“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, 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,
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 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 combinations dealt with such phenomena. No—protested the Adviser—Trurl wanted to compromise and undo it by creating 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 encouraging official cooperation, not to mention interrogation machinery 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, symbols, signals, probability and information theory, and became 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 necessary 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 completely demolished in the process, the King was satisfied he had done the right thing.
A week later, Trurl appeared at the palace gates and requested 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 Adviser 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 yourself 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 instrument 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 hovering 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 courtiers 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.