The Sixth Sally
OR How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the
Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg
"There are but two caravan trails that lead south from the Lands of the Upper Suns. The first, which is older, goes from the Stellar Quadriferum past the Great Glossaurontus, a most treacherous star, for its magnitude varies, and at its dimmest it resembles the Dwarf of the Abyssyrs, and thereby causes travelers to blunder into the Great Shroud Wastes, from whence only one caravan in nine ever returns. The second, newer trail was opened up by the Imperium Myrapoclean, whose turboservoslaves carved a tunnel six billion miles in length through the heart of the Great Glossaurontus itself.
"The northern entrance to the tunnel may be found in the following manner: from the last of the Upper Suns proceed directly toward the Pole for the time it takes to recite seven Now-I-lay me-down-to-sleep's. Then go left, till you reach the wall of fire, which is a side of Glossaurontus, and locate the opening, a black dot in that white-hot furnace. Steer straight down into this, and put aside all fear, for the tunnel's width will let eight ships, starboard to larboard, pass through. The sight that then appears outside your portholes truly has no equal. First there is the famous Phlogistinian Flamefall, and then as depending on the weather: when the solar depths are swept with pyromagnetic storms that surge a billion miles or more away, one sees great tortured knots of fire, pulsing arteries swollen with white, glowing clots; when, on the other hand, the storm is closer, or it is a typhoon of the seventh order, the roof will shudder, as if that white dough of incandescence were about to fall, but this is an illusion, for it spills over but does not fall, and burns, but cannot consume, held in check by the tensile ribs of the Fffian Force Fields. But when one observes the core of the prominence bulge, and the long-forked bolts of the fountainheads they call Infernions flare closer, it is best to keep a firm grip upon the wheel, and look sharp into the solar viscera and not at any chart, for the utmost steering skill is needed here. Indeed, that road is never traversed the same way twice; the entire tunnel gouged through Glossaurontus twists continually, writhes and thrashes like a serpent flailed. Keep therefore your eyes well peeled, and your safety frigipacks (that rim your visors with transparent icicles) hard by, and carefully watch the blazing walls that rush up and lash their thundering tongues, and should you hear the hull begin to sizzle, battered and bespattered in the seething solar cauldron, then trust to nothing but your own lightning reflexes. Though you must also bear in mind that not every burst of flame nor every jump of the tunnel signifies a starquake or a squall in the white oceans of fire; remembering this, the seasoned mariner will not cry 'man the pumps' at the drop of a match, and later have to face the ridicule of his peers, who will say he is the type that would try to douse a star's eternal light with a beaker of liquid nitrogen. To the one who inquires what he should do if a real quake descends upon his vessel, most wags will answer that then it is quite enough to heave a sigh, there being little time for prayer or the writing of wills, and as for the eyes, these may be open or shut according to personal preference, for the fire will burn them out in any event. Such disasters, however, are extremely rare, since the brackets and braces installed by the Imperial Myrapocles hold marvelously well, and really, intrastellar flight, gliding past the curved, sparkling hydrogen mirrors of Glossaurontus, can be a most delightful experience. Then too, they say—and not without reason—that whoever enters the tunnel will at least exit soon after, which certainly cannot be said of the Great Shroud Wastes. And were the tunnel to be totally destroyed by a quake, the only alternate route possible would go through those Wastes, which—as their name indicates—are blacker than night, for the light of the neighboring stars dares not enter there. There, as in a mortar, one finds a constant colliding and crashing together—which makes a terrific din—of scrap metal, cans, wrecks of ships that were led astray by the treachery of Glossaurontus and crushed in the cruel grip of those bottomless gravitational vortices, then left to drift in circles until such time as the Universe itself runs down. To the east of the Shroud is the kingdom of the Slipjaws, to the west, the Bogglyeyed, and in the south are roads, heavily dotted with fortified mortalitaries, leading to the gentler sphere of sky-blue Lazulia, beyond which lies the bud-beaming Murgundigan, where the archipelago of iron-poor stars, known as Alcaron's Carriage, shines blood-red.
