The Fifth Elephant (Discworld 24)

"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?"

Vetinari sighed. The worried man in front of him, who was so considerate of life that he carefully dusted around spiders, had once invented a device that fired lead pellets with tremendous speed and force. He thought it would be useful against dangerous animals. He"d designed a thing that could destroy whole mountains. He thought it would be useful in the mining industries. Here was a man who, in his tea break, would doodle an instrument for unthinkable mass destruction in the blank spaces around an exquisite drawing of the fragile beauty of the human smile. With a list of numbered parts. And if you taxed him with it he"d say: ah, but such a thing would make war completely impossible, you see? Because no one would dare use it.

Leonard brightened up as a thought apparently struck him. "But, on the other hand, the more we know about one another the more we will learn to understand. Now, you asked me to construct some more cyphers for you. I"m sorry, my lord, but I must have misunderstood your requirements. What was wrong with the first ones I did?"

Vetinari sighed. "I"m afraid they were unbreakable, Leonard."

"But surely - "

"It"s hard to explain," said Vetinari, aware that what to him were the lucid waters of politics were so much mud to Leonard. "These new ones you have are... merely devilishly difficult?"