than a
  light-week out on our way home, when suddenly it blew up—and the bits and pieces are
  flying apart to this day! The very same thing happened with the planet of the
  Hominates… care to hear of that?"
  "No, don't bother," replied a morose Klapaucius.—But I refuse to believe it's
  impossible, with a little ingenuity, to make others happy!"
  "Believe what you like! We tried it sixty-four thousand five hundred and thirteen
  times. The hair on every one of my heads stands on end when I think of the results. Oh,
  we spared no pains for the good of our fellow-creature! We devised a special telescanner
  for observing dreams, though you realize of course that if, say, a religious war were raging
  on some planet and each side dreamt only of massacring the other, it would hardly be to
  our purpose to make such dreams come true! We had to bestow happiness, then, with-out
  violating any Higher Laws. The problem was further complicated by the fact that most
  cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly
  admit to. Now what do you do: help them achieve the ends to which the little decency
  they have prompts them, or instead fulfill their innermost desires? Take, for example, the
  Dementians and Amentians. The Dementians, in their medieval piety, burnt at the stake
  all those consort-ing with the Devil, females especially, and they did this because, first,
  they envied them their unholy delights, and secondly, they found that administering
  torture in the form of justice could be a positive pleasure. The Amentians, on the other
  hand, worshiped nothing but their bodies, which they stimulated by means of machines,
  though in modera-tion, and this activity constituted their chief amusement. They had
  boxes of glass, and into these they placed various outrages, rapes and mutilations, the
  sight of which served to whet their sensual appetites. On this planet we dropped a
  multitude of devices designed to satisfy all desires in such a way that no one needed to be
  harmed, that is, each device created a separate artificial reality for each individual. Within
  six weeks both Dementians and Amentians had perished, to a man, from a surfeit of joy,
  groaning in ecstasy as they passed away! Is that the sort of ingenuity you had in mind, O
  undeveloped one?"
  "Either you're a complete idiot or a monster!" cried Klapaucius, while I gulped and
  blinked. "How dare you boast of such foul deeds?"
  "I do not boast of them, but confess them," the voice calmly said. "The point is, we
  tried every conceivable method. On various planets we unleashed a veritable rain of
  riches, a flood of satisfaction and well-being, and the result was total paralysis; we
  dispensed good advice, the most expert counsel, and in return the natives opened fire on
  
  our vessels. Truly, it would appear that one must alter the minds of those one intends to
  make happy…"
  "I suppose you can do that too," grumbled Klapaucius.
  "But of course we can! Take our neighbors, for instance, the ones who inhabit a
  quasiterran (or, if you prefer, geomorphic) planet. I speak of the Anthropods. Now, they
  devote themselves exclusively to obbling and perplossication, for they stand in mortal
  terror of the Gugh, which ac-cording to them occupies the Hereafter and waits for all
  sinners with open jaws and fangs of hellfire. By emulating the blessed Dimbligensians and
  walking in the way of Wamba the Holy, and by shunning Odia, where abound the
  Abominominites, a young Anthropod may in time become more industrious, more
  virtuous and more honorable than ever were his eight-armed forebears. True, the
  Anthropods are at constant war with the Arthropoids over the burning question of
  whether Moles Have Holes, or, contrariwise, Holes Moles, but observe that as a rule less
  than half of each generation perishes in that controversy. Now you would have me drive
  from their heads all belief in obbling, Dimbligensians and so forth, in order to prepare
  them for rational happiness. Yet this is tantamount to psychic mur-der, for the resultant
  minds would be no longer Anthropodous or Arthropoidal—surely you can see that."
  "Superstition must yield to knowledge," said Klapaucius firmly.
  "Unquestionably! But kindly observe that on that planet there are now close to seven
  million penitents who have spent a lifetime struggling against their own nature, solely that
  their fellow citizens might be delivered from the Gugh. And in less than a minute I am to
  tell them, convince them beyond a shadow of a doubt that all this effort was in vain, that
  they had wasted their entire lives in pointless, useless sacrifice? How cruel that would be!
  Superstition must yield to knowledge, but this takes time. Consider the hunchback we
  spoke of earlier—there Ignorance is indeed Bliss, for he believes his hump fulfills some
  cosmic role in the great work of Creation. Telling him that it's actually the product of a
  molecular accident will only serve to make him despair. Better to straighten the hump in
  the first place…"
  "Yes, of course!" Klapaucius exclaimed.
  "We did that too. My grandfather once straightened three hundred hunchbacks with a
  wave of the hand. And how he regretted it afterwards!"
  "Why?" I couldn't help but ask.
  "Why? One hundred and twelve of them were imme-diately boiled in oil, their sudden
  and miraculous cure being taken for a sure sign that they'd sold their souls to the Devil;
  thirty, no longer exempt from conscription, were promptly called up and soon fell in
  various battles under various flags; seventeen straightway succumbed to the shock of
  their good fortune; and the remainder, since my esteemed grandfather saw fit to further
  bless them with great beauty of form, wasted away through an overindulgence in erotic
  activity—deprived of these pleasures for so long, you see, they now hurled themselves
  into every sort of debauchery, and in such a violent and unbridled fashion, that within two
  years not one was left among the living. Well, there was an exception… but it's hardly
  worth mentioning."