"The Shroud itself, as we said, is as black as the Glossaurontian corridor is white. Nor does the only peril there lie in its vortices, in debris pulled down from dizzy heights by the current, in meteors gone berserk; for some say that in an unknown place, among dark, crepuscular caverns, at the bottom of an immeasurably deep and unplumbed profundity, for ages and ages now there sits a certain creature, anomalous and wholly anonymous, for anyone who meets the thing and learns its name will surely never live to tell a soul. And they say that that Anonymoid is both a pirate and a mage, and it lives in a castle raised by black gravitation, and the moat is a perpetually raging storm, and the walls non-being, impenetrable in their nothingness, and the windows are all blind, and the doors dumb; the Anonymoid lies in wait for caravans, but whenever it feels an overwhelming hunger for gold and skeletons, it blows black dust into the faces of the suns that serve as signposts, and once these are extinguished, and some wayfarers have strayed from their path of safety, it comes whirling out of the void, wraps them tightly in its coils, and carries them off to its castle of oblivion, without ever dropping the least ruby brooch, for the monster is monstrously meticulous. Afterward, only the gnawed remains drift away and float through the Wastes, followed by long trails of ship rivets, which are spit out from the monster's maw like seeds. But lately, ever since the Glossaurontian tunnel was opened by the forced labor of innumerable turboservoserfs, and all navigation takes the way of that brightest of corridors, the Anonymoid rages, deprived of further plunder, and the heat of its fury now illumines the darkness of the Shroud, and it glows through the black barriers of gravitation like a fiend's skull rotting in some dank, phosphorescent cocoon. There are scoffers, true, who say that no such monster exists and never did—and they say so with impunity, for it is hard to assail an opinion of things for which there are no words, an opinion formed moreover on a quiet summer afternoon, far from cosmic shrouds and stellar conflagrations. Yes, it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches. Was not the Murgundiganian Cybernator himself, with an entourage of eighty in three ships, swallowed up, so that nothing remained of that magnaterium but a few chewed buckles, which were cast up on the shore of Solara Minor by a nebular wave and subsequently discovered by the villagers of those parts? And were not countless other worthies devoured without mercy or appeal? Therefore let at least electronic memory pay silent tribute to these poor unburied multitudes, if no avenger can be found for them, one who will deal with that perpetrator according to the old sidereal laws."
All this Trurl read one day from a book, yellowed with age, which he chanced to obtain from a passing peddler, and he took it straightway to Klapaucius and read it a second time, aloud, from beginning to end, as he was much intrigued by the marvels described therein.
Klapaucius, a wise constructor who knew the Cosmos well and had no little acquaintance with suns and nebulae of various kinds, only smiled and nodded, saying:
"You don't believe, I hope, a single word of that rubbish?"
"And why shouldn't I believe it?" Trurl bridled. "Look, here's even an engraving, skillfully done, of the Anonymoid eating two photon schooners and hiding the booty in his cellar. Anyway, isn't there in fact a tunnel through a super-giant? Beth-el-Geuse, I mean. Surely you're not such an ignoramus in cosmography to doubt that possibility…"
"As for illustrations, why, I could draw you a dragon right now, with a thousand suns for each eye. Would you accept the sketch as proof of its existence?" Klapaucius replied. "And as for tunnels—first of all, the one of which you speak has a length of only two million miles, not some billions, and secondly, the star of which you speak is practically burnt out, and in the third place, intrastellar travel presents no hazard whatever, as you know perfectly well, having flown that way yourself. And as for the so-called Great Shroud Wastes, this is in reality nothing but a cosmic dump some ten kiloparsecs across, floating in the vicinity of Maeridia and Tetrarchida, and not around any Slopjaws or Gaussauronts, which don't exist anywhere; and it's dark there, yes, but simply because of all the garbage. And as for your Anonymoid, there's obviously no such thing! It isn't even a respectable, ancient myth, but some cheap yarn concocted out of a half-baked cranium."
Trurl bit his lip.
"You think the tunnel safe," he said, "because it was I who flew it. But you would be of an altogether different opinion had it been you, instead. But enough of the tunnel. As far as the Shroud and Anonymoid are concerned, it isn't my habit to settle such things with words. We'll go there, and then you'll see"—and he held up the heavy book—"you'll see what's true in here, and what is not!"
Klapaucius did his best to dissuade him, but when he saw that Trurl, stubborn as usual, had absolutely no intention of backing down from so singularly conceived a sally, he first declared that he would have nothing more to do with him, but before very long had joined in preparing for the voyage: he didn't wish to see his friend perish alone—somehow, two can look death in the eye more cheerfully than one.
