Free Lem, Stanislaw by The Cyberiad [v1.0] [htm] Page A

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    do, in the name of the Great Comet?! How about—a photoelectric
    phantom?"
    "You mean, a mirage? Have the
    King hunt a mirage? No thanks! After an hour or two of that, he'd
    come straight here and make phantoms of us!"
    Again they were silent. Finally Trurl
    said:
    "The only way out of our
    difficulty, as far as I can see, is to have the beast
abduct
the King, and then—"
    "You don't have to say another
    word. Yes, that's not at all a bad idea… Then for the ransom
    we—and haven't you noticed, old boy, that the orioles here are
    a deeper orange than on Maryland IV?" concluded Klapaucius, for
    just then some servants were bringing silver lamps out on the
    veranda. "There's still a problem though," he continued
    when they were alone again. "Assuming the beast can do what you
    say, how will we be able to negotiate with the prisoner if we're
    sitting in a dungeon ourselves?"
    "You have a point there,"
    said Trurl. "We'll have to figure some way around that…
    The main thing, however, is the algorithm!"
    "Any child knows that! What's a
    beast without an algorithm?"
    So they rolled up their sleeves and
    sat down to experiment—by simulation, that is
    mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King
    Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the
    equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping.
    Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals
    beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite
    series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to
    the
n
th power, but the King so belabored it with
    differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier
    coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the
    ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King
    and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig
    from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work
    and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing
    their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical
    ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very
    paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel
    coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and
    logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a
    field of irrational numbers (F 1 ) and smote it so
    grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but
    the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an
n
-dimensional
    orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming
    factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But
    the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his
    impervious parameters, took his increment Δ
k
to
    infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling
    through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared
    for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew
    like mad through transcendental functions and double
    eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the
    King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up,
    danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to
    shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the
    chandelier-—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated
    into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea
    why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, "Hurrah!
    Victory!!"
    Well after midnight, the Leyden jug
    from which the constructors had on occasion refreshed themselves
    in the course of their labors was quietly taken to the headquarters
    of the King's secret police, where its false bottom was opened and a
    tiny tape recorder removed. This the experts switched on and listened
    to eagerly, but the rising sun found them totally unenlightened
    and looking haggard. One voice, for example, would say:
    "Well? Is the King ready?"
    "Right!"
    "Where'd you put him? Over