Going Postal (31 page)

“Nice job of work, I’ll give them that,” Groat said grudgingly. “But I’ve got to be up and doing, sir, up and doing!”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” said Moist, staring at the mess of scabs.

“Right as rain, sir. I
told
’em, sir, if a banshee can’t get at me through my chest protector, none of their damn invisible little biting demons are going to manage it. I bet it’s all going wrong, sir, with Aggy bossing people around? I bet it is! I bet you really need me, right, sir?”

“Um, yes,” said Moist. “Are they giving you medicine?”

“Hah, they
call
it medicine, sir. They gave me a lot of ol’ mumbo-pocus about it being wonderful stuff, but it’s got neither taste nor smell, if you want my opinion. They say it’ll do me good but I told ’em it’s hard work that does me good, sir, not sitting in soapy water with young wimmin lookin’ at my rattle-and-flute. And they took my hair away. They called it unhygenic, sir! What a nerve! All right, it moves about a bit of its own accord, but that’s only natural. I’ve had my hair a long time, sir, I’m used to its funny little ways!”

“Hwhat is going on here?” said a voice full of offended ownership.

Moist turned.

If one of the rules that should be passed on to a young man is “Don’t get mixed up with crazy girls who smoke like a bellows,” another one should be “Run away from any woman who pronounces ‘what’ with two
H
s.”

This woman might have been two women. She certainly had the cubic capacity and, since she was dressed entirely in white, looked rather like an iceberg. But chillier. And with sails. And with a headdress starched to a cutting edge.

Two smaller women stood behind and on either side of her, in definite danger of being crushed if she stepped backwards.

“I’ve come to see Mr. Groat,” said Moist weakly, while Groat gibbered and pulled the bedclothes over his head.

“
Quite
impossible! I am the matron here, young man, and I must insist that you leave at once! Mr. Groat is in an extremely unstable condition.”

“He seems fine to me,” said Moist.

He had to admire the look the matron gave him. It suggested that Moist had just been found adhering to the sole of her shoe. He returned it with a chilly one of his own.

“Young man, his condition is
extremely
critical!” she snapped. “I refuse to release him!”

“Madam, illness is not a crime!” said Moist. “People are not
released
from hospital, they are
discharged
!”

The matron drew herself up and out, and gave Moist a smile of triumph.

“That, young man, is hwhat we are afraid of!”

M
OIST WAS SURE
doctors kept skeletons around to cow patients.
Nyer, nyer, we know what you look like underneath…
He quite approved, though. He felt a certain fellow feeling. Places like the Lady Sybil were still very rare these days, but Moist felt certain he could make a profitable career out of wearing a white robe, using long, learned names for ailments like “runny nose,” and looking solemnly at things in bottles.

On the other side of the desk, a Dr. Lawn—he had his name on a plate on his desk, because doctors are very busy and can’t remember everything—looked up from his notes on Tolliver Groat.

“It was quite interesting, Mr. Lipwig. It was the first time I’ve ever had to operate to remove the patient’s clothing,” he said. “You don’t happen to know what the poultice was made of, do you? He wouldn’t tell us.”

“I believe it’s layers of flannel, goose grease, and bread pudding,” said Moist, staring around at the office.

“Bread pudding?
Really
bread pudding?”

“Apparently so,” said Moist.

“Not something alive, then? It seemed leathery to us,” said the doctor, leafing through the notes. “Ah, yes, here we are. Yes, his trousers were the subject of a controlled detonation after one of his socks exploded. We’re not sure why.”

“He fills them with sulfur and charcoal to keep his feet fresh, and he soaks his trousers in saltpeter to prevent Gnats,” said Moist. “He’s a great believer in natural medicine, you see. He doesn’t trust doctors.”

“Really?” said Dr. Lawn. “He retains some vestige of sanity, then. Incidentally, it’s best not to argue with the nursing staff. I find the best course of action is to throw some chocolates in one direction and hurry off in the other while their attention is distracted. Mr. Groat thinks that every man is his own physician, I gather?”

“He makes his own medicines,” Moist explained. “He starts every day with a quarter of a pint of gin mixed with spirits of niter, flour of sulfur, juniper, and the juice of an onion. He says it clears the tubes.”

