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luggage in the trunk and set off down a highway full of traffic, and still said nothing, because I had asked the professor not to tell me our destination. Overcaution, perhaps, but I would stick to that policy until a better one suggested itself. And he didn’t need to say anything, because after more than two hours on back roads we arrived at a large white building surrounded by pavilions, palms, and cacti, and I knew at once that my trusted friend had brought me to an insane asylum. Not a bad place to hide, I thought. In the car, I had looked over my shoulder now and then to see if we were being followed, but it never entered my head that I was such an important, valuable person that they would follow me by a method less conventional, not found in any spy novel. From a modern satellite not only can a car be observed but wooden matches counted on a garden table. That never entered my head—more precisely the half of my head that could understand without sign language the mess Ijon Tichy had got himself into.

Briefing
    The worst mess in my life. I got into it quite by accident, while trying to see Professor Tarantoga after my return from Encia. He wasn’t at home; he’d flown to Australia for some reason. He’d be back in a few days. Since he had a special kind of primrose that demanded constant watering, he asked his cousin to apartment-sit for him. Not the cousin who collects public-toilet graffiti around the world; another cousin, a paleobotanist. Tarantoga has a lot of cousins. I didn’t know this one. When I saw that he was in a bathrobe and had just risen from a typewriter, I apologized and turned to leave, but he said no, I wasn’t interrupting anything, I had arrived just in time: he was writing a difficult, trail-blazing book and he always liked to marshal his thoughts by telling someone, even a stranger, the idea of the chapter at hand. I feared he was writing some botanical treatise and would fill my head with weeds, bulbs, and perennials, but thank heaven it wasn’t like that. It was actually quite interesting. From the dawn of history, he said, in the savage tribes there were unconventional individuals, no doubt considered mad, who tried to eat whatever their eyes fell on: leaves, sprouts, stems, roots both fresh and dried, and all kinds of vegetation. They must have dropped like flies because so many plants are poisonous. Which didn’t deter the next generation of nonconformists, who carried on this dangerous work. It is only thanks to them that we know today how to use laurel leaves and nutmeg, that asparagus and spinach are worth the trouble, and that it’s better to give wild berries a wide berth. Tarantoga’s cousin acquainted me with the fact, ignored by world science, that to find which plant was the best to smoke, these Sisyphuses of antiquity had to gather, dry, ferment, roll, and turn into ash a good forty-seven thousand varieties of leaf before they discovered tobacco, because there was no sign on any sprig or branch that said this one will be good for cigars and snuff. Over many centuries whole armies of these prehistoric saints took into their mouths, bit, chewed, tasted, and swallowed everything that grew by a fence or from a tree, and this in every conceivable way, cooked and raw, with water and without, strained and unstrained, and in countless combinations, thanks to which we know today that cabbage goes with pork and beets with rabbit. The fact that in certain regions it’s not beets but red cabbage that goes with hare Tarantoga’s cousin attributes to the early rise of nationalities. One cannot imagine a Slav, for example, without borscht. Each nationality had its own experimentalists, and when they finally decided on beets, its descendants remained loyal to beets even though their neighbors turned up their noses at that vegetable. Tarantoga’s cousin plans to write another book, later, about cultural differences in gastronomy and the influence of national character (the