Thud! (Discworld 34)

"It spins once every 6.9 seconds but the torque is immense! It broke the clamp! What powers it?"

"No one seems to know," said Carrot. "In Uberwald-"

"Excuse me, what is this about?" said Lord Vetinari, holding out a hand imperiously.

The man glanced at him and then turned to Carrot. "Who"s this?" he said.

"Lord Vetinari, ruler of the city, may I present Mr Pony of the Artificers" Guild?" said Carrot quickly. "Please let his lordship see the Axle, Mr Pony."

"Thank you," said Vetinari. He took the thing, which looked very like two cubes, each about six inches on a side, joined together on one face, like a pair of dice joined at the sixes. In relation to the other, one turned - very, very slowly.

"Oh," he said flatly. "A mechanism. How nice."

"Nice?" said Pony. "Don"t you understand? It won"t stop turning." Carrot and Pony looked expectantly at the Patrician, who said:

"And that"s a good thing, is it?"

Carrot coughed. "Yes, sir. One of these drives one of the biggest mines in Uberwald. All the pumps, the fans that move the air, the trucks that haul the ore, the bellows for the forges, the elevators ... everything. Just one of those. It"s another type of Device, like the cubes. We don"t know how they"re made, they"re very rare, but the other three I"ve heard of have not stopped working for hundreds of years. They don"t use fuel, they don"t need anything. They appear to be millions of years old. No one knows what made them. They just turn."

"How interesting," said Vetinari. "Hauling trucks? Underground, you say?"

"Oh, yes," said Carrot. "Even with miners in."

"I shall give this some thought," said Vetinari, avoiding Mr Pony"s outstretched hand. "And what could we make it do in this city?"

He and Carrot turned questioning faces to Mr Pony, who shrugged and said, "Everything?"

Plink! went a drop of water on to the head of the very, very late King Bloodaxe.

"How long are we going to have to do this, sarge?" said Nobby, as they watched the line of visitors shuffle past the dead kings.

"Mister Vimes has sent for another squad from home," said Fred Colon, shifting from one foot to the other. It seemed quite warm when you first came into the cave, but after a while the clamminess could get a man down. He reflected that Nobby wasn"t affected by this, being blessed by Nature with natural clammy.

"It"s starting to give me the creeps, sarge," said Nobby, indicating the kings. "If that hand moves, I"m going to scream."

"Think of it as Being There, Nobby."

"I"ve always been somewhere, sarge:

"Yeah, but when they comes to write the history books they"ll-" Fred Colon paused for thought. He had to admit, they probably wouldn"t mention him and Nobby. "Well, your Tawneee will be proud of you, anyway."

"I think that"s not to be, sarge," said Nobby sadly. "She"s a nice girl, but I think I"m goin" to have to let her down lightly."

"Surely not!"

"fraid so, sarge. She cooked me dinner the other day. She tried to make Distressed Pudding like my ol mum used to make."

Fred Colon smiled all the way from his stomach. "Ah, yes. No one could distress a pudding like your ol mum, Nobby."

"It was awful, Fred," said Nobby, hanging his head. "As for her Slumpie, well, I do not wish to go there. She is not a girl who knows her way around a stove."

"She"s more of a pole person, Nobby, that is true."

"Exactly. An" I thought, ol Hammerhead, well, you might never be sure which way she was lookin; but her buttered clams, well ... He sighed.

"There"s a thought to keep a man warm on a cold night," Fred agreed.

"An, y"know, these days, when she hits me with a wet fish, it doesn"t sting like it used to," Nobby went on. "I think we are reaching an understanding."