The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem

master electrician who ran a clinic in the city; it was from him that I learned—for he did, though rarely, speak about his patients—that robots do on occasion go mad, and that the most serious of the persecution manias is the conviction that one is a man. Moreover—as I gathered from his words, though he never actually came out and said it—there had been a significant increase in the number of such cases of late.
    I did not however relay these bits of information to Earth because, first, they seemed too trivial, and secondly, I wasn’t particularly eager to go marching back over the mountains to where I’d left my rocket, which held the transmitter. One fine morning, just as I was finishing my calf (my host supplied me with one each evening, convinced that nothing in the world could give me greater pleasure), the entire house reverberated to a violent banging at the gate. My fears, it turned out, were only too well justified. It was the police—that is, the halberdiers. They placed me under arrest and, without a single word, led me out to the street before the eyes of my petrified host and hostess. I was shackled, put into a van and driven off to prison, where a hostile crowd already stood at the entrance, hissing and booing. They locked me in a separate cell. When the door was slammed shut behind me, I sat on my metal mattress with a loud sigh. A sigh couldn’t hurt me now. For a while I tried to figure out just how many prisons it had been now, in which I’d sat in various regions of the Galaxy, but I kept losing count. Something was lying at the foot of the mattress. A pamphlet on the detection of mucilids—had it been put there maliciously, to mock me? I opened it without thinking. First I read about how the upper portion of the mucilid trunk moves in conjunction with the so-called phenomenon of breathing, and how one can determine whether the hand, extended in greeting, is doughy, and if from the facial opening there isn’t a slight breeze. When agitated—the passage concluded—the mucilid secretes a watery fluid, mainly through the forehead.
    It was accurate enough. I was indeed secreting that watery fluid. On the face of it, cosmic exploration does seem a bit repetitious, viz. those abovementioned and perpetually recurring—as if they represented an unavoidable aspect of the enterprise—sojourns in jail, whether interstellar, planetary, or even nebular, but my situation had never been so dismal as now. Around noon a guard brought me a bowl of warmed-over mineral oil, in which there floated a few ball bearings. I asked for something more nourishing, inasmuch as I had already been unmasked, but he only clinked ironically and left without a word. I began to pound the door, demanding a lawyer. No one answered. Towards evening, when I had eaten the last crumb of a biscuit I’d discovered inside my armor, a key scraped in the lock and into the cell walked a squat automaton with a thick leather briefcase.
    “Corsed be ye, mussilid!” he said, then added: “I am your defendour.”
    “Do you always greet your clients in this manner?” I asked, taking a seat.
    He also sat, clattering. He was hideous. The plates across his abdomen had worked completely loose.
    “Mussilids, aye,” he said with conviction. “Tis only owt of a loyaltee to my professioun—nat to yow, ye shameles feend—that I exersyse my skills in your defens, creetur! Peraventure the punysshment that awaytethee kan be lightened to but a single desmantelynge.”
    “What are you talking about?” I said. “I can’t be dismantled.”
    “Ha!” he creaked. “That ys what you thynke! And nowe telle me what ye hav yhidde up your sleef, O yvel slyme!!”
    “Your name?” I asked.
    “Klaustron Fredrax,”
    “Tell me, Klaustron Fredrax, what am I accused of?”
    “Of mussiliditee,” he replied at once. “A capitall offence. And also: of the intent to werken tresoun upon us, of espiaillement on behaff of Gookum, of blasphemous