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:
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.
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 matter; 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 recombinations. 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 knowledge 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 intentionally taught it anything, yet neither could you
