cry, ‘‘Angel!’’ Odd, that I never noticed this principle before. We shall call it Trurl’s Universal Law: according to the particular defect in its
own construction, each creature postulates an Ideal. I must make a
note of that; it will come in handy when I get around to correcting the
foundations of philosophy. But to the business at hand. To begin, let
us take that which is Good—but where can Good be found?
Obviously not where there is no one to experience it. The waterfall
is neither good nor evil as far as the rock is concerned, nor the
earthquake, if you ask the earth. Ergo, we must assemble a Someone
to experience Good. But wait, how can this Someone experience
Good unless he knows what it is, and how will he know? Suppose . . .
suppose I see Klapaucius suffer some harm? Half of me would grieve,
the other half rejoice. There’s a complication. One could be happy in
comparison with one’s neighbour, yet be totally unaware of the fact
and therefore not be happy at all, though actually happy! Must I then
construct beings and keep other beings racked in pain perpetually
before them, that they might know their own good fortune? A
feasible solution—but how ghastly! Let’s see, with a transformer
here and a fuse there . . . Best to start with an individual; happy
civilizations we can manufacture afterwards.’
Trurl rolled up his sleeves and in three days had put together an
Ecstatic Contemplator of Existence, a machine whose consciousness,
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
7
cathodes all aglow, embraced whatever came beneath its gaze, for
there was nothing in the whole wide world that wouldn’t give it
pleasure. Trurl examined it closely. The Contemplator, resting on
three metal legs, slowly swept the room with its telescopic eyes, and
whether they fell upon the fence outside, or a rock, or an old shoe, it
oh’ed and ah’ed with delight. And when the sun went down and the
sky grew pink, it swayed from side to side in rapture.
‘Klapaucius will say of course that oh’ing and ah’ing and swaying
from side to side in themselves prove nothing’, thought Trurl, uneasy.
‘He’ll want evidence, data . . .’
So in the Contemplator’s belly he installed a large dial with a golden
pointer and calibrated in units of happiness, which he called hedons
or heds for short. A single hed was taken to be the quantity of bliss
one would experience after walking exactly four miles with a nail in
one’s boot and then having the nail removed. Trurl multiplied the
distance by the time and divided by the rest mass of the nail, placing
the foot coefficient in brackets; this enabled him to express happiness
in centimetres, grams and seconds. That improvement lifted his spirits
considerably. Meanwhile, as he leaned over and worked, the Con-
templator regarded his patched and stained lab coat and registered, at
that particular angle of leaning and cut of coat, from 11.8 to 11.9 heds
per stain-patch-second. This reading fully restored Trurl’s confidence.
He made a few more calculations to test the instrument’s precision—
one kilohed, for instance, was what the elders had felt when they
beheld Susanna at her bath, one megahed the joy of a man con-
demned to hang but reprieved at the last minute—and then sent an
errand robot to fetch Klapaucius.
The latter came and, seeing Trurl point a proud finger at his new
creation, began to inspect it. It in turn fixed the majority of its lenses on him, swayed from side to side and delivered a few oh’s and ah’s.
These exclamations surprised the constructor, but he asked with an
air of unconcern:
‘What is it?’
‘A happy being’, replied Trurl, ‘more specifically, an Ecstatic
Contemplator of Existence or Contemplator for short.’
‘And what exactly does this Contemplator do?’
Trurl sensed the sarcasm in his friend’s query but chose to ignore it.
‘It devotes itself to wholehearted, incessant observation’, he ex-
plained. ‘Not passive observation, mind you, but a most intense,
strenuous and aggressive kind of observation, and whatever is
observed fills it with inexpressible delight! It is precisely this delight,
8
Stanisl/aw Lem
oscillating through its many circuits and cells, which prompts those
oh’s and ah’s you hear, even now as it looks upon your otherwise
uninteresting face.’
‘You mean, this machine derives pleasure from an active examina-
tion of all that is?’
‘Correct!’, said Trurl, but without his former assurance, for he
feared a trap.
‘And this must be a felicitometer, graduated in units of existential
bliss’, Klapaucius went on, indicating the dial with the golden pointer.
‘Yes . . . ’
Klapaucius then presented the Contemplator with various objects,
in each case taking careful note of its reaction. Trurl, greatly relieved, began to hold forth on the niceties of hedonic calculus or theoretical
felicitometry. One word led to the next, question followed question,
until Klapaucius remarked:
‘How many units, do you think, would result from this situation:
one man is brutally beaten for a full three hundred hours, then all at
once jumps up and brains the one who was beating him?’
