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He walked further along the bench,where anotherbox
stood with its back panel open. This time a cageful of sluggishlooking 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-defence mechanism, it's called. So as the film goes past and the shutter here clicks backwards and forwards, their light goes out through the film and these lenses here and on to 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 gri
'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
Harp's Hous of Ribs,
For the Best i
'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 Harp 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 incomprehension.
'Just run that past me one more time, will you?' he said.
'They'll want to do exactly the same thing!' said Dibbler.
'I know,' said Victor. 'They'll want us to hold up cards with things on like "Harga's Isn't the Best Place in Town, Actually, Ours Is".'
'Something like that, something like that,' snapped Dibbler, glaring at him. 'Maybe we can work on the words, but something like that.'
'But, but,' Silverfish fought to keep ahead of the conversation, 'Harga won't like it, will he? If he pays us money to say his place is best, and then we take money from other people to say that their place is best, then he's bound to-'
'Pay us more money,' said Dibbler, 'to say it again, only in larger letters.'
They stared at him.
'You really think that will work?' said Silverfish.
'Yes,' said Dibbler flatly. 'You listen to the street traders any morning. They don't shout, "Nearly-fresh oranges, only slightly squashy, reasonable value", do they? No, they shout, "Git chore orinjes, they're luvverly". Good business sense.'
He leaned across the desk again.
'Seems to me', he said, 'that you could do with some of that around here.'
'So it appears,' said Silverfish weakly.
'And with the money,' said Dibbler, his voice a crowbar inserted in the cracks in reality, 'you could really get on with perfecting your art.'
Silverfish brightened a bit. 'That's true,' he said. 'For example, some way of getting sound on-'
Dibbler wasn't listening. He pointed to a stack of boards leaning against the wall.
'What are those?' he said.
'Ah,' said Silverfish. 'That was my idea. We thought it would be, er, good business sense', he savoured the words as if they were some rare new sweet, 'to tell people about the other moving pictures we were making.'
Dibbler picked up one of the boards and held it critically at arm's length.
It said:
Nexte weke wee will be Shewing
Pelias and Melisande,
A Romantick Tragedie in Two Reels.
Thank you.
'Oh,' he said, flatly.
'Isn't that all right?' said Silverfish, now thoroughly beaten. 'I mean, it tells them everything they should know, doesn't it?'
'May I?' said Dibbler, taking a piece of chalk from Silverfish's desk. He scribbled intently on the back of the card for a while, and then turned it around.
Now it read:
Goddes and Men Saide It Was Notte To Bee, But They
Would Notte Listen!
Pelias and Melisande, A Storie of Forbiden Love!
A searing Sarger of Passion that Bridged Spaes and Tyme!
Thys wille shok you!
With a 1,000 elephants