Going Postal

was bound to be someone in a 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 math started to get silly.
    Killing the Grand Trunk…Oh, the towers would be left standing, but it would take months to repair them all. It’d bring the company down. No one would get hurt, the Gnu said. They meant the men in the towers.
    The Trunk had become a monster, eating people. Bringing it down was a beguiling idea. The Gnu were full of ideas for what could replace it—faster, cheaper, easier, streamlined, using imps specially bred for the job…
    But something irked Moist. Gilt had been right, damn him. If you wanted to get a message five hundred miles very, very fast, the Trunk was the way to do it. If you wanted to wrap it in a ribbon, you needed the Post Office.
    He liked the Gnu. They thought in a refreshingly different way; whatever curse hung around the stones of the old tower surely couldn’t affect minds like theirs, because they were inoculated against madness by being a little bit crazy all the time. The clacks signalers, all along the Trunk, were…a different kind of people. They didn’t just do their job, they lived it.
    But Moist kept thinking of all the bad things that could happen without the semaphore. Oh, they used to happen before the semaphore, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.
    He’d left them sawing and hammering in the stone tower, and headed back to the city, deep in thought.

CHAPTER 13
    The Edge of the Envelope
In which we learn the theory of baize-space
• Devious Collabone • The Grand Trunk burns
• So sharp you’ll cut yourself • Finding Miss Dearheart
• Igor moveth on • A Theory of Disguise
• “Let this moment never end” • A brush with the Trunk
• The big sail unfurls • The message is received
    M USTRUM RIDCULLY , Archchancellor of Unseen University, leveled his cue and took careful aim.
    The white ball hit a red ball, which rolled gently into a pocket. This was harder than it looked, because more than half of the snooker table served as the Archchancellor’s filing system, * and, indeed, to get to the hole the ball had to pass through several piles of paperwork, a tankard, a skull with a dribbly candle on it, and a lot of pipe ash. It did so.
    “Well done, Mr. Stibbons,” said Ridcully.
    “I call it baize-space,” said Ponder Stibbons proudly.
    Every organization needs at least one person who knows what’s going on and why it’s happening and who’s doing it, and at UU this role was filled by Stibbons, who often wished it wasn’t. Right now he was present in his position as head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, and his long-term purpose was to see that his department’s budget went through on the nod. To this end, therefore, a bundle of thick pipes led from under the heavy old billiard table, out through a hole in the wall and across the lawn, and into the High Energy Magic building, where—he sighed—this little trick was taking up forty percent of the rune-time of Hex, the university’s thinking engine.
    “Good name,” said Ridcully, lining up another shot.
    “As in phase space?” said Ponder hopefully. “When a ball is just about to encounter an obstacle that is not another ball, you see, Hex moves it into a theoretical parallel dimension where there is unoccupied flat surface, and maintains speed and drag until it can be brought back to this one. It really is a most difficult and intricate piece of unreal-time spell-casting—”
    “Yes, yes, very good,” said Ridcully. “Was there something else, Mr. Stibbons?”
    Ponder looked at his clipboard. “There’s a polite letter from Lord Vetinari asking on behalf of the city whether the university might consider including in its intake, oh, twenty-five percent of less able students, sir?”
    Ridcully potted the black through a heap of university directives.
    “Can’t have a bunch of grocers and butchers telling a university how to run itself, Stibbons!” he said firmly, lining up on a red. “Thank them for their interest and tell them we’ll continue to take one hundred percent of complete and utter