‘That’s easily done!’, cried Trurl enthusiastically, and immediately
began to calculate it out—when suddenly he heard a loud guffaw and
whirled around. Klapaucius said, still laughing:
‘You say you took Goodness as your guiding principle? Well, Trurl,
I see you’re off to a flying start! At this rate you’ll have perfection in no time! Now if you’ll excuse me . . .’
And he departed, leaving behind a totally crushed Trurl.
‘I should have known! I should have seen it!’, groaned the poor
constructor, and his groans mingled with the oh’s and ah’s of the
Contemplator, which so aggravated him that he locked it in a closet.
Then he sat at his empty desk and said:
‘What a fool I was, to mistake aesthetic ecstasy for Good! Why, one
could hardly even call the Contemplator a thing of reason! No, that’s
not the way to go about it, not in a million maxwells! Happiness—
certainly, pleasure—of course! But not at someone else’s expense! Not
from Evil! Wait—what is Evil? Ah, now I see how shamefully I
neglected, in all my years of cybernetic construction, a study of the
fundamentals!’
For eight days and nights Trurl did nothing but bury himself in
terribly erudite volumes that dealt with the weighty question of Good
and Evil. A great number of wise men, as it turned out, maintained
the most important thing was an active solicitude coupled with an all-
embracing good will. Unless men of understanding mutually mani-
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
9
fested these virtues, all was lost. True, under that banner quite a few
individuals had been impaled, boiled in oil, buried alive, drawn and
quartered, broken on the wheel or stretched on the rack. Indeed,
history showed that good will, when extended to the soul and not the
body, gave rise to endless varieties and variations of torture.
‘Good will is not enough’, thought Trurl. ‘What if we house one’s
conscience in one’s neighbour, and conversely? No, that would be
disastrous: my transgressions would fill others with remorse, leaving
me free to sink deeper and deeper in sin! But what if we attach a
remorse amplifier to the conscience, in other words ensure that every
wicked deed hound its perpetrator afterwards with an intensity a
thousand times greater than normal? But then everyone would run
out and commit some crime just to see whether his new conscience
really hurt that much—and then be ridden by an overwhelming guilt
to the end of his days . . . Perhaps a conscience that’s reversible, with a clearing mechanism—locked of course. The authorities could keep the
key . . . No, there would be picklocks and skeleton keys circulating in
no time. Arrange for the general broadcasting of feelings? One would
feel for all, and all for one. No, that’s been done, Altruizine created
precisely that effect . . . Now here’s an idea: everyone carries in his
stomach a small bomb and receiver, so that if, as a result of his
wrongdoing, say, ten or more persons wish him ill, the input of that
combined and heterodyned signal blows the culprit sky-high.
to! On second thought . . . what kind of happiness is it, to go around
with a bomb in your stomach? Anyway, there could be plots; ten
villainous men could conspire against one innocent and he would
detonate, innocent or not. What then, reverse the signs? No, that
wouldn’t work either. Confound it, can it be that I, who have moved
galaxies about as if they were furniture, am unable to solve this
ridiculously simple problem in construction?!
‘Suppose each and every individual of a given society is plump, rosy,
full of cheer, sings and leaps and laughs from morning till night, rushes to the aid of others with such zeal the very ground trembles, and the
others do likewise, and when asked, they exclaim they are positively
thrilled with their own not to mention the common lot . . . Would not
such a society be perfectly happy? Evil, after all, would be unthinkable
in it! Why would anyone want to harm anyone else? What could be
gained by doing harm? Absolutely nothing! And there’s the answer,
there’s my blueprint, elegant in its simplicity, for mass-producing
happiness! Klapaucius, the misanthrope, the cynic — where in this
10
Stanisl/aw Lem
whole, magnificent system will he find the least thing to mock and
deride? Nowhere, for everyone, helping everyone else, will make
everything better and better, until it can’t possibly be better . . . But wait, might they not strain themselves, grow faint and fall beneath
that avalanche, so to speak, of good deeds? I could add a regulator or
two, circuit breakers too, some joyproof shields, bliss-resistant fields . . .
The main thing is not to rush, we can’t afford any more oversights. So
then, primo—they enjoy themselves, secundo—they help others, tertio—
they jump up and down, quarto — plump and rosy, quinto — things
couldn’t be better, sexto—self-sacrificing . . . yes, that ought to do it!’