Finally, having stocked the larder with plenty of provisions, for the way would lead through vast, barren regions (not as picturesque, to be sure, as the book depicted), they took off in their trusty ship. During the flight, they stopped now and then to ask directions, particularly when they had left far behind the territory with which they were familiar. Not much could be learned from the natives, however, for these spoke reliably only about their immediate surroundings—of things that lay beyond, where they had never ventured themselves, they gave the most absurd account, and in great detail, elaborating with both relish and a sense of dread. Klapaucius called such tales "corroded," having in mind the corrosis-sclerosion that attacks all aging brains.
But when they had come within five or six million light-blocks of the Black Wastes, they began to hear rumors of some robber-giant who called himself The PHT Pirate. No one they spoke to had actually seen him, nor knew what "PHT" was supposed to mean. Trurl thought this might be a distortion of "pH," which would indicate an ionic pirate with a high concentration and very base, but Klapaucius, more level-headed, preferred to refrain from entertaining such hypotheses. To all accounts, this pirate was an ill-tempered brute, as evidenced by the fact that, even after stripping his victims of everything, he was never satisfied, his greed being great and insatiable, and beat them long and cruelly before setting them free. For a moment or two the constructors considered whether they shouldn't arm themselves with blasters or blades before entering the Wastes, but soon concluded that the best weapon was their wits, sharpened in constructorship, subtle, agile and universal; so they set out just as they were.
It must be confessed that Trurl, as they traveled on, was bitterly disillusioned; the starry starlight, the fiery fires, the cavernous voids, the meteor reefs and shooting shoals were nowhere near as enchanting to the eye as promised in the ancient tome. There were only a few old stars about, and those were unimpressive, if not downright shabby; some barely flickered, like cinders in a heap of ashes, and some were completely dark and hardened on the surface, red veins glowing dully through cracks in their charred and wrinkled crusts. Of flaming jungles of combustion and mysterious vortices there was not a sign, nor had anyone ever heard of them, for the desolate waste was a place of tedium, and tedious in the extreme, by virtue of the fact that it was desolate, and a waste. As far as meteors went, they were everywhere, but in that rattling, clattering swarm was a good deal more flying refuse than honest magnetites, tektites or aerolites—for the simple reason that the Galactic Pole was only a stone's throw away, and the swirling dark currents sucked to this very spot, southward, prodigious quantities of flotsam and jetsam from the central zones of the Galaxy. Hence all the tribes and nations in the neighborhood spoke of this area not as any sort of Shroud, but as nothing more or less than what it was: a junkyard.
Trurl hid his disappointment as best he could, in order not to occasion sarcastic comments from Klapaucius, and steered straight into the Wastes. Immediately sand began to patter on the bow; every kind of stellar debris, spewed from prominences or supernovae, collected and caked up on the ship's hull, forming such a thick coat, that the constructors lost all hope of ever getting it clean again.
By now the stars had vanished in the general gloom, so the two proceeded gropingly, till suddenly their ship lurched, and all the furniture, pots and pans went flying; they felt themselves hurtling forward, faster and faster, then at last there was an awful crunch and the ship came to a stop, landing softly enough though at an angle, as if its nose had stuck in something doughy. They ran to the window, but couldn't see a thing, as it was pitch black outside—and now they heard someone banging, someone fearfully strong, whoever it was, for the very walls were buckling in. At this point Trurl and Klapaucius began to feel a little less confident in the power of their unarmed wits, but it was too late now, so they opened the hatch, since otherwise it would be forced from without and broken for good.
As they looked, someone stuck his face in the opening—a face so huge, that it was clearly out of the question for the rest of the body to climb in after it, and not only huge, but unspeakably hideous, studded up and down and every which way with bulging eyes, and the nose was a saw, and an iron hook served for the jaw. The face didn't move, pressed up against the open hatch, only the eyes darted back and forth, avidly examining everything, as if appraising whether or not the take was worth the trouble. Even someone far less intelligent than our constructors would have understood what that scrutiny meant, for it was unmistakable.
"Well?" said Trurl finally, exasperated by such shameless eyeing, which went on in silence. "What do you want, you unwashed mug?! I am Trurl, constructor and general omnipotentiary, and this is my friend Klapaucius, also of great renown, and we were flying by in our ship as tourists, so kindly remove your ugly muzzle and take us immediately out of this unsavory place—full of litter and rubbish, no doubt—and direct us to some clean, respectable sector, or we'll lodge a complaint and they'll have you broken down into little scrap—do you hear me, you scavenger, ragpicker, pack rat?!"
But the face said nothing, just looked and looked, as if calculating, making an estimate of how much.
