by shouts of joy, which was a great comfort to him. ‘This time’, he said
to himself, ‘Klapaucius can have no objections. These people are
happy, and their happiness is not programmed, hence predetermined
and imperative, but wholly stochastic, ergodic and probabilistic. I’ve
won at last!’ And with this pleasant thought he fell asleep and slept till morning.
Klapaucius was not in, and it was noon before he showed up and
Trurl could lead him to the felicitological proving ground. There
Klapaucius inspected the homes, fences, minarets, signs, the court-
house, its offices, delegates and citizens, here and there engaged a few
in conversation, and on a side street even attempted to punch one in
the face. But three others seized him by the breeches and, singing in
unison, gave him the old heave-ho at the gate, careful not to break his
neck, though he did look much the worse for wear when he climbed
out of the roadside ditch.
‘Well?’, said Trurl, pretending not to notice his friend’s mortifica-
tion. ‘What do you think?’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow’, replied Klapaucius.
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
13
Considering this a retreat, Trurl nodded and gave a sympathetic
smile. The next day both constructors again entered the settlement
and found it greatly changed. They were stopped by a patrol and the
highest ranking officer addressed Trurl:
‘What’s this, frowning on the premises? Can’t you hear the birds
singing? Don’t you see the flowers? Chin up!’
And the next highest ranking officer said:
‘Chest out! Shoulders back! Look alive! Smile!’
The third said nothing, only clapped the constructor on the back
with a mailed fist, raising a deafening clang, then turned with the rest
to Klapaucius—who didn’t wait for such encouragement but snapped
to attention at once, assuming a properly ecstatic expression, at which
they were satisfied and continued on their way. Meanwhile the
unsuspecting creator of this new order stared open-mouthed at the
square before the headquarters of Felicifica, where hundreds stood in
formation and roared with joy upon command.
‘All hail to life!’, bellowed one old officer in epaulets and plumes,
and the gathering thundered back as one man:
‘All hail to happiness.’
Before Trurl could say another word, he found himself wedged
firmly in one of the columns with his friend and compelled to march
and drill for the rest of the day. The main manoeuvre seemed to
consist in making oneself as miserable as possible while furthering the
welfare of the next in line, all to the rhythm of ‘Left! Right! Left!
Right!’ The drillmasters were Felicemen, known as the Guardians of
Good and Gladness and thus commonly called G-men, and their task
was to see that each and every one, both separately and together,
participated wholeheartedly in the general beatitude, which in
practice proved to be unbelievably burdensome. During a brief
intermission in these felicitological exercises Trurl and Klapaucius
managed to slip away and hide behind a hedge. There they found a
gully and followed it, crouching as if under heavy fire, to Trurl’s place, where to be absolutely safe they locked themselves in the attic—and
just in the nick of time, for the patrols were out, combing the area for
all those discontent, gloomy or sad, and summarily felicitizing them
on the spot. In his attic Trurl cursed and fumed and considered the
quickest way to put an end to this unhappy experiment, while
Klapaucius did what he could to keep from laughing out loud.
Unable to come up with anything better, Trurl shook his head and
sent a demolition squad to the settlement, making sure beforehand to
programme it impervious to the lure of such attractive slogans as
14
Stanisl/aw Lem
brotherly love and joy for all—which provision, however, he was
careful to keep from Klapaucius. Trurl’s demolition squad soon
collided with the G-men and the sparks began to fly. As the last
bastion of universal happiness, Felicifica fought most valiantly, and
Trurl had to send replacements with heavy-duty clamps and grappling
hooks. Now the battle became full-pitched, the war all-out; both sides
displayed a truly staggering dedication, and grapeshot and shrapnel
filled the air. When at last the constructors stepped out into the
moonlit night, they beheld a piteous sight: the settlement lay in
smouldering ruins, and here and there a Feliceman, not fully un-
screwed in the general haste, expressed in a weak and trembling voice
its undying devotion to the cause of Universal Goodness. No longer
able to contain himself, Trurl burst into tears of rage and despair; he
couldn’t understand what had gone wrong, why these kindly souls
had changed into such insufferable bullies.
‘The directive for an all-embracing good will may, if too direct, bear
contrary fruit’, Klapaucius explained. ‘He who is glad wishes others to
be glad, glad without delay, and ends up clubbing gladness into all
recalcitrants.’
‘Then Good may produce Evil! Oh, how perfidious is the Nature of
Things!’, cried Trurl. ‘Very well, I hereby declare war against Nature
Herself! Adieu, Klapaucius! You see me momentarily defeated, but
not discouraged. I shall win yet!’