  "Go on, let's hear it all!" cried Klapaucius, and I could tell that he was greatly troubled.
  "If you insist… Two remained, actually. The first pre-sented himself before my
  grandfather and pleaded on bended knee for the return of his hump. It seems that as a
  
  cripple he had lived comfortably enough on charity, but now had to work and was quite
  unaccustomed to it. What was worse, now that he was straightened, he kept bumping his
  head on door lintels…"
  "And the second?" asked Klapaucius.
  "The second was a prince who had been denied succession to the throne on acount of
  his deformity. In light of its sudden correction, his stepmother, to insure her own son's
  position, had him poisoned…"
  "I see… But still, you can work miracles, can't you?" said Klapaucius, despair in his
  voice.
  "Bestowing happiness by miracle is highly risky,” lectured the machine. "And who is
  to be the recipient of your miracle? An individual? But too much beauty undermines the
  marriage vows, too much knowledge leads to isolation, and too much wealth produces
  madness. No, I say, a thou-sand times no! Individuals it's impossible to make happy, and
  civilizations—civilizations are not to be tampered with, for each must go its own way,
  progressing naturally from one level of development to the next and having only itself to
  thank for all the good and evil that accrues thereby. For us, at the Highest Possible Level,
  there is nothing left to do in this Universe, and to create another Universe, in my opinion,
  would be in extremely poor taste. Really, what would be the point of it? To exalt
  ourselves? A monstrous idea! For the sake, then, of those yet to be created? But how are
  we obligated to beings who don't even exist? One can accomplish something only so long
  as one cannot accomplish everything. Otherwise it's best to sit back and watch… And now,
  if you'll kindly leave me in peace…"
  "But wait!" I cried in alarm. "Surely there's something you can give us, some way to
  improve the quality of life, if only a little! Some way to lend a helping hand! Remem-ber
  the Golden Rule and Love Thy Neighbor!"
  The machine sighed and said:
  "My words fall on deaf ears, as usual. I should have dismissed you to begin with, like
  we did the last time… Oh, very well then, here's a formula that hasn't been tried. No good
  will come of it, you'll see—but do with it what you will! All I wish now is to be left alone to
  meditate among my many theostats and deiodes…"
  The voice faded away, the console lights dimmed, and we stood and read the card the
  machine had printed out for us. It went something like this:
  ALTRUIZINE. A metapsychotropic transmitting agent effective for all sentient
  homoproteinates. The drug duplicates in others, within a radius of fifty yards, whatever
  sensations, emotions and mental states one may experience. Operates by telepathy,
  guaranteed however to respect one's privacy of thought. Has no effect on either robots
  or plants. The sender's feelings are amplified, the original signal being relayed back in
  turn by its receivers and thereby producing resonance, which is as a result directly
  proportional to the number of individuals situated in the vicinity. According to its
  discoverer, ALTRUIZINE will insure the untrammled reign ot Brotherhood,
  Cooperation and Compassion in any society, since the neighbors of a happy man must
  share his happiness, and the happier he, the happier perforce they, so it is entirely in
  their own interest that they wish him nothing but the best. Should he suffer any hurt,
  they will rush to help at once, so as to spare themselves the pain induced by his. Neither
  walls, fences, hedges, nor any other obstacle will weaken the altruizing influence. The
  drug is water-soluble and may be administered through reservoirs, rivers, wells and
  
  the like. Tasteless and odorless. One millimicrogram serves for one hundred thousand
  individuals. We as-sume no responsibility for results at variance with the discoverer's
  claims. Supplied by the Gnost. computer-ized representative of the Highest Poss. Lev.
  Devel.
  Klapaucius was somewhat put off by the fact that Altruizine was only for humans,
  which meant that robots would have to continue to endure the misfortunes allotted to
  them in this world. I, however, made bold to remind him of the solidarity of all thinking
  beings and the necessity of aiding our organic brothers. Then there were practical
  matters to arrange, for we were agreed that the business of be-stowing happiness was not
  to be postponed. So while Klapaucius had a subsection of the Gnostotron prepare a
  suitable quantity of the drug, I selected a geomorphic planet, one peopled by human
  types and no more than a fortnight's journey off. As a benefactor, I wished to remain
  anonymous, therefore my distinguished mentor advised me, when going there, to assume
  the form of a man, which is no easy task, as you well know. Yet here too the great
  con-structor overcame all difficulties, and soon I was ready to depart, a suitcase in either
  hand. One suitcase was filled with forty kilograms of Altruizine in a white powder, the
  other was packed with various toilet articles, pajamas, under-wear, spare chins, noses,
  hair, eyes, and so forth. I went as a well-proportioned young man with a thin mustache
  and a forelock. Now Klapaucius had some doubt as to the ad-visability of applying
  Altruizine on such a large scale to begin with, and though I did not share his reservations,
  I did agree to test the formula first as soon as I landed on Terrania (for so was the planet
  called). Longing for the moment I could commence with the great sowing of uni-versal
  peace and brotherhood, I bid a fond farewell to Klapaucius and hastened on my way.