Weary after these long and difficult deliberations, Trurl slept until
noon, then jumped out of bed, refreshed and full of fight, wrote down
the plans, punched out the programs, set up the algorithms and in the
beginning he created a happy civilization composed of nine hundred
persons. That equality should obtain within its borders, he made them
all amazingly alike; that there should be no struggle over food or
drink, he made them free of any need of sustenance—atomic batteries
were their only source of energy. Then he sat on his porch for the rest
of the day and watched how they sang and leaped, announcing their
happiness, how they rushed to aid one another, patted one another on
the head, removed stumbling blocks before one another and, bursting
with excitement, generally lived a life of prosperity and peace. If
someone sprained his ankle, an enormous crowd would form, not
out of curiosity but because of the categorical imperative to extend a
helping hand. It was true that at first, due to a little over-enthusiasm, a foot might be pulled off instead of repaired, but Trurl quickly adjusted
the automatic choke and threw in a few rheostats; then he sent for
Klapaucius. Klapaucius regarded this scene of incessant jubilation with
a fairly dour expression, listened to the hallelujahs and huzzahs for a
while, then finally turned to Trurl and asked:
‘And can they be sad as well?’
‘What an idiotic question! Of course they can’t!’, replied Trurl.
‘Then they do nothing but jump around, look plump and rosy,
remove stumbling blocks and shout in unison that they are positively
thrilled?’
‘Yes!’
Seeing that Klapaucius was not only sparing in his praise but in fact
had none at all to offer, Trurl added peevishly:
‘A monotonous prospect, perhaps, hardly as picturesque as a
battlefield. My purpose, however, was to bestow happiness, not
provide you with a dramatic spectacle!’
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
11
‘If they do what they do because they must’, said Klapaucius, ‘then,
Trurl, there is as much Good in them as in a streetcar that fails to run
you down on the sidewalk simply because it hasn’t jumped its tracks.
Who derives happiness from doing Good? Not he who must forever
blocks, but he who is able to brood, to sob, to do his fellow in, yet
voluntarily and cheerfully refrains from such things! These puppets of
yours, Trurl, are but a mockery of those high ideals you have
managed so completely to profane!’
‘What—what are you saying?!’ Trurl was stunned. ‘They aren’t
puppets, but thinking beings . . .’
‘Oh?’, said Klapaucius. ‘We shall see!’
And he walked out among Trurl’s perfect prote´geś and struck the
first one he met full in the face, saying:
‘I trust you’re happy?’
‘Terribly!’; replied that individual, holding its broken nose.
‘And now?’, inquired Klapaucius, this time dealing it such a blow
that it went head over heels. Whereupon that individual, still lying in
the dust and spitting out teeth, exclaimed:
‘Happy, sir! Things couldn’t be better!’
‘There you are’, said Klapaucius to a dumbfounded Trurl and left
without another word.
The crestfallen constructor led his creations one by one back to the
laboratory and there dismantled them to the last nut and bolt, and not
one of them protested, not in the least. In fact, a few even tried to be
of assistance, holding a wrench or pliers while Trurl worked, or
hammering at their own heads when the cranial lids stuck and
wouldn’t unscrew. Trurl put the parts back in the drawers and
shelves, pulled the blueprints off the drawing board and tore them
&nbs
p; all to shreds, sat down at his desk piled high with books on philosophy
and ethics, and gave a deep sigh.
‘How he humiliates me, the dog! And to think I once called that
pettifogging putterer my friend!’
From its glass case he took the model of the psychopermutator, the
device that had transformed every impulse into an active solicitude
and all-embracing good will, and smashed it to bits on an anvil. Not
that this did much to improve his spirits. So he thought a while, gave
another sigh, and began again. This time a sizeable society took
shape—three thousand stout citizens in all—and it immediately
chose a government for itself by secret ballot and universal suffrage,
after which various projects were undertaken: the building of houses
12
Stanisl/aw Lem
and the putting up of fences, the discovering of the laws of nature and
the throwing of parties. Each of these latest creations of Trurl carried a small homeostat in its head, and in each homeostat were two
electrodes, one welded to either side, and between them the indivi-
dual’s free will could play and dance as it pleased; underneath was the
positive spring, with a tension far exceeding the pull of the opposite
spring, the one bent on destruction and negation but prudently held
in check with a safety clip. Moreover, each citizen possessed a moral
monitor of great sensitivity, which was situated in a vice with two
toothed jaws: these would begin a gnawing action upon it whenever
its possessor strayed from the straight and narrow. Trurl first tested
this contrivance on a special model in his workshop; the poor thing
was stricken with such pangs and twinges that it fell into a violent fit.
But then, the capacitor soon charged with the necessary penance and
the ignition with contrition, he was able to ease the monitor some-
what from those relentless jaws. The whole thing was most cleverly
done! Trurl even considered connecting the monitor by regenerative
feedback coupling to a splitting headache, but quickly changed his
mind, afraid Klapaucius would again start to lecture him about
compulsion ruling out the exercise of free will. Which wasn’t at all
true, for these new beings had statistical transmissions, in other words
no one, including Trurl, could possibly foresee what they would end
up doing with themselves. That night Trurl was repeatedly awakened