"WAIT! WAIT !" Beelzebub interrupted. "What you have just been describing must surely be that ephemeral idea that the strange three-brained beings breeding on the planet Earth called 'perpetual motion,' for the sake of which at one time great numbers of them went quite 'mad' or even perished.
"It once happened on that ill-fated planet that somebody got the 'crazy notion' into his head that he could invent a 'mechanism' that would run forever without requiring any material from the outside.
"This notion so took everybody's fancy that most of the crackpots of that peculiar planet began thinking about it and trying to produce this 'miracle'. How many of them had to pay for this ephemeral idea with all the material and spiritual welfare that they had previously acquired at great cost!'
"For one reason or another, they were all quite determined to invent what they imagined would be a 'simple matter.'
"Whenever external conditions permitted, many of them gave themselves up to the search for this perpetual motion, without any inner data for such work, some relying upon their 'knowledge,' others upon 'luck,' but most of them driven by an already full-blown psychopathy.
"In short, to invent perpetual motion became the 'rage' there, and every crank felt obliged to be interested in this question.
"I was once in a town where a large number of 'models' and all kinds of 'descriptions' of proposed mechanisms for this perpetual motion had been collected.
"What could not be found there? What ingenious and complicated machines did I not see? In any single one of these mechanisms there were more ideas and 'wiseacrings' than in all the laws of world-creation and world-existence.
"I noticed at the time that in these innumerable models and plans of proposed mechanisms, the idea of using what is called the 'force of weight' predominated. The idea was this: a complicated mechanism was designed to lift a 'certain weight,' which was then supposed to fall, and by its fall to set the whole mechanism in motion, and this motion would again lift the weight, and so on without end.
"The result of all this was that thousands of these unfortunates were shut up in 'lunatic asylums,' while thousands more, lost in this dream, completely neglected to fulfill even those being-duties that had somehow been established there in the course of many centuries, or else fulfilled them in the worst possible way.
"I don't know how it would all have ended if some quite demented being with one foot already in the grave, an 'old dotard,' as they say, who had somehow acquired a certain authority, had not proved by 'calculations' known only to himself that it was absolutely impossible to invent 'perpetual motion.'
"Now, my dear Captain, after your explanation, I can understand very well how the cylinder invented by the Archangel Hariton works. It is the very thing those unfortunates dreamed of.