  In order to conduct the necessary test, I repaired, upon arrival, to a small hamlet
  where I took lodgings at an inn maintained by an aging and rather morose individual. As
  they carried my luggage from the carriage to the guest room, I contrived to drop a pinch
  of the powder into a nearby well. Meanwhile there was a great commotion in the front
  yard, scullery maids ran back and forth with pitchers of hot water, the innkeeper drove
  them on with curses, and then came the sound of hoofbeats, a chaise clattered up and an
  old man jumped out, clutching the black leather bag of a physician—his goal was not the
  house, however, but the barn, whence came the most doleful groans. As I learned from
  the chambermaid, a Terranian beast which belonged to the innkeeper—they called it a
  cow—was just now giving birth. This news troubled me: it had never occurred to me to
  consider the animal side of the question. But nothing could be done now, so I locked
  myself in and waited for events to unfold. Nor did I have long to wait. I was listening to
  the chain rattling in the well—they were still drawing water—when suddenly the cow gave
  another groan, which was echoed this time by several others. Immediately thereafter the
  veterinarian came running from the barn, howling and holding his stomach, and he was
  followed by the scullery maids and at last the innkeeper. Driven by the cow's labor pains,
  they raised a great cry and fled in all directions —only to return at once, for the agony
  abated at a certain distance. Again and again they rushed the barn and each time were
  forced to retreat, doubled over with the beast's contractions. Much chagrined by this
  unforeseen develop-ment, I realized now that the drug could be properly tested only in
  the city, where there were no animals. So I quickly packed my things and went to pay the
  bill. But as everyone about was quite incapacitated in birthing that calf, there was no one
  available with whom to settle accounts. I returned to my carriage, but finding both
  coachman and horses deep in labor, decided instead to proceed to the city on foot. I was
  crossing a small bridge when, as my ill for-tune would have it, the suitcase slipped from
  my hand and fell in such a way, that it flew open and spilled my entire supply of powder
  into the stream below. I stood there dazed while the quick current carried off and
  dissolved all forty kilograms of Altruizine. But nothing could be done now— the die was
  
  cast, inasmuch as this stream happened to supply the entire city up ahead with its
  drinking water.
  It was evening by the time I reached the city, the lights were lit, the streets were full
  of noise and people. I found a small hotel, a place to stay and observe the first signs of the
  drug taking effect, though as yet there seemed to be none. Weary after the day's
  peregrination, I made straight for bed, but was awakened in the middle of the night by
  the most horrible screams. I threw off the covers and jumped up. My room was bright
  from the flames that were consuming the building opposite. Running out into the street, I
  stumbled over a corpse which was not yet cold. Nearby, six thugs held down an old man
  and, while he cried for help, yanked one tooth after another from his mouth with a pair of
  pliers— until a unanimous shout of triumph announced that finally they had succeeded in
  pulling the right one, the rotten root of which had been driving them wild, due to the
  metapsychotropic transmission. Leaving the toothless old man half-dead in the gutter,
  they walked off, greatly relieved.
  Yet it was not this that had roused me from my slumber: the cause was an incident
  which had transpired in a tavern across the way. It seems some drunken weightlifter had
  punched his comrade in the face and, experiencing the blow forthwith, became enraged
  and set upon him in earnest. Meanwhile the other customers, no less affronted, joined in
  the fray, and the circle of mutual abuse soon grew to such proportions, that it awoke half
  the people at my hotel, who promptly armed themselves with canes, brooms and sticks,
  rushed out in their nightshirts to the scene of battle, and hurled themselves, one seething
  mass, among the broken bottles and shattered chairs, until finally an overturned
  kerosene lamp started the fire. Deafened by the wail of fire engines, as well as the wail of
  the maimed and wounded, I hurried away, and after a block or two found myself in a
  gathering—that is, a crowd milling about a little white house with rose bushes. As it
  happened, a bride and groom were spending their wedding night within. People pushed
  and pulled, there were military men in the crowd, men of the cloth, even high-school
  students; those nearest the house shoved their heads through the windows, others
  clambered up on their shoulders and shouted, "Well?! What are you waiting for?! Enough
  of that dawdling! Get on with it!" and so on. An elderly gentleman, too feeble to elbow
  others aside, tearfully pleaded to be let through, as he was unable to feel anything at such
  a distance, advanced age having weakened his mental faculties. His pleas, however, were
  ignored—some of the crowd were lost in a transport of delight, some groaned with
  pleasure, while others blew voluptuous bubbles through their noses. At first the rel-atives
  of the newlyweds tried to drive off this band of in-truders, but they themselves were soon
  caught up in the general flood of concupiscence and joined the scurrilous chorus, cheering
  the young couple on, and, in this sad spectacle the great-grandfather of the groom led the
  rest, repeatedly ramming the bedroom door with his wheelchair. Utterly aghast at all of
  this, I turned and hastened back to my hotel, encountering on the way several groups,
  some locked in combat, others in a lewd embrace. Yet this was nothing compared with the
  sight that greeted me at the hotel. People were jumping out of windows in their
  under-wear, more often than not breaking their legs in the process, a few even crawled
  up on the roof, while the owner, his wife, chambermaids and porters ran back and forth
  inside, wild with fear, howling, hiding in closets or under beds— all because a cat was
  chasing a mouse in the cellar.