"Listen here, you unmitigated freak," yelled Trurl, throwing all caution to the winds, though Klapaucius kept elbowing him to show some restraint, "we have no gold, no silver, no precious stones, so you let us go this instant, and above all cover up that oversized physiognomy of yours, for it's unspeakably hideous. And you"—he said, turning to Klapaucius—"stop jabbing me with that elbow! This is the way you have to talk to such types!"
"I have no use," suddenly said the face, turning its thousand glittering eyes on Trurl, "for gold or silver, and the way you have to talk to me is delicately and with respect, as I am a pirate with a Ph.D., well-educated and by nature extremely high-strung. Other guests have been here and needed sweetening up—and when I've given you a proper pounding too, why, you'll be positively dripping with good manners. My name is Pugg, I'm thirty arshins in every direction and it's true I rob, but in a manner that is modern and scientific, for I collect precious facts, genuine truths, priceless knowledge, and in general all information of value. And now, let's hand it over, otherwise I whistle! Very well then, I'll count to five—one, two, three…"
And at five, when they had handed him nothing, he let loose such a whistle, that their ears nearly flew off, and Klapaucius realized that the "PHT" of which the natives spoke with terror was indeed "Ph.D.," for the pirate had obviously studied at some higher institution, like the Criminal Academy. Trurl held his head and groaned—Pugg's whistle was fully commensurate with his size.
"We'll give you nothing!" he cried, while Klapaucius ran off to find some cotton. "And get your face out of here!"
"You don't like my face, maybe you'll like my hand," replied the pirate. "It's one huge humdinger of a hand and heavy as the devil! And here it comes!"
And indeed: the cotton Klapaucius brought was no longer needed, for the face had disappeared, and in its place was a paw, a paw to end all paws, with knots and knobs and shovel claws, and it rummaged and clutched, breaking tables and hutches and cupboards, till all the pots and pans came crashing down, and the paw chased Trurl and Klapaucius into the engine room, where they climbed up on top of the atomic pile and rapped its knuckles—pow! pow!—with a poker. This made the diplomaed pirate mad, and he put his face back in the hatch and said:
"Look, I strongly advise you to come to terms with me at once, otherwise I'll put you aside for later, at the very bottom of my storage bin, and cover you with garbage, and wedge you in with rocks, so you can't move, and you'll just sit there and slowly rust. So then, which is it to be?"
Trurl wouldn't hear of negotiating, but Klapaucius politely asked what exactly it was that His Doctoral Diplomahood wanted?
"Now you're talking," he said. "I gather rich mines of information, for such is my lifelong love and avocation, the result of a higher education and, I might add, a practical grasp of the situation, when you consider that, with the usual treasures untutored pirates like to hoard, there is not a blessed thing here one can buy. Information, on the other hand, satisfies one's thirst for knowledge, and it is well known besides, that everything that is, is information; and thus for centuries now I gather it, and will continue to do so, though it's true I'm not against a little gold or diamonds now and then, for they're pretty and decorative—but that's strictly on the side, as occasion warrants. Observe, however, that for false information, no less than for false coin, I give a good shellacking, since I 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 stochastical, 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 things and tripped, but finally pulled out an iron barrel, old and empty, put a tiny hole in it and hurried back, just as Trurl arrived, the Demon in his hand.
The air in the barrel was so foul, that one's nose wanted to hide when brought near the little opening, but the Demon didn't seem to mind; Trurl placed this mote of a mite astride the hole in the barrel, affixed a large roll of paper tape on the top and threaded it underneath the tiny diamond-tipped pen, which quivered eagerly, then began to scratch and scribble, clattering rat-tat, pit-pat, just like a telegraph, only a million times faster. From under this frantic apparatus the information tape slowly began to slide out, covered with words, onto the filthy cellar floor.
