The Cyberiad

A GOOD SHELLACKING

Someone was knocking at the door of Klapaucius the constructor. 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 putting 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. Klapaucius 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 perfectly 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 canvas?”

“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 Klapaucius, 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 machine, 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 colleague, 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 ingratitude, you dare show your face here as if nothing happened! 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 perhaps 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 appeased. “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 putting 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 having 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 handsomely 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 decorate 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.