Moving Pictures

picture.” He turned the handle. It went clickaclicka , and the imps gibbered.
    “What did they do that for?” said Victor.
    “Ah,” said Gaffer, “ that’s because the handle also drives this little wheel with whips on. It’s the only way to get them to work fast enough. He’s a lazy little devil, your average imp. It’s all feedback, anyway. The faster you turn the handle, the faster the film goes by, the faster they have to paint. You got to get the speed just right. Very important job, handlemanning.”
    “But isn’t it all rather, well, cruel ?”
    Gaffer looked surprised. “Oh, no. Not really. I gets a rest every half an hour. Guild of Handlemen regulations.”
    He walked further along the bench, where another box stood with its back panel open. This time a cageful of sluggish-looking lizards blinked mournfully at Victor.
    “We ain’t very happy with this,” said Gaffer, “but it’s the best we can do. Your basic salamander, see, will lie in the desert all day, absorbing light, and when it’s frightened it excretes the light again. Self-defense mechanism, it’s called. So as the film goes past and the shutter here clicks backward and forward, their light goes out through the film and these lenses here and onto the screen. Basically very simple.”
    “How do you make them frightened?” said Victor.
    “You see this handle?”
    “Oh.”
    Victor prodded the picture box thoughtfully.
    “Well, all right,” he said. “So you get lots of little pictures. And you wind them fast. So we ought to see a blur, but we don’t.”
    “Ah,” said Gaffer, tapping the side of his nose. “Handlemen’s Guild secret, that is. Handed down from initiate to initiate,” he added importantly.
    Victor gave him a sharp look. “I thought people’d only been making movies for a few months,” he said.
    Gaffer had the decency to look shifty. “Well, OK, at the moment we’re more sort of handing it round ,” he admitted. “But give us a few years and we’ll soon be handing it down don’t touch that! ”
    Victor jerked his hand back guiltily from the pile of cans on the bench.
    “That’s actual film in there,” said Gaffer, pushing them gently to one side. “You got to be very careful with it. You mustn’t get it too hot because it’s made of octo-cellulose, and it don’t like sharp knocks either.”
    “What happens to it, then?” said Victor, staring at the cans.
    “Who knows? No one’s ever lived long enough to tell us.” Gaffer looked at Victor’s expression and grinned.
    “Don’t worry about that ,” he said. “You’ll be in front of the moving-picture box.”
    “Except that I don’t know how to act,” said Victor.
    “Do you know how to do what you’re told?” said Gaffer.
    “What? Well. Yes. I suppose so.”
    “That’s all you need, lad. That’s all you need. That and big muscles.”
    They stepped out into the searing sunlight and headed for Silverfish’s shed.
    Which was occupied.
    Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler was meeting the movies.

    “What I thought,” said Dibbler, “is that, well, look. Something like this.”
    He held up a card.
    On it was written, in shaky handwriting:

    After thys perfromans, Why Notte Visit
Harga’s Hous of Ribs,
For the Best inne Hawt Cuisyne

    “What’s hawt cuisyne?” said Victor.
    “It’s foreign,” said Dibbler. He scowled at Victor. Someone like Victor under the same roof wasn’t part of the plan. He’d been hoping to get Silverfish alone. “Means food,” he added.
    Silverfish stared at the card.
    “What about it?” he said.
    “Why don’t you,” said Dibbler, speaking very carefully, “hold this card up at the end of the performance?”
    “Why should we do that?”
    “Because someone like Sham Harga will pay you a lo—quite a lot of money,” said Dibbler.
    They stared at the card.
    “I’ve eaten at Harga’s House of Ribs,” said Victor. “I wouldn’t say it’s the best. Not the best. A long way from being the best.” He thought for a bit. “About as far away from being the best as you can get, in fact.”
    “That doesn’t matter,” said Dibbler sharply. “That’s not important .”
    “But,” Silverfish said, “if we went around saying Harga’s House of Ribs was the best place in the city, what would all the other restaurants think?”
    Dibbler leaned across the table.
    “They’d think,” he said, “‘Why didn’t we think of it first?’”
    He sat back. Silverfish flashed him a look of bright