Pugg sat down next to the barrel, lifted the paper tape to his hundred eyes and read what the Demon had, with its informational net, managed to dredge up out of the eternal prancing and dancing of the atoms; those significant bits of knowledge so absorbed him, that he didn't even notice how the two constructors left the cellar in great haste, how they grabbed hold of the helm of their ship, pulled once, twice, and on the third time freed it from the mire in which the pirate had stuck them, then climbed aboard and blasted off as fast as they possibly could, for they knew that, though their Demon would work, it would work too well, producing a far greater wealth of information than Pugg anticipated. Pugg meanwhile sat propped up against the barrel and read, as that diamond pen which the Demon employed to record everything it learned from the oscillating atoms squeaked on and on, and he read about how exactly Harlebardonian wrigglers wriggle, and that the daughter of King Petrolius of Labondia is named Humpinella, and what Frederick the Second, one of the paleface kings, had for lunch before he declared war against the Gwendoliths, and how many electron shells an atom of thermionolium would have, if such an element existed, and what is the cloacal diameter of a small bird called the tufted twit, which is painted by the Wabian Marchpanes on their sacrificial urns, and also of the tripartite taste of the oceanic ooze on Polypelagid Diaphana, and of the flower Dybbulyk, that beats the Lower Malfundican hunters black and blue whenever they waken it at dawn, and how to obtain the angle of the base of an irregular icosahedron, and who was the jeweler of Gufus, the left-handed butcher of the Bovants, and the number of volumes on philately to be published in the year seventy thousand on Marinautica, and where to find the tomb of Cybrinda the Red-toed, who was nailed to her bed by a certain Clamonder in a drunken fit, and how to tell the difference between a bindlesnurk and an ordinary trundlespiff, and also who has the smallest lateral wumpet in the Universe, and why fan-tailed fleas won't eat moss, and how to play the game of Fratcher-My-Pliss and win, and how many snapdragon seeds there were in the turd into which Abroquian Phylminides stepped, when he stumbled on the Great Albongean Road eight miles outside the Valley of Symphic Sighs—and little by little his hundred eyes began to swim, and it dawned on him that all this information, entirely true and meaningful in every particular, was absolutely useless, producing such an ungodly confusion that his head ached terribly and his legs trembled. But the Demon of the Second Kind continued to operate at a speed of three hundred million facts per second, and mile after mile of tape coiled out and gradually buried the Ph.D. pirate beneath its windings, wrapping him, as it were, in a paper web, while the tiny diamond-tipped pen shivered and twitched like one insane, and it seemed to Pugg that any minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of things, things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he greedily read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib, the drinking songs of the Quaidacabondish and the sizes of bedroom slippers available on the continent of Cob, with pompons and without, and the number of hairs growing on each brass knuckle of the skew-beezered flummox, and the average width of the fontanel in indigenous stepinfants, and the litanies of the M'hot-t'ma-hon'h conjurers to rouse the reverend Blotto Ben-Blear, and the inaugural catcalls of the Duke of Zilch, and six ways to cook cream of wheat, and a good poison for uncles with goatees, and twelve types of forensic tickling, and the names of all the citizens of Foofaraw Junction beginning with the letter M, and the results of a poll of opinions on the taste of beer mixed with mushroom syrup…
And it grew dark before his hundred eyes, and he cried out in a mighty voice that he'd had enough, but Information had so swathed and swaddled him in its three hundred thousand tangled paper miles, that he couldn't move and had to read on about how Kipling would have written the beginning to his Second Jungle Book if he had had indigestion just then, and what thoughts come to unmarried whales getting on in years, and all about the courtship of the carrion fly, and how to mend an old gunny sack, and what a sprothouse is, and why we don't capitalize paris in plaster of paris or turkish in turkish bath, and how many bruises one can have at a single time. And then a long list of the differences between fiddle and faddle, not to be confused with twiddle and twaddle or tittle and tattle, then all the words that rhyme with "spinach," and what were the insults which Pope Urn of Pendora heaped upon Antipope Mlum of Porking, and who plays the eight-tone autocomb. In desperation he struggled to free himself from the paper coils and toils, but suddenly grew faint, for though he kicked and tore at the tape, he had too many eyes not to receive, with at least a few of them, more and more new bits and pieces of information, and so was forced to learn what authority the home guard exercises in Indochina, and why the Coelenterids of Fluxis constantly say they've had too much to drink, until he shut his eyes and sat there, rigid, overcome by that great flood of information, and the Demon continued to bind him with its paper strips. Thus was the pirate Pugg severely punished for his inordinate thirst for knowledge.
He sits there to this day, at the very bottom of his rubbage heap and bins of trash, covered with a mountain of paper, and in the dimness of that cellar the diamond pen still jumps and flickers like the purest flame, recording whatever the Demon of the Second Kind culls from dancing atoms in the rancid air that flows through the hole of the old barrel; and so poor Pugg, crushed beneath that avalanche of fact, learns no end of things about rickshaws, rents and roaches, and about his own fate, which has been related here, for that too is included in some section of the tape—as are the histories, accounts and prophecies of all things in creation, up until the day the stars burn out; and there is no hope for him, since this is the harsh sentence the constructors passed upon him for his pirately assault—unless of course the tape runs out, for lack of paper.