the school

The city of Lamster sank into an unusual darkness. The streets, true, were nicely lit, except the roof walk. There only first, second, third, fifth, seventh, eleventh, thirteenth... and so on to the end, only some lamps were lit. A girl and a boy walked, chattered, admired the sunset and

-I don't get this lamp decoration. Sunset is nicer.

-Maybe, but sunset is predictable.

-So are these lamps.

-Are they? So, is 133 on?

-Well that's simple, at least... wait, you got me confused now... gosh, there is some system! Just give me a little time.

-Don't you tell me you know numbers. No offence, but to me it always seemed like a pretty perverted way of amusement. It's not for humans!

-You're disturbing me! Wait a little, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7... and why not 9? Ah, 3 * 3 = 9, then we go 11, 13, 17, just like I thought, 15 got skipped, 19... where did you disappear? Hey, see us tomorrow! Where was I? Aha, 23, oho, up to 29 and right on to 31. Let's see. Terminal?

-On service.

-Now look at it, it works, and everyone says city's malfunct. Why did you turn only these lamps on?

-To see if anyone will notice.

-C'mon, everyone noticed; but why only those whose numbers can't get divided with anything?

-Those are called prime numbers.

-It seems somewhere I have already... you didn't tell me why exactly only those?

-That was the thing to notice.

-Oh, so. How do I foresee in advance which number is prime?

-There are more ways. Sieve of Erathostenes, for one.

-Lets only those numbers pass?

-Yes, but not at once. First those which can be divided by two, then by three, by five and so on.

-Tell me more.

-You are curious about this?

-Well, er... you heard me before this.

-I don't listen up.

-And how do you know when I call you, if you don't listen?

-You tweak your voice a little. You learned it when you were a kid.

-I don't think of that anymore. Will you tell me?

-Yes. How old are you?

-Fifteen.

-Can you dedicate next five years to me?

 

 

 

most thankful to Sting for the title, to the grand masters for the City, and to Beta for constructive mockery. I hope this has enlarged the global collection of general items.
written in mid-eighties in INES editor on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum; retyped into Atari's 1ST Word in february 1991, transferred into Ventura Professional using a program written in FoxPro 1.02 on 30th of March 1991. Uploaded to Sezam 1992, and downloaded back when the original vanished with a crashed disk. Sent to Oreska BBS and from there to Boban Knežević's contest before any copy went to print. According to Oreska's sysop (username broker), won the 2nd prize (confirmed later by Knežević). By the end of '94 transferred to Word 2.0 somewhere in Hungary. Eventually, on 25th of January 97 transferred to .html format using a couple of macros done in Word 7.0, and finished up in Word 97

The first English version done in Netscape Composer 4.03, finished 4th of February 98. Translated by the author himself, don't judge the language too hard. The layout of this version was redesigned in FrontPage 2000, and the translation was (hopefully) slightly improved. Almost done January 17th 2000, but then in November discovered that FrontPage messed things up, and restyled it almost manually, keeping the HTML pure and systematically deleting any of the unwanted stylesheet and other stuff.