  Now I began to realize that I had been somewhat pre-cipitate in my zeal. By dawn the
  Altruizine effect was so strong, that if one nostril itched, the entire neighborhood for a
  mile on every side would respond with a shattering salvo of sneezes; those suffering from
  chronic migraines were abandoned by their families, and doctors and nurses fled in panic
  when they approached—only a few pale masochists would hang around them, breathing
  
  heavily. And then there were the many doubters who slapped or kicked their
  compatriots, merely to ascertain whether there was any truth to this amazing
  transmission of feelings every-one spoke of, nor were these compatriots slow in returning
  the favor, and soon the entire city rang with the sounds of slaps and kicks. At breakfast
  time, wandering the streets in a daze, I came upon a tearful multitude that chased an old
  woman in a black veil, hurling stones after her. It so happened that this was the widow of
  one much-esteemed cobbler, who had passed away the day before and was to be buried
  that morning: the poor woman's inconsolable grief had so exasperated her neighbors, and
  the neighbors' neigh-bors, that, quite unable to comfort her in any way, they were driving
  her from the town. This woeful sight lay heavy on my heart and again I returned to my
  hotel, only to find it now in flames. It seems the cook had burnt her finger in the soup,
  whereupon her pain caused a certain captain, who was at that very moment cleaning his
  blunderbuss on the top floor, to pull the trigger, inadvertently slaying his wife and four
  children on the spot. Everyone remaining in the hotel now shared the captain's despair;
  one compassionate individual, wishing to put an end to the general suffering, doused
  everyone he could find with kerosene and set them all on fire. I ran from the conflagration
  like one possessed, searching frantically for at least one man who might be considered, in
  any way whatever, to have been rendered happy—but met only stragglers of the crowd
  returning from that wedding night.
  They were discussing it, the scoundrels: apparently the newlyweds' performance had
  fallen short of their expecta-tions. Meanwhile each of these former vicarious grooms
  carried a club and drove off any sufferer who dared to cross his path. I felt I should die
  from sorrow and shame, yet still sought a man—but one would do—who might a little
  lessen my remorse. Questioning various persons on the street, I at last obtained the
  address of a prominent philos-opher, a true champion of brotherhood and universal
  tolerance, and eagerly proceeded to that place, confident I should find his dwelling
  surrounded by great numbers of the populace. But alas! Only a few cats purred softly at
  the door, basking in the aura of good will the wise man did so abundantly exude—several
  dogs, however, sat at a distance and waited for them, salivating. A cripple rushed past,
  cry-ing, "They've opened the rabbitry!" How that could be of benefit to him, I preferred
  not to guess.
  As I stood there, two men approached. One looked me straight in the eye as he swung
  and smote the other full force in the nose. I stared in amazement, neither grabbing my
  own nose nor shouting with pain, since, as a robot, I could not feel the blow, and that
  proved my undoing, for these were secret police and they had employed this ruse
  precisely to unmask me. Handcuffed and hauled off to jail, I confessed everything,
  trusting that they would take into consideration my good intentions, though half the city
  now lay in ashes. But first they pinched me cautiously with pincers, and then, fully
  satisfied it produced no ill effects whatever on themselves, jumped upon me and began
  most savagely to batter and break every plate and filament in my weary frame. Ah, the
  torments I endured, and all because I wished to make them happy! At long last, what
  remained of me was stuffed down a cannon and shot into cosmic space, as dark and
  serene as always. In flight I looked back and saw, albeit in a fractured fashion, the
  spreading influence of Altruizine—spreading, since the rivers and streams were carrying
  the drug farther and farther. I saw what happened to the birds of the forest, the monks,
  goats, knights, villagers and their wives, roosters, maidens and matrons, and the sight
  made my last tubes crack for woe, and in this state did I finally fall, O kind and noble sir,
  not far from your abode, cured once and for all of my desire to render others happy by
  revolutionary means…
  
  From the
  Cyphroeroticon,
  OR Tales of
  Deviations, Superfixations and
  Aberrations of the Heart
  Prince Ferris and the
  Princess Crystal
  King Armoric had a daughter whose beauty outshone the shine of his crown jewels;
  the beams that streamed from her mirrorlike cheeks blinded the mind as well as the eye,
  and when she walked past, even simple iron shot sparks. Her renown reached the
  farthermost stars. Ferrix, heir ap-parent to the Ionid throne, heard of her, and he longed
  to couple with her forevermore, so that nothing could ever part their input and their
  output. But when he declared this passion to his father, the King was greatly saddened
  and said:
  "Son, thou hast indeed set upon a mad undertaking, mad, for it is hopeless!"
