The Fifth Elephant

Eventually he reached a door, which he unlocked.

There was a large attic room beyond, suddenly airy and bright and cheerful with sunlight from the windows in the roof. It seemed to be a cross between a workshop and a storeroom. Several bird skeletons hung from the ceiling and there were a few other bones on the worktables, along with coils of wire and metal springs and tubes of paint and more tools, many of them probably unique, than you normally saw in any one place. Only a narrow bed, wedged between a thing like a loom with wings and a large bronze statue, suggested that someone actually lived here. They were clearly someone who was obsessively interested in everything.

What interested Lord Vetinari right now was the device. all by itself on a table in the middle of the room. It looked like a collection of copper balls balanced on one another. Steam was hissing gently from a few rivets, and occasionally the device went blup

'Your lordship!'

Vetinari looked around. A hand was waving desperately at him from behind an upturned bench.

And something made him look up, as well. The ceiling above him was crusted with some brownish substance, which hung from it like stalactites.

Blup

With quite surprising speed the Patrician was behind the bench. Leonard of Quirm smiled at him from underneath his home-made protective helmet.

'I do apologize,' he said. 'I'm afraid I wasn't expecting anyone to come in. I'm sure it will work this time, however.'

Blup

'What is it?' said Vetinari.

Blup

'I'm not quite sure, but I hope it's a—'

And then it was, suddenly, too noisy to talk.

Leonard of Quirm never dreamed that he was a prisoner. If anything, he was grateful to Vetinari for giving him this airy work space, and regular meals, and laundry, and protecting him from those people who for some reason always wanted to take his perfectly innocent inventions, designed for the betterment of mankind, and use them for despicable purposes. It was amazing how many of them there were—both the people and the inventions. It was as if all the genius of a civilization had funnelled into one head which was, therefore, in a constant state of highly inventive spin. Vetinari often speculated upon the fate of mankind should Leonard keep his mind on one thing for more than an hour or so.

The rushing noise died away. Blup.

Leonard peered cautiously over the bench and smiled broadly. 'Ali! Happily, we appear to have achieved coffee,' he said.

'Coffee?'

Leonard walked over to the table and pulled a small lever on the device. A light . brown foam cascaded into a waiting cup with a noise like a clogged drain.

'Different coffee,' he said. 'Very fast coffee. I rather think you will like it. I'm calling this the Very-Fast-Coffee machine.'

'And that's today's invention, is it?' said Vetinari.

'Well, yes. It would have been a scale model of a device for reaching the moon and other celestial bodies, but I was thirsty.'

'How fortunate.' Lord Vetinari carefully removed an experimental pedal-powered shoepolishing machine from a chair and sat down. 'And I've brought you some more little... messages.'

Leonard almost clapped his hands. 'Oh, good! And I've finished the other ones you gave me last night.'

Lord Vetinari carefully removed a moustache of frothy coffee from his upper lip. 'I beg your...? All of them? You broke the cyphers on all those messages from Uberwald?'

'Oh, they were quite easy after I'd finished the new device,' said Leonard, rummaging through the piles of paper on a bench and handing the Patrician several closely written sheets. 'But once you realize that there are only a limited number of birth dates a person can have, and that people do tend to think the same way, cyphers are really not very hard.'

'You mentioned a new device?' said the Patrician.

'Oh, yes. The... thingy. It's all very crude at the moment, but it suffices for these simple codes.'

Leonard pulled a sheet off something vaguely rectangular. It seemed to Vetinari to be all wooden wheels and long thin spars which, he saw when he moved closer, were inscribed thickly with letters and numbers. A number of the wheels were not round but oval or heartshaped or some other curious curve. When Leonard turned a handle, the whole thing moved with a complex oiliness quite disquieting in something merely mechanical.

'And what are you calling it?'

'Oh, you know me and names, my lord. I think of it as the Engine for the Neutralizing of Information by the Generation of Miasmic Alphabets, but I appreciate that it does not exactly roll off the tongue. Er...'

'Yes, Leonard?'

'Er... it's not... wrong, is it—reading other people's messages?'