Moving Pictures

Ankh-Morpork. As a city, it had some of the most accomplished spectators in the universe. They’d watch anything, especially if there was any possibility of anyone getting hurt in an amusing way.
    “Why don’t you stay for the show?” said Silverfish, and hurried off.
    An alchemist. Well, everyone knew that alchemists were a little bit mad, thought Victor. It was perfectly normal.
    Who’d want to spend their time moving pictures? Most of them looked all right where they were.
    “Sausages inna bun! Get them while they’re hot!” bellowed a voice by his ear. He turned.
    “Oh, hallo, Mr. Dibbler,” he said.
    “Evening, lad. Want to get a nice hot sausage down you?”
    Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything .
    “Special rate for students,” Dibbler whispered conspiratorially. “Fifteen pence, and that’s cutting my own throat.” He flapped the frying pan lid strategically, raising a cloud of steam.
    The piquant scent of fried onions did its wicked work.
    “Just one, then,” Victor said warily.
    Dibbler flicked a sausage out of the pan and snatched it into a bun with the expertise of a frog snapping a mayfly.
    “You won’t live to regret it,” he said cheerfully,
    Victor nibbled a bit of onion. That was safe enough.
    “What’s all this?” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the flapping screen.
    “Some kind of entertainment,” said Dibbler. “Hot sausages! They’re lovely!” He lowered his voice again to its normal conspiratorial hiss.
    “All the rage in the other cities, I hear,” he added. “Some sort of moving pictures. They’ve been trying to get it right before coming to Ankh-Morpork.”
    They watched Silverfish and a couple of associates fumble technically with the box on the tripod. White light suddenly appeared at a circular orifice on the front of it, and illuminated the screen. There was a half-hearted cheer from the crowd.
    “Oh,” said Victor. “I see . Is that all? It’s just plain old shadow play. That’s all it is. My uncle used to do it to amuse me. You know? You kind of move your hands in front of the light and the shadows make a kind of silhouettey picture.”
    “Oh, yeah,” said Dibbler uncertainly. “Like ‘Big Elephant,’ or ‘Bald Eagle.’ My grandad used to do that sort of stuff.”
    “Mainly my uncle did ‘Deformed Rabbit,’” said Victor.
    “He wasn’t very good at it, you see. It used to get pretty embarrassing. We’d all sit around desperately guessing things like ‘Surprised Hedgehog’ or ‘Rabid Stoat’ and he’d go off to bed in a sulk because we hadn’t guessed he was really doing ‘Lord Henry Skipps and His Men beating the Trolls at the Battle of Pseudopolis.’ I can’t see what’s so special about shadows on a screen.”
    “From what I hear it’s not like that,” said Dibbler. “I sold one of the men a Jumbo Sausage Special earlier on, and he said it’s all down to showing pictures very fast. Sticking lots of pictures together and showing them one after another. Very, very fast, he said.”
    “Not too fast,” said Victor severely. “You wouldn’t be able to see them go past if they were too fast.”
    “He said that’s the whole secret, not seeing ’em go past,” said Dibbler. “You have to see ’em all at once, or something.”
    “They’d all be blurred,” said Victor. “Didn’t you ask him about that?”
    “Er, no,” said Dibbler. “Point of fact, he had to rush off just then. Said he felt a bit odd.”
    Victor looked thoughtfully at the remnant of his sausage in a bun and, as he did so, he was aware of being stared at in his turn.
    He looked down. There was a dog sitting by his feet.
    It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically gray but with patches of brown, white and black in outlying areas, and it was staring.
    It was certainly the most penetrating stare Victor had ever seen. It wasn’t menacing or fawning. It was just very slow and very thorough, as though the dog was memorizing details so that it could give a full description to the authorities later on.
    When it was sure it had his full attention, it transferred its gaze to the sausage.
    Feeling wretched at being