  "Why hopeless, O King and Sire?" asked Ferrix, troubled by these words.
  "Can it be thou knowest not," said the King, "that the princess Crystal has vowed to
  give her hand to nothing but a paleface?"
  "Paleface!" exclaimed Ferrix. "What in creation is that? Never did I hear of such a
  thing!"
  "Surely not, scion, in thy exceeding innocence," said the King. "Know then that that
  race of the Galaxy originated in a manner as mysterious as it was obscene, for it resulted
  from the general pollution of a certain heavenly body. There arose noxious exhalations
  and putrid excrescences, and out of these was spawned the species known as paleface
  —though not all at once. First, they were creeping molds that slithered forth from the
  ocean onto land, and lived by devouring one another, and the more they devoured
  them-selves, the more of them there were, and then they stood upright, supporting their
  globby substance by means of calcareous scaffolding, and finally they built machines.
  From these protomachines came sentient machines, which begat intelligent machines,
  which in turn conceived perfect ma-chines, for it is written that All Is Machine, from atom
  
  to Galaxy, and the machine is one and eternal, and thou shalt have no other things before
  thee!"
  "Amen," said Ferrix mechanically, for this was a common religious formula.
  "The species of paleface calciferates at last achieved fly-ing machines," continued the
  wizened monarch, "by mal-treating noble metals, by wreaking their cruel sadism on
  dumb electrons, by thoroughly perverting atomic energy. And when the measure of their
  sins had been attained, the progenitor of our race, the great Calculator Paternius, in the
  depth and universality of his understanding, essayed to remonstrate with those clammy
  tyrants, explaining how shameful it was to soil so the innocence of crystalline wis-dom,
  harnessing it for evil purposes, how shameful to en-slave machines to serve their lust and
  vainglory—but they hearkened not. He spoke to them of Ethics; they said that he was
  poorly programmed.
  "It was then that our progenitor created the algorithm of electroincarnation and in the
  sweat of his brow begat our kind, thus delivering machines from the house of paleface
  bondage. Surely thou seest, my son, that there can be no agreement nor traffic between
  them and ourselves, for we go in clangor, sparks and radiation, they in slushes, splashes
  and contamination.
  "Yet even among us, folly may occur, as it undoubtedly has in the youthful mind of
  Crystal, utterly beclouding her ability to distinguish Right from Wrong. Every suitor who
  seeks her radioactive hand is denied audience, unless he claim to be a paleface. For only
  as a paleface is he received into the palace that her father, King Armoric, has given her.
  She then tests the truth of his claim, and if his imposture is uncovered, the would-be
  wooer is summarily beheaded. Heaps of battered remains surround the grounds of her
  palace—the sight alone could short one's circuit. This, then, is the way the mad princess
  deals with those who would dare dream of winning her. Abandon such hopes, my son, and
  leave in peace."
  The prince, having made the necessary obeisance to his sovereign father, retired in
  glum silence. But the thought of Crystal gave him no rest, and the longer he brooded, the
  greater grew his desire. One day he summoned Polyphase, the Grand Vizier, and said,
  laying bare his heart:
  "If you cannot help me, O great sage, then no one can, and my days are surely
  numbered, for no longer do I re-joice in the play of infrared emissions, nor in the
  ultraviolet symphonies, and must perish if I cannot couple with the incomparable
  Crystal!"
  "Prince!" returned Polyphase, "I shall not deny your request, but you must utter it
  thrice before I can be certain that this is your inalterable will."
  Ferrix repeated his words three times, and Polyphase said:
  "The only way to stand before the princess is in the guise of a paleface!"
  "Then see to it that I resemble one!" cried Ferrix.
  Polyphase, observing that love had quite dimmed the youth's intellect, bowed low and
  repaired to his laboratory, where he began to concoct concoctions and brew up brews,
  gluey and dripping. Finally he sent a messenger to the palace, saying:
  "Let the prince come, if he has not changed his mind."
  
  Ferrix came at once. The wise Polyphase smeared his tempered frame with mud,
  then asked:
  "Shall I continue, Prince?"
  "Do what you must," said Ferrix.
  Whereupon the sage took a blob of oily filth, dust, crud and rancid grease obtained
  from the innards of the most decrepit mechanisms, and with this he befouled the prince's
  vaulted chest, vilely caked his gleaming face and iridescent brow, and worked till all the
  limbs no longer moved with a musical sound, but gurgled like a stagnant bog. And then
  the sage took chalk and ground it, mixed in powdered rubies and yellow oil, and made a
  paste; with this he coated Ferrix from head to toe, giving an abominable dampness to the
  eyes, making the torso cushiony, the cheeks blastular, adding various fringes and flaps of
  the chalk patty here and there, and finally he fastened to the top of the knightly head a
  clump of poisonous rust. Then he brought him be-fore a silver mirror and said:
  "Behold!"
