Free Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem Page B

the computer.
    “No, no! In that case don’t do anything, I beg you, what good will it be to have more and more terrible dragons on the Moon when I don’t want any there at all?”
    “Ah, now that’s a different matter,” the computer replied. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? You see how illogically you express yourself? One moment… I must think.”
    And it churred and hummed, and chuffed and chuckled, and finally said:
    “We make an antimoon with an antidragon, place it in the Moon’s orbit (here something went snap inside), sit around the fire and sing: Oh I’m a robot full of fun, water doesn’t scare me none, I dives right in, I gives a grin, tra la the livelong day!! ”
    “You speak strangely,” said the King. “What does the antimoon have to do with that song about the funny robot?”
    “What funny robot?” asked the computer. “Ah, no, no, I made a mistake, something feels wrong inside, I must have blown a tube.” The King began to look for the trouble, finally found the burnt-out tube, put in a new one, then asked the computer about the antimoon.
    “What antimoon?” asked the computer, which meanwhile had forgotten what it said before. “I don’t know anything about an antimoon … one moment, I have to give this thought.”
    It hummed, it huffed, and it said:
    “We create a general theory of the slaying of electrodragons, of which the lunar dragon will be a special case, its solution trivial.”
    “Well, create such a theory!” said the King.
    “To do this I must first create various experimental dragons.”
    “Certainly not! No thank you!” exclaimed the King. “A dragon wants to deprive me of my throne, just think what might happen if you produced a swarm of them!”
    “Oh? Well then, in that case we must resort to other means. We will use a strategic variant of the method of successive approximations. Go and telegraph the dragon that you will give it the throne on the condition that it perform three mathematical operations, really quite simple…”
    The King went and telegraphed, and the dragon agreed. The King returned to the computer.
    “Now,” it said, “here is the first operation: tell it to divide itself by itself!”
    The King did this. The electrosaur divided itself by itself, but since one electrosaur over one electrosaur is one, it remained on the Moon and nothing changed.
    “Is this the best you can do?!” cried the King, running into the vault with such haste, that his slippers fell off. “The dragon divided itself by itself, but since one goes into one once, nothing changed!”
    “That’s all right, I did that on purpose, the operation was to divert attention,” said the computer. “And now tell it to extract its root!” The King telegraphed to the Moon, and the dragon began to pull, push, pull, push, until it crackled from the strain, panted, trembled all over, but suddenly something gave—and it extracted its own root! The King went back to the computer.
    “The dragon crackled, trembled, even ground its teeth, but extracted the root and threatens me still!” he shouted from the doorway. “What now, my old… I mean, Your Ferromagneticity?!”
    “Be of stout heart,” it said. “Now go tell it to subtract itself from itself!”
    The King hurried to his royal bedchamber, sent the telegram, and the dragon began to subtract itself from itself, taking away its tail first, then legs, then trunk, and finally, when it saw that something wasn’t right, it hesitated, but from its own momentum the subtracting continued, it took away its head and became zero, in other words nothing; the electrosaur was no more!
    “The electrosaur is no more,” cried the joyful King, bursting into the vault. “Thank you, old computer … many thanks … you have worked hard … you have earned a rest, so now I will disconnect you.”
    “Not so fast, my dear,” the computer replied. “I do the job and you want to disconnect me, and you no longer call me Your