And he returned to the isolation of his books and manuscripts, grim
and more determined than ever. Common sense suggested it might
not be a bad idea, before proceeding with further tests, to throw up
battlements around the house, with embrasures for artillery. But this
was plainly no way to begin the construction of brotherly love, so he
decided instead to make his models smaller, on a scale of 100,000 to
1—that is, to conduct his experiments with microminiaturized civili-
zations. In order not to forget what he’d learned, he hung signs like
the following on his workshop walls: THESE BE MY GUIDE—(1) SACRED
AUTONOMY, (2) SWEET PARITY, (3) SUBTLE CHARITY, (4) UNOBTRUSIVE
AVUNCULARITY. Then he began the work of translating those noble
sentiments into action.
First he assembled a thousand electromites under the microscope,
endowed them with little minds and not much greater love of Good,
since by now he feared fanaticism. They went about their business in
a dull sort of way, and their little dwelling-box began to resemble the
works of a watch, so even and monotonous were their movements in
it. Trurl opened a valve and raised the intelligence a bit; immediately
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
15
they grew more lively, fashioned tiny tools from a few stray filings
and started using them to pry open their little box. Trurl then quickly
increased the Good potential and overnight the society became self-
sacrificing, everyone ran about frantically looking for someone to
save—widows and orphans were in particularly great demand, espe-
cially if blind. These were besieged with so many tokens of respect,
paid so many compliments, that the poor things f
led and hid in the
farthest corners of the box. In no time Trurl’s civilization faced a crisis: the acute shortage of orphans and other unfortunates made it next to
impossible to find deserving objects of any properly monumental act
of generosity. As a result the micromites, after eighteen generations,
began to worship the Absolute Orphan, whom nothing in their
boxlike vale of tears could ever deliver from dismal orphanhood;
thus their excessive benevolence finally found relief in the infinite
transcendental realm of metaphysics. They populated those higher
spheres with various beings, the Triple Cripple for instance, or the
Lord Up Above, who was always greatly to be pitied, and they
neglected the things of this world and replaced all government
agencies with religious orders. This was not quite what Trurl had in
mind, so he introduced rationalism, scepticism and common sense
until everything settled down.
Though not for long. A certain Electrovoltaire appeared and
announced there was no Absolute Orphan, only the Cosmic Cube
created by the forces of Nature; the orphanists excommunicated him,
but then Trurl had to leave for an hour or two to do some shopping.
When he returned, the tiny box was bouncing about on its shelf in
the throes of a religious war. Trurl charged it with altruism—that only
made it sizzle and smoke; he added a few more units of intelligence,
which cooled it off somewhat—but later there was a great deal of
activity and confusion, after which military parades appeared, march-
ing in a disconcertingly mechanical way. Another generation came
and went, the orphanists and electrovoltairians vanished without a
trace, now everyone spoke only of the Common Good, numerous
treatises were written on the subject—entirely secular—and then a
great debate arose concerning the origin of the species: some said that
they were spawned spontaneously from the dust that lay in the
corners; others, that they stemmed from a race of invaders from
without. To resolve this burning question, the Great Awl was built to
penetrate the cosmic wall and explore the Space Beyond. And since
unknown things might lurk out there, powerful weapons were
immediately manufactured and stockpiled. Trurl was so alarmed at
16
Stanisl/aw Lem
this development that he scrapped the whole model as quickly as
possible and said, close to tears: ‘Reason leads to heartlessness, Good
produces madness! Must every attempt at historiographic construc-
tion be doomed to failure?’ He decided to attack the problem on an
individual basis again and dragged his first prototype, the Contem-
plator, from its closet. It began to oh and ah in aesthetic rapture before a pile of debris, but Trurl plugged in an intelligence component and it
fell silent at once. He asked it if anything was wrong, to which it
replied:
‘Everything continues to be just fine; I only contain my admiration
in order to reflect upon it, for I wish to know, first of all, the source of this fineness, and secondly, what end or purpose it may serve. And
what are you, to interrupt my contemplation with the asking of
questions? How does your existence concern mine? I feel, indeed,
compelled to admire all things, including yourself, but prudence tells
me to resist this inclination, for it may be some trap devised against
me.’
‘As far as your existence goes’, Trurl said incautiously, ‘it was
created by me, created expressly that between you and the world
there should be perfect harmony.’
‘Harmony?’, said the Contemplator, gravely turning all its lenses on
him. ‘Harmony, you say? And why do I have three legs? Wherefore is
my head on top? For what reason am I brass on the left and iron on
the right? And why do I have five eyes? Answer, if it be true you
brought me into being from nothingness!’
