Making Money - Terry Pratchett [84]
“You’d be amazed.”
“Oh? Why?”
“That’s the wrong kind of question.”
“You do know something quite important about the Cabinet,” said Adora Belle, apparently waking up. “You know it wasn’t built for or by a girl between the ages of four and, oh, eleven years old.”
“How do we know that?”
“No pink. Trust me. No girl in that age group would leave out pink.”
“Are you sure? That’s wonderful!” said Ponder, making a note on his clipboard. “That’s certainly worth knowing. Let’s get the Foot, then, shall we?”
The broomstick-riding wizards had touched down now. Ponder cleared his throat and picked up the megaphone. “ALL DOWN? WONDERFUL. HEX—BE SO GOOD AS TO FOLD, PLEASE!”
There was silence for a while, and then a distant clattering noise began to grow, up near the ceiling. It sounded like gods shuffling wooden playing cards that happened to be a mile high.
“Hex is our thinking engine,” said Ponder. “We’d hardly be able to explore the box at all without him.”
The clattering was becoming louder and faster.
“You might find your ears aching,” said Ponder, raising his voice. “Hex tries to control the speed, but it takes finite time for the ventilators to get air back into the room. THE VOLUME OF THE CABINET CHANGES VERY FAST, YOU SEE!”
This was shouted against the thunder of collapsing drawers. They slammed in on themselves far too fast for the human eye to follow as the edifice shrunk and folded and slid and rattled down into house size, shed size, and, finally, in the middle of the huge space, unless it was some kind of time, stood a small polished cabinet, about a foot and a half on a side, standing on four beautifully carved legs.
The Cabinet’s doors clicked shut.
“Slowly unfold to specimen 1,109,” said Ponder, in the ringing silence.
The doors opened. A deep drawer slid out.
It went on sliding.
“Just follow me,” said Ponder, strolling toward the Cabinet. “It’s fairly safe.”
“Er, a drawer about a hundred yards long has just slid out of a box about fourteen inches square,” said Moist, in case he was the only one to notice.
“Yes. That’s what happens,” said Ponder, as the drawer slid back about halfway. Its side, Moist saw, was a line of drawers. So drawers opened…out of drawers. Of course, Moist thought, in eleven-dimensional space that was the wrong thing to think.
“It’s a sliding puzzle,” said Adora Belle, “but with lots more directions to slide.”
“That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way,” said Ponder.
Adora Belle’s eyes narrowed. She had not had a cigarette in ten minutes.
The long drawer extruded another drawer at right angles. All along the sides of it were, yes, yet more drawers. One of these extended slowly.
Moist took a risk and tapped on what appeared to be perfectly ordinary wood. It made a perfectly ordinary noise.
“Should I worry that I just saw a drawer slide through another drawer?” he said.
“No,” said Ponder. “The Cabinet is trying to make four-dimensional sense of something that is happening in eleven or, possibly, ten.”
“Trying? Do you mean it’s alive?”
“Aha! The right type of question!”
“I bet you don’t know the answer, though.”
“You are correct. But you must admit it’s an interesting question not to know the answer to. And, yes, here we have the Foot. Hold and collapse please, Hex.”
The drawers collapsed back into themselves in a series of crashes, much shorter and less dramatic than before, leaving the Cabinet looking demure and antique and slightly bow-legged. It had little claws