Going Postal

‘So now you’re, what was it again… crackers?’ Moist said.

‘That’s right,’ said Mad Al. ‘Because we can crack the system.’

‘That sounds a bit over-dramatic when you’re just doing it with lamps, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, but “flashers” was already taken,’ said Sane Alex.

‘All right, but why “Smoking Gnu”?’ said Moist.

‘That’s cracker slang for a very fast message sent throughout the system,’ said Sane Alex proudly.

Moist pondered this. ‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘If I was a team of three people, who all had a first name begi

They’d found a way into the semaphore system, and it was this: at night, all clacks towers were invisible. Only the lights showed. Unless you had a good sense of direction, the only way you could identify who the message was coming from was by its code. Engineers knew lots of codes. Ooh, lots.

‘You can send messages free ?’ said Moist. ‘And nobody notices?’

There were three smug smiles. ‘It’s easy,’ said Mad Al, ‘when you know how.’

‘How did you know that tower was going to break down?’

‘We broke it,’ said Sane Alex. ‘Broke the differential drum. They take hours to sort out because the operators have to—’

Moist missed the rest of the sentence. I

‘—and that takes at least half a day,’ Sane Alex finished.

Moist looked helplessly at the other two. ‘And that means what, exactly?’ he said.

‘If you send the right kind of message you can bust the machinery,’ said Mad Al.

‘The whole Trunk ?’

‘In theory,’ said Mad Al, ‘because an execute and terminate code—’

Moist relaxed as the tide came back in. He wasn’t interested in machinery; he thought of a spa

‘—can’t do that any more in any case, because we’ve heard they’re changing the—’

Moist stared at the pigeon for a while, until silence came back. Ah. Mad Al had finished, and by the looks of things it hadn’t been on a high note.

‘You can’t do it, then,’ said Moist, his heart sinking.

‘Not now. Old Mr Pony might be a bit of an old woman but he sits and niggles at problems. He’s been changing all the codes all day! We’ve heard from one of our mates that every signaller will have to have a personal code now. They’re being very careful. I know Miss Adora Belle thought we could help you, but that bastard Gilt has locked things up tight. He’s worried you’re going to win.’

‘Hah!’ said Moist.

“We’ll come up with some other way in a week or two,’ said Undecided Adrian. ‘Can’t you put it off until then?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Sorry,’ said Undecided Adrian. He was playing idly with a small glass tube, full of red light. When he turned it over, it filled with yellow light.

‘What’s that?’ Moist asked.

‘A prototype,’ said Undecided Adrian. ‘It could have made the Trunk almost three times faster at night. It uses perpendicular molecules. But the Trunk’s just not open to new ideas.’

‘Probably because they explode when dropped?’ said Sane Alex.

‘Not always .’

‘I think I could do with some fresh air,’ said Moist.

They stepped out into the night. In the middle distance the terminal tower still winked, and towers were alight here and there in other parts of the city.

‘What’s that one?’ he said, like a man pointing to a constellation.

‘Thieves’ Guild,’ said Undecided Adrian. ‘General signals for the members. I can’t read ‘em.’

‘And that one? Isn’t that the first tower on the way to Sto Lat?’

‘No, it’s the Watch station on the Hubwards Gate. General signals to Pseudopolis Yard.’

‘It looks a long way off.’

‘They use small shutter boxes, that’s all. You can’t see Tower 2 from here - the University’s in the way.’

Moist stared, hypnotized, at the lights.

‘I wondered why that old stone tower on the way to Sto Lat wasn’t used when the Trunk was built? It’s in the right place.’

‘The old wizard tower? Robert Dearheart used it for his first experiments, but it’s a bit too far and the walls aren’t safe and if you stay in there for more than a day at a time you go mad. It’s all the old spells that got into the stones.’

There was silence and then they heard Moist say, in a slightly strangled voice: ‘If you could get on to the Grand Trunk tomorrow, is there anything you could do to slow it down?’

‘Yes, but we can’t,’ said Undecided Adrian.

‘Yes, but if you could?’

‘Well, there’s something we’ve been thinking about,’ said Mad Al. ‘It’s very crude.’

‘Will it knock out a tower?’ said Moist.

‘Should we be telling him about this?’ said Sane Alex.

‘Have you ever met anyone else that Killer had a good word for?’ said Mad Al. ‘In theory it could knock out every tower, Mr Lipwig.’

‘Are you insane as well as mad?’ said Sane Alex. ‘He’s government !’

‘Every tower on the Trunk?’ said Moist.

‘Yep. In one go,’ said Mad Al. ‘It’s pretty crude.’

‘Really every tower?’ said Moist again.

‘Maybe not every tower, if they catch on,’ Mad Al admitted, as if less than wholesale destruction was something to be mildly ashamed of. ‘But plenty. Even if they cheat and carry it to the next tower on horseback. We call it… the Woodpecker’ .

‘The woodpecker?’

‘No, not like that. You need, sort of, more of a pause for effect, like… the Woodpecker !

‘. . . the Woodpecker ,’ said Moist, more slowly.

‘You’ve got it. But we can’t get it on to the Trunk. They’re on to us’

‘Supposing I could get it on to the Trunk?’ said Moist, staring at the lights. The towers themselves were quite invisible now.

‘You? What do you know about clacks codes?’ said Undecided Adrian.

‘I treasure my ignorance,’ said Moist. ‘But I know about people. You think about being cu

They listened. They argued. They resorted to mathematics, while words sailed through the night above them.

And Sane Alex said: ‘All right, all right. Technically it could work, but the Trunk people would have to be stupid to let it happen.’

‘But they’ll be thinking about codes,’ said Moist. ‘And I’m good at making people stupid. It’s my job.’

‘I thought your job was postmaster,’ said Undecided Adrian.

‘Oh, yes. Then it’s my vocation.’

The Smoking Gnu looked at one another.

‘It’s a totally mad idea,’ said Mad Al, gri

‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Moist.

There are times when you just have to miss a night’s sleep. But Ankh-Morpork never slept; the city never did more than doze, and would wake up around 3 a.m. for a glass of water.

You could buy anything in the middle of the night. Timber? No problem. Moist wondered whether there were vampire carpenters, quietly making vampire chairs. Canvas? There was bound to be someone in the city who’d wake up in the wee small hours for a wee and think, ‘What I could really do with right now is one thousand square yards of medium grade canvas!’ and, down by the docks, there were chandlers open to deal with the rush.

There was a steady drizzle when they left for the tower. Moist drove the cart, with the others sitting on the load behind him and bickering over trigonometry. Moist tried not to listen; he got lost when maths started to get silly.