Moving pictures

'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 round 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 grey 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 so cruel to a poor dumb animal, Victor flicked the sausage downwards. The dog caught and swallowed it in one economical movement.

More people were drifting into the plaza now. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler had wandered off and was doing a busy trade with those latenight revellers who were too drunk to prevent optimism triumphing over experience; anyone who bought a meal at one a.m. after a7 night's revelling was probably going to be riotously ill anyway, so they might as well have something to show for it.

Victor was gradually surrounded by a large crowd. It didn't consist solely of humans.

He recognized, a few feet away, the big rangy shape of Detritus, an ancient troll well known to all the students as someone who found employment anywhere people needed to be thrown very hard out of places for money. The troll noticed him, and tried to wink. This involved closing both eyes, because Detritus wasn't good at complicated things. It was widely believed that, if Detritus could be taught to read and write sufficiently to sit down and do an intelligence test, he'd prove to be slightly less intelligent than the chair.

Silverfish picked up a megaphone.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' he said, 'you are privileged tonight to witness a turning point in the history of the Century of-' he lowered the megaphone and Victor heard him whisper urgently to one of his assistants, 'What century is this? Is it?' and then raised the megaphone again and continued in the original plummily optimistic tones '-Century of the Fruitbat! No less than the birth of Moving Pictures! Pictures that move without magic!'

He waited for the applause. There wasn't any. The crowd just watched him. You needed to do more than end your sentences with exclamation marks to get a round of applause from an Ankh-Morpork crowd.

Slightly dispirited, he went on, 'Seeing is Believing, they say! But, ladies and gentlemen, you will not believe the Evidence of Your Own Eyes! What you are about to witness is a Triumph of Natural Science! A Marvel of the Age! A Discovery of World, nay, dare I say, Universe-Shaking Proportions!-'

' 'S got to be better than that bloody sausage, anyway,' said a quiet voice by Victor's knee.