am refined and insist on authenticity!”
“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 everything 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 mesons 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 molecule. 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 information, 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, beginning, 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 information 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 Existence 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 information 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 calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared 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 Second Kind, and you’ll see for yourself the wondrous perfection 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 opening; perched there, it will let out only significant information, 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 information. 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