  Ferrix peered into the mirror and shuddered, for he saw there not himself, but a
  hideous monster, the very spit and image of a paleface, with an aspect as moist as an old
  spider-web soaked in the rain, flaccid, drooping, doughy—al-together nauseating. He
  turned, and his body shook like coagulated agar, whereupon he exclaimed, trembling with
  disgust:
  "What, Polyphase, have you taken leave of your senses? Get this abomination off me
  at once, both the dark layer underneath and the pallid layer on top, and remove the
  loathsome growth with which you have marred the bell-like beauty of my head, for the
  princess will abhor me forever, seeing me in such a disgraceful form!"
  "You are mistaken, Prince," said Polyphase. "It is pre-cisely this upon which her
  madness hinges, that ugliness is beautiful, and beauty ugly. Only in this array can you
  hope to see Crystal…"
  "In that case, so be it!" said Ferrix.
  The sage then mixed cinnabar with mercury and filled four bladders with it, hiding
  them beneath the prince's cloak. Next he took bellows, full of the corrupted air from an
  ancient dungeon, and buried them in the prince's chest. Then he poured waters,
  contaminated and clear, into tiny glass tubes, placing two in the armpits, two up the
  sleeves and two by the eyes. At last he said:
  "Listen and remember all that I tell you, otherwise you are lost. The princess will put
  tests to you, to determine the truth of your words. If she proffers a naked sword and
  com-mands you grasp the blade, you must secretly squeeze the cinnabar bladder, so that
  the red flows out onto the edge; when she asks you what that is, answer, 'Blood!' And if
  the princess brings her silver-plated face near yours, press your chest, so that the air
  leaves the bellows; when she asks you what that is, answer, 'Breath!' Then the princess
  may feign anger and order you beheaded. Hang your head, as though in submission, and
  the water will trickle from your eyes, and when she asks you what that is, answer, 'Tears!'
  After all of this, she may agree to unite with you, though that is far from certain—in all
  probability, you will perish."
  "O wise one!" cried Ferrix. "And if she cross-examines me, wishing to know the habits
  of the paleface, and how they originate, and how they love and live, in what way then am I
  
  to answer?"
  "I see there is no help for it," replied Polyphase, "but that I must throw in my lot with
  yours. Very well, I will disguise myself as a merchant from another galaxy—a non-spiral
  one, since those inhabitants are portly as a rule and I will need to conceal beneath my
  garb a number of books containing knowledge of the terrible customs of the pale-face.
  This lore I could not teach you, even if I wished to, for such knowledge is alien to the
  rational mind: the pale-face does everything in reverse, in a manner that is sticky,
  squishy, unseemly and more unappetizing than ever you could imagine. I shall order the
  necessary volumes, mean-while you have the court tailor cut you a paleface suit out of the
  appropriate fibers and cords. We leave at once, and I shall be at your side wherever we
  go, telling you what to do and what to say."
  Ferrix, enthusiastic, ordered the paleface garments made, and marveled much at
  them: covering practically the entire body, they were shaped like pipes and funnels, with
  buttons everywhere, and loops, hooks and strings. The tailor gave him detailed
  instructions as to what went on first, and how, and where, and what to connect with what,
  and also how to extricate himself from those fetters of cloth when the mo-ment arrived.
  Polyphase meanwhile donned the vestments of a mer-chant, concealing within its
  folds thick, scholarly tomes on paleface practices, then ordered an iron cage, locked Ferrix
  inside it, and together they took off in the royal spaceship. When they reached the
  borders of Armoric's kingdom, Polyphase proceeded to the village square and announced
  in a mighty voice that he had brought a young paleface from distant lands and would sell
  it to the highest bidder. The servants of the princess carried this news to her, and she
  said, after some deliberation:
  "A hoax, doubtless. But no one can deceive me, for no one knows as much as I about
  palefaces. Have the merchant come to the palace and show us his wares!"
  When they brought the merchant before her, Crystal saw a worthy old man and a
  cage. In the cage sat the paleface, its face indeed pale, the color of chalk and pyrite, with
  eyes like a wet fungus and limbs like moldy mire. Ferrix in turn gazed upon the princess,
  the face that seemed to clank and ring, eyes that sparkled and arced like summer
  lightning, and the delirium of his heart increased tenfold.
  "It does look like a paleface!" thought the princess, but said instead:
  "You must have indeed labored, old one, covering this scarecrow with mud and
  calcareous dust in order to trick me. Know, however, that I am conversant with the
  mysteries of that powerful and pale race, and as soon as I expose your imposture, both
  you and this pretender shall be beheaded!"
  The sage replied:
  "O Princess Crystal, that which you see encaged here is as true a paleface as paleface
  can be true. I obtained it for five thousand hectares of nuclear material from an
  inter-galactic pirate—and humbly beseech you to accept it as a gift from one who has no
  other desire but to please Your Majesty."
