Going Postal

madness; they said the rattle of the clacks got into your head and your thoughts beat time with it, so sooner or later you could tell what messages were going through by listening to the rattle of the shutters. In their towers, they drank hot tea out of strange tin mugs, much wider at the bottom, so that they didn’t fall over when gales banged into the tower. On leave, they drank alcohol out of anything. And they talked a gibberish of their own, of donkey and nondonkey, system overhead and packet space, of drumming it and hotfooting, of a 181 (which was good) or flock (which was bad) or totally flocked (really not good at all) and plug-code and hog-code and jacquard…
    And they liked kids, who reminded them of the ones they left behind or would never have, and kids loved the towers. They’d come and hang around and do odd jobs and maybe pick up the craft of semaphore just by watching.
    They tended to be bright, they mastered the keyboard and levers as if by magic, they usually had good eyesight, and what they were doing, most of them, was running away from home without actually leaving.
    Because, up on the towers, you might believe you could see to the rim of the world. You could certainly see several other towers, on a good, clear day. You pretended that you, too, could read messages by listening to the rattle of the shutters, while under your fingers flowed the names of faraway places you’d never see but, on the tower, were somehow connected to…
    She was known as Princess to the men on Tower 181, although she was really Alice. She was thirteen, could run a line for hours on end without needing help, and later on had an interesting career which…but anyway, she remembered this one conversation, on this day, because it was strange.
    Not all the signals were messages. Some were instructions to towers. Some, as you operated your levers to follow the distant signal, made things happen in your own tower. Princess knew all about this. A lot of what traveled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. It was instructions to towers, reports, messages about messages, even chatter between operators, although this was strictly forbidden these days. It was all in code. It was very rare you got Plain in the Overhead. But now:
    “There it goes again,” she said. “It must be wrong. It’s got no origin code and no address. It’s Overhead, but it’s in Plain.”
    On the other side of the tower, sitting in a seat facing the opposite direction, because he was operating the upline, was Roger, who was seventeen and already working for his tower-master certificate.
    His hand didn’t stop moving as he said: “What did it say?”
    “There was GNU, and I know that’s a code, and then just a name. It was John Dearheart. Was it a—”
    “You sent it on?” said Grandad. Grandad had been hunched in the corner, repairing a shutter box in this cramped shed halfway up the tower. Grandad was the tower-master and had been everywhere and knew everything. Everyone called him Grandad. He was twenty-six. He was always doing something in the tower when she was working the line, even though there was always a boy in the other chair. She didn’t work out why until later.
    “Yes, because it was a G code,” said Princess.
    “Then you did right. Don’t worry about it.”
    “Yes, but I’ve sent that name before. Several times. Up-line and down-line. Just a name, no message or anything!”
    She had a sense that something was wrong, but she went on: “I know a U at the end means it has to be turned around at the end of the line, and an N means Not Logged.” This was showing off, but she’d spent hours reading the cypher book. “So it’s just a name, going up and down all the time! Where’s the sense in that?”
    Something was really wrong. Roger was still working his line, but he was staring ahead with a thunderous expression.
    Then Grandad said: “Very clever, Princess. You’re dead right.”
    “Hah!” said Roger.
    “I’m sorry if I did something wrong,” said the girl meekly. “I just thought it was strange. Who’s John Dearheart?”
    “He…fell off a tower,” said Grandad.
    “Hah!” said Roger, working his shutters as if he suddenly hated them.
    “He’s dead ?” said Princess.
    “Well, some people say—” Roger began.
    “Roger!” snapped Grandad. It sounded like a warning.
    “I know about Sending Home,” said Princess. “And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.”
    “Who told you