"Stanislaw Lem - The Offer Of King Krool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

escape on. We give it ears, a tail, paws, so ¹one will suspect, and they can be easily
jettisoned on takeoff. What do you think of that? We get off scot-free and thumb our noses
at the King!”
“And if the King has planted a real constructor among our servants, which is not unlikely,
then it's all over and into the pit with us. Besides, running away—no, it just doesn't suit me.
It's him or us, Trurl, you can't get around it.”
“Yes, I suppose a spy could be a constructor too,” said Trurl with a sigh. “What then can
we do, in the name of the Great Comet?! How about—a photoelectric phantom?”
“You mean, a mirage? Have the King hunt a mirage? ¹thanks!
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 nth 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 (F1) 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 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
eigen transformations, 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 ¹idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting over and over,
“Hurrah! Victory!!”