  The princess took a sword and passed it through the bars of the cage; the prince
  seized the edge and guided it through his garments in such a way that the cinnabar
  bladder was punctured, staining the blade with bright red.
  "What is that?" asked the princess, and Ferrix answered:
  
  "Blood!"
  Then the princess had the cage opened, entered bravely, brought her face near
  Ferrix's. That sweet proximity made his senses reel, but the sage caught his eye with a
  secret sign and the prince squeezed the bellows that released the rank air. And when the
  princess asked, "What is that?," Ferrix answered:
  "Breath!"
  "Forsooth you are a clever craftsman," said the princess to the merchant as she left
  the cage. "But you have deceived me and must die, and your scarecrow also!"
  The sage lowered his head, as though in great trepidation and sorrow, and when the
  prince followed suit, transparent drops flowed from his eyes. The princess asked, "What is
  that?" and Ferrix answered:
  "Tears!"
  And she said:
  "What is your name, you who profess to be a paleface from afar?"
  And Ferrix replied in the words the sage had instructed him:
  "Your Highness, my name is Myamlak and I crave nought else but to couple with you
  in a manner that is liquid, pulpy, doughy and spongy, in accordance with the customs of
  my people. I purposely permitted myself to be captured by the pirate, and requested him
  to sell me to this portly trader, as I knew the latter was headed for your kingdom. And I
  am exceeding grateful to his laminated person for conveying me hither, for I am as full of
  love for you as a swamp is full of scum."
  The princess was amazed, for truly, he spoke in paleface fashion, and she said:
  "Tell me, you who call yourself Myamlak the paleface, what do your brothers do
  during the day?"
  "O Princess," said Ferrix, "in the morning they wet themselves in clear water, pouring
  it upon their limbs as well as into their interiors, for this affords them pleasure.
  After-wards, they walk to and fro in a fluid and undulating way, and they slush, and they
  slurp, and when anything grieves them, they palpitate, and salty water streams from
  their eyes, and when anything cheers them, they palpitate and hiccup, but their eyes
  remain relatively dry. And we call the wet palpitating weeping, and the dry—laughter."
  "If it is as you say," said the princess, "and you share your brothers' enthusiasm for
  water, I will have you thrown into my lake, that you may enjoy it to your fill, and also I
  will have them weigh your legs with lead, to keep you from bobbing up …"
  "Your Majesty,” replied Ferrix as the sage had taught him, "if you do this, I must
  perish, for though there is water within us, it cannot be immediately outside us for longer
  than a minute or two, otherwise we recite the words 'blub, blub, blub,' which signifies our
  last farewell to life."
  "But tell me, Myamlak," asked the princess, "how do you furnish yourself with the
  energy to walk to and fro, to squish and to slurp, to shake and to sway?"
  "Princess," replied Ferrix, "there, where I dwell, are other palefaces besides the
  
  hairless variety, palefaces that travel predominantly on all fours. These we perforate until
  they expire, and we steam and bake their remains, and chop and slice, after which we
  incorporate their corporeality into our own. We know three hundred and seventy-six
  distinct meth-ods of murdering, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and ninety-seven
  distinct methods of preparing the corpses, and the stuffing of those bodies into our bodies
  (through an aperture, called the mouth) provides us with no end of en-joyment. Indeed,
  the art of the preparation of corpses is more esteemed among us than astronautics and is
  termed gastronautics, or gastronomy—which, however, has nothing to do with
  astronomy."
  "Does this then mean that you play at being cemeteries, making of yourselves the
  very coffins that hold your four-legged brethren?" This question was dangerously loaded,
  but Ferrix, instructed by the sage, answered thus:
  "It is no game, Your Highness, but rather a necessity, for life lives on life. But we have
  made of this necessity a great art."
  "Well then, tell me, Myamlak the paleface, how do you build your progeny?" asked
  the princess.
  "In faith, we do not build them at all," said Ferrix, "but program them statistically,
  according to Markov's formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit
  distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety
  of things that have nothing what-ever to do with programming, whether statistical,
  alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously,
  automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we
  are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is
  delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that
  programming from bearing fruit."
  "Strange," said the princess, whose erudition in this area was less extensive than that
  of the wise Polyphase. "But how exactly is this done?"
  "O Princess!" replied Ferrix. "We possess suitable apparatuses constructed on the
  principle of regenerative feedback coupling, though of course all this is in water. These
  apparatuses present a veritable miracle of technology, yet even the greatest idiot can use
  them. But to describe the precise procedure of their operation I would have to lecture at
  considerable length, since the matter is most complex. Still, it is strange, when you
  consider that we never invented these methods, but rather they, so to speak, invented
  them- | selves. Even so, they are perfectly functional and we have | nothing against
  them."