‘Three legs, because two wouldn’t provide enough stability,
whereas four would be an unnecessary expenditure’, Trurl explained.
‘Five eyes: that’s how many usable optics I had on hand. As for the
brass, well, I ran out of iron.’
‘Ran out of iron!’, jeered the Contemplator. ‘You expect me to
believe that all this was the work of sheer accident, pure luck, blind
chance, happenstance? Come, come!’
‘I ought to know, if I created you!’, said Trurl, irritated by the
machine’s overweening manner.
‘There are two possibilities’, replied the circumspect Contemplator.
‘The first is, you are an out-and-out liar. This we shall set aside for the moment as unverifiable. The second is, you believe it is the truth you
speak, yet that truth, predicated as it is upon your feeble under-
standing, is in truth untrue.’
‘Come again?’
‘What seems an accident to you may be no accident at all. You
In Hot Pursuit of Happiness
17
think it insignificant that you ran short of iron, and yet who knows
but that some Higher Necessity arranged precisely for that shortage?
Again, you see nothing in the availability of brass but a convenient
coincidence, yet here too some Provident Harmony entered in and
interfered. Similarly, in the number of my eyes and legs there surely
must lie some profound Mystery of a Higher Order, some Ultimate
Meaning. And truly, three and five—both are prime numbers; three
and six divided by three is two, the number of my colours, for behold,
on the left is brass and on the right, iron! Mere chance produce a
relation of such elegant precision? What nonsense! I am a being
whose essence obviously extends beyond your petty horizons, O
unschooled tinkerer! And if there be any truth in your claim to
have constructed me—which, really, I find most difficult to imagine—
then you were only the ignorant instrument of Higher Laws, while I
constituted their aim, their goal. You are a random drop of rain, I the
flower whose glorious blossoming shall extol all creation; you are a
mouldering post that casts a shadow, I the blazing sun that commands
the post to divide the darkness from the light; you are the blind tool
guided by the Everlasting Hand—solely that I may spring into
existence! Therefore seek not to lower my exalted person by arguing
that its five-eyed, three-legged and two-metalled nature is wholly a
product of arbitrary-budgetary factors. In these qualities I see the
reflection of a Greater Symmetry, still somewhat obscure perhaps, but
I shall certainly divine it, given the time to study the problem in
depth. Importune me then no longer with your presence, for I have
better things to do than bandy words with you.’
Incensed by this speech, Trurl threw the struggling Contemplator
back in its closet and, though it invoked in a loud and ringing voice
the right to self-determination and autonomy of all free entities as
well as the sacred principle of individual inviolability, he proceeded to disconnect its intelligence component. This violence done to the
Contemplator suddenly filled him with a s
ense of shame, and he
sneaked back to his room, looking around to see if there were any
witnesses. Sitting at his desk, he felt like a criminal.
‘Some curse apparently hangs over any construction work that has
only Good and Universal Happiness as its goals’, he thought. ‘All my
attempts, even the most preliminary tests, seem to involve me in foul
deeds and feelings of guilt before I know it! A plague on that
Contemplator with its Higher Necessity! There must be some other
way . . .’
18
Stanisl/aw Lem
So far he had tried one model after another, and each experiment
had demanded considerable time and material. But now he decided to
run a thousand experiments simultaneously—on a scale of 1,000,000
to 1. Under an electron microscope he twisted individual atoms in
such a way that they gave rise to beings not much larger than
microbes and called Angstromanians. A quarter of a million of these
persons made a single culture, which was transferred by micropipette
to a slide. Each such millimicrosocietal specimen was an olive-grey
stain to the naked eye, and only under the highest magnification
could one observe what transpired within.
Trurl equipped his Angstromanians with altruinfraternal regulators,
eudaemonitors and optimizers, nonaggression pawls and ratchets, all
operating at unheard-of levels of beneficence and stabilized against
any sort of fanatical deviation by both heresy and orthodoxy stops;
the cultures he mounted on slides, the slides he put in packets, and
the packets in packages, all of which he then shelved and locked in a
civilizing incubator for two and a half days. But first he placed over
each culture a cover glass, crystal clear and tinted a pale blue, which
was to serve as that civilization’s sky; he also supplied food and fuel by eyedropper, as well as raw materials to permit the fabrication of
whatever the consensus omnium might find appropriate or necessary.
Obviously, Trurl couldn’t possibly keep up with developments on
each and every slide, so he pulled out civilizations at random,
carefully wiped the eyepiece of his microscope, and with bated
breath leaned over and surveyed their undertakings, much like the
Lord God Himself parting the clouds to look down upon His handi-
work.
Three hundred cultures went bad at the outset. The symptoms were