“Good heavens, I’m sure it does. Does he smoke at all?”

Moist considered this. “No-o. It looks more like steam,” he said.

“And his background in basic alchemy is…?”

“Nonexistent, as far as I know,” said Moist. “He makes some interesting cough sweets, though. After you’ve sucked them for two minutes you can feel the wax running out of your ears. He paints his knees with some sort of compound of iodine and—”

“Enough!” said the doctor. “Mr. Lipwig, there are times when we humble practitioners of the craft of medicine have to stand aside in astonishment. Quite a long way aside, in the case of Mr. Groat, and preferably behind a tree. Take him away, please. I have to say that, against all the odds, I found him amazingly healthy. I can quite see why an attack by a banshee would be so easily shrugged off. In fact, Mr. Groat is probably unkillable by any normal means, although I advise you not to let him take up tap dancing. Oh, and do take his wig, will you? We tried putting it in a cupboard, but it got out. We’ll send the bill to the Post Office, shall we?”

“I thought this said ‘free hospital’ on the sign,” said Moist.

“Broadly, yes, broadly,” said Dr. Lawn. “But those on whom the gods have bestowed so many favors—one hundred and fifty thousand of them, I heard—probably have had all the charity they require, hmm?”

And it’s all sitting in the Watch’s cells
, thought Moist. He reached into his jacket and produced a crumpled wad of green Ankh-Morpork one-dollar stamps.

“Will you take these?” he said.

T
HE PICTURE
of Tiddles being carried out of the Post Office by Moist von Lipwig was, since it concerned an animal, considered to be full of human interest by the
Times
and was thus displayed prominently on the front page.

Reacher Gilt looked at it without displaying so much as a flicker of emotion. Then he reread the story next to it, under the headlines:

MAN SAVES CAT
“We’ll Rebuild Bigger!” Vows
as Post Office Blazes
$150,000 Gift From Gods
Wave of Stuck Drawers Hits City

“It occurs to me that the editor of the
Times
must sometimes regret that he has only one front page,” he observed dryly.

There was a sound from the men sitting around the big table in Gilt’s office. It was the kind of sound you get when people are not really laughing.

“Do you think he
has
got gods on his side?” said Greenyham.

“I hardly imagine so,” said Gilt. “He must have known where the money was.”

“You think so? If I knew where that much money was, I wouldn’t leave it in the ground.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Gilt quietly, in such a way that Greenyham felt slightly uneasy.

“
Twelve and a half percent! Twelve and a half percent!
” screamed Alphonse, bouncing up and down on his perch.

“We’re made to look fools, Reacher!” said Stowley. “He
knew
the line would go down yesterday! He might as
well
have divine guidance! We’re losing the local traffic already. Every time we have a shutdown you can bet he’ll run a coach out of sheer devilment. There’s nothing that damn man won’t stoop to. He’s turned the Post Office into a…a show!”

“Sooner or later all circuses leave town,” said Gilt.

“But he’s laughing at us!” Stowley persisted. “If the Trunk breaks down again, I wouldn’t put it past him to run a coach to Genua!”

“That would take weeks,” said Gilt.

“Yes, but it’s cheaper and it gets there. That’s what he’ll say. And he’ll say it loudly, too. We’ve got to do something, Reacher.”

“And what do you suggest?”

“Why don’t we just spend some money and get some proper maintenance done?”

“You can’t,” said a new voice. “You don’t have the men.”

All heads turned to the man at the far end of the table. He had a jacket on over his overalls and a very battered top hat on the table beside him. His name was Mr. Pony, and he was the Trunk’s chief engineer. He’d come with the company, and had hung on because at the age of fifty-eight, with twinges in your knuckles, a sick wife, and a bad back, you think twice about grand gestures such as storming out. He hadn’t seen a clacks until three years ago, when the first company was founded, but he was methodical, and engineering was engineering.

Currently his greatest friend in the world was his collection of pink carbon copies. He’d done his best, but he wasn’t going to carry the can when this lot finally fell over, and his pink carbon copies would see to it that he didn’t. White memo paper to the chairman, yellow carbon copy to the file, pink copy you kept. No one could say he hadn’t warned them.