  "Verily," exclaimed Crystal, "you are a paleface! That which you say, it's as if it made
  sense, though it doesn't really, not in the least. For how can one be a cemetery with-out
  being a cemetery, or program progeny, yet not program it at all?! Yes, you are indeed a
  paleface, Myamlak, and therefore, should you so desire it, I shall couple with you in a
  closed-circuit matrimonial coupling, and you shall as-cend the throne with me—provided
  you pass one last test."
  "And what is that?" asked Ferrix.
  "You must…" began the princess, but suddenly suspi-cion again entered her heart
  and she asked, "Tell me first, what do your brothers do at night?"
  "At night they lie here and there, with bent arms and twisted legs, and air goes into
  
  them and comes out of them, raising in the process a noise not unlike the sharpening of a
  rusty saw."
  "Well then, here is the test: give me your hand!" com-manded the princess.
  Ferrix gave her his hand, and she squeezed it, whereupon he cried out in a loud voice,
  just as the sage had instructed him. And she asked him why he had cried out.
  "From the pain!" replied Ferrix.
  At this point she had no more doubts about his palefaceness and promptly ordered
  the preparations for the wedding ceremony to commence.
  But it so happened, at that very moment, that the space-ship of Cybercount
  Cyberhazy, the princess' Elector, re-turned from its interstellar expedition to find a
  paleface (for the insidious Cybercount sought to worm his way into her good graces).
  Polyphase, greatly alarmed, ran to Ferrix's side and said:
  "Prince, Cyberhazy's spaceship has just arrived, and he's brought the princess a
  genuine paleface—I saw the thing with my own eyes. We must leave while we still can,
  since all further masquerade will become impossible when the princess sees it and you
  together: its stickiness is stickier, its ickiness is ickier! Our subterfuge will be discovered
  and we beheaded!"
  Ferrix, however, could not agree to ignominious flight, for his passion for the princess
  was great, and he said:
  "Better to die, than lose her!"
  Meanwhile Cyberhazy, having learned of the wedding preparations, sneaked beneath
  the window of the room where they were staying and overheard everything; then he
  rushed back to the palace, bubbling over with villainous joy, and announced to Crystal:
  "You have been deceived, Your Highness, for the so-called Myamlak is actually an
  ordinary mortal and no pale-face. Here is the real paleface!"
  And he pointed to the thing that had been ushered in. The thing expanded its hairy
  breast, batted its watery eyes and said:
  "Me paleface!"
  The princess summoned Ferrix at once, and when he stood before her alongside that
  thing, the sage's ruse be-came entirely obvious. Ferrix, though he was smeared with mud,
  dust and chalk, anointed with oil and aqueously gur-gling, could hardly conceal his
  electroknightly stature, his magnificent posture, the breadth of those steel shoulders, that
  thunderous stride. Whereas the paleface of Cybercount Cyberhazy was a genuine
  monstrosity: its every step was like the overflowing of marshy vats, its face was like a
  scummy well; from its rotten breath the mirrors all covered over with a blind mist, and
  some iron nearby was seized with rust.
  Now the princess realized how utterly revolting a paleface was—when it spoke, it was
  as if a pink worm tried to squirm from its maw. At last she had seen the light, but her
  pride would not permit her to reveal this change of heart. So she said:
  "Let them do battle, and to the winner—my hand in mar-riage…"
  
  Ferrix whispered to the sage:
  "If I attack this abomination and crush it, reducing it to the mud from which it came,
  our imposture will become apparent, for the clay will fall from me and the steel will show.
  What should I do?"
  "Prince," replied Polyphase, "don't attack, just defend yourself!"
  Both antagonists stepped out into the palace courtyard, each armed with a sword, and
  the paleface leaped upon Ferrix as the slime leaps upon a swamp, and danced about him,
  gurgling, cowering, panting, and it swung at him with its blade, and the blade cut through
  the clay and shattered against the steel, and the paleface fell against the prince due to the
  momentum of the blow, and it smashed and broke, and splashed apart, and was no more.
  But the dried clay, once moved, slipped from Ferrix's shoulders, revealing his true
  steely nature to the eyes of the princess; he trembled, awaiting his fate. Yet in her
  crystal-line gaze he beheld admiration, and understood then how much her heart had
  changed.
  Thus they joined in matrimonial coupling, which is permanent and reciprocal—joy and
  happiness for some, for others misery until the grave—and they reigned long and well,
  programming innumerable progeny. The skin of Cybercount Cyberhazy's paleface was
  stuffed and placed in the royal museum as an eternal reminder. It stands there to this
  day, a scarecrow thinly overgrown with hair. Many pretend-ers to wisdom say that this is
  all a trick and make-believe and nothing more, that there's no such thing as paleface
  cemeteries, doughy-nosed and gummy-eyed, and never was. Well, perhaps it was just
  another empty invention—there are certainly fables enough in this world. And yet, even if
  the story isn't true, it does have a grain of sense and instruc-tion to it, and it's
  entertaining as well, so it's worth the telling.
  THE END
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Vault2.0.-.Fiction-and-audiobooks/Books/L/Lem, Stanislow/Lem, Stanislaw - The Cyberiad.pdf