The Fifth Elephant

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 homemade 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 is 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 funneled 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.
    “Ah! 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 shoe polishing machine from a chair and sat down. “And I have brought you some more little…messages.”
    Leonard almost clapped his hands.
    “Oh, good! And I have finished the other ones you gave me last night.”
    Lord Vetinari carefully removed a mustache of frothy coffee from his upper lip. “I beg your…? All of them? You broke the ciphers on all those messages from Uberwald?”
    “Oh, they were quite easy after I had 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, ciphers are really not very hard.”
    “You mentioned a new device?” said the Patrician.
    “Oh yes. The…thingy. It is 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 heart shaped 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