A two-inch stack of the latest copies was attached to his clipboard. Now, feeling like an elder god leaning down through the clouds of some Armaggedon and booming “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I warn you? Did you listen? Too late to listen now!” he put on a voice of strained patience:

“I’ve got six maint’nance teams. I had eight last week. I sent you a memo about that, got the copies right here. We ought to have eighteen teams. Half the lads are needin’ to be taught as we go, and we ain’t got time for teachin’. In the ol’ days we’d set up walkin’ towers to take the load an’ we ain’t got men even to do that now—”

“All right, it’ll take time, we
understand
,” said Greenyham. “How long will it take if you…hire more men and get these walking towers working and—”

“You made me sack a lot of the craftsmen,” said Pony.

“We didn’t sack them, we ‘let them go,’” said Gilt.

“We…downsized,” said Greenyham.

“Looks like you succeeded, sir,” said Pony. He took a stub of pencil out of one pocket and a grubby notebook out of the other.

“D’you want it fast or cheap or good, gentlemen?” he said. “The way things have gone, can only give you one out of three…”

“How soon can we have the Grand Trunk running properly?” said Greenyham, while Gilt leaned back and shut his eyes.

Pony’s lips moved as he ran eyes over his figures.

“Nine months,” he said.

“I suppose if we’re seen to be working hard, nine months of erratic running won’t seem too—” Mr. Stowley began.

“Nine months shut down,” said Mr. Pony.

“Don’t be a fool, man!”

“I ain’t a fool, sir, thank you,” said Pony sharply. “I’ll have to find and train new craftsmen, ’cos a lot of the old brigade won’t come back whatever I offer. If we shut the towers down, I can use the signalers, at least they know their way around a tower. We can get more work done if we don’t have to drag walking towers and set them up. Make a clean start. The towers were never built that well to begin with. Dearheart never expected this sort of traffic. Nine months of dark towers, sirs.”

He wanted to say, oh, how he wanted to say:
Craftsmen. D’you know what that means? It means men with some pride, who get fed up and leave when they’re told to do skimpy work in a rush, no matter what you pay them. So I’m employing people as “craftsmen” now who’re barely fit to sweep out a workshop. But you don’t care, because if they don’t polish a chair with their arse all day you think a man who’s done a seven-year apprenticeship is the same as some twerp who can’t be trusted to hold a hammer by the right end
. He didn’t say this aloud, because although an elderly man probably has a lot less future than a man of twenty, he’s far more careful about it…

“You can’t do better than that?” said Stowley.

“Mr. Stowley, I’ll be doin’ well if it’s only nine months,” said Pony, focusing again. “If you don’t want to shut down, I can maybe get it done in a year and a half, if I can find enough men and you’re ready to spend enough money. But you’ll have shutdowns every day. It’ll be crippled runnin’, sir.”

“This man von Lipwig will walk all over us in nine months!” said Greenyham.

“Sorry about that, sir.”

“And how much will it cost?” asked Gilt dreamily, without opening his eyes.

“One way or the other, sir, I reckon maybe two hundred thousand,” said Pony.

“That’s ridiculous! We paid less than that for the Trunk!” Greenyham burst out.

“Yes, sir. But, you see, you got to run maint’nance
all the time
, sir. The towers have been run ragged. There was that big gale back in Sektober and all that trouble in Uberwald. I haven’t got the manpower. If you don’t do maint’nance, a little fault soon becomes a big one. I sent you gentlemen lots of reports, sir. And you cut my budget twice. I may say my lads did wonders with—”

“Mr. Pony,” said Gilt quietly, “I think what I see here is a conflict of cultures. Would you mind strolling along to my study, please? Igor will make you a cup of tea. Thank you so much.”

When Pony was gone, Greenyham said: “Do you know what worries me right now?”

“Do tell us,” said Gilt, folding his hands across his expensive waistcoat.

“Mr. Slant is not here.”

“He has apologized. He says he has important business,” said Gilt.

“We’re his biggest clients! What’s more important than us? No, he’s not here because he wants to be somewhere else! The damn old revenant senses trouble and he’s never there when it all goes bad. Slant always comes out smelling of roses!”

“That is at least more fragrant than his usual formaldehyde,” said Gilt. “Don’t
panic
, gentlemen.”