Lem, Stanislaw (26 page)

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 anything."

"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 jurisprudence," 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 condition."

"In that case you failed to live

up to your part of the bargain: the Adviser was to have been

perfect, without any limitations. If it couldn't destroy you, then it

wasn't perfect."

"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 determining 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 legalistic 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 codices and codicils, civil and criminal, and,

just to be safe, he added international and institutional law

components. Finally 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;

apparently some trace of the memory of that incident had found

its way into the new circuits, creating a kind of subconscious

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 volumes in his library, and sometimes he conducted secret

experiments 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 whatsoever,

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 diligence
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, f
or I'm
working on an
Adviser

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 meticulous 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 Adviser 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 uneasy, 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 actually 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

distinguished discoverer of invisible sign language, Professor

Crusticus. That scholar, having examined the incriminating document

as well as the records of everything the military specialists

had done, announced that they would have to apply the method of trial

and error, using computers with astronomical 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 thousand 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 arrested. 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