Going Postal

why the clacks was a string of expensive towers. Come to that, it was why farmers grew crops and fishermen trawled nets. Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh-baked loaf. You could make fish jump out of the sea already cooked. And then, somewhere, somehow, magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could afford.
    That’s why it was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not “not doing magic” because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again.
    Anyway, there was a sense of inevitability about this whole business. People wanted to be fooled. They really believed that you found gold nuggets lying on the ground, that this time you could find the Lady, that just for once the glass ring might be real diamond.
    Words spilled out of Mr. Groat like stashed mail from a crack in the wall. Sometimes the machine had produced a thousand copies of the same letter, or filled the room with letters from next Tuesday, next month, next year. Sometimes they were letters that hadn’t been written, or might have been written, or were meant to have been written, or letters that people had once sworn that they had written and hadn’t really, but which nevertheless had a shadowy existence in some strange, invisible letter world and were made real by the machine.
    If, somewhere, any possible world can exist, then somewhere there is any letter that could possibly be written. Somewhere, all those checks really were in the mail.
    They poured out—letters from the present day, which turned out not to be from this present day, but ones that might have happened if only some small detail had been changed. It didn’t matter that the machine had been switched off, the wizards said. It existed in plenty of other presents, and so worked here owing to…a lengthy sentence, which the postmen didn’t understand but which had the words like “portal,” “multidimensional,” and “quantum” in it, “quantum” being in it twice. They didn’t understand, but they had to do something. No one could deliver all that mail. And so the rooms began to fill up…
    The wizards from Unseen University had been jolly interested in the problem, like doctors being really fascinated by some new, virulent disease; the patient appreciates all the interest but would very much prefer it if they either came up with a cure or stopped prodding.
    The machine couldn’t be stopped and certainly shouldn’t be destroyed, the wizard said. Destroying the machine might well cause this universe to stop existing, instantly.
    On the other hand, the Post Office was filling up, so one day Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow had gone into the room with a crowbar, had ordered all the wizards out, and belted the machine until things stopped whirring.
    The letters ceased, at least. This came as a huge relief, but nevertheless, the Post Office had its Regulations, and so the chief postal inspector was brought before Postmaster Cowerby and asked why he had decided to risk destroying the whole universe in one go.
    According to Post Office legend, Mr. Rumbelow had replied: “Firstly, sir, I reasoned that if I destroyed the universe all in one go, no one would know; secondly, when I walloped the thing the first time, the wizards ran away, so I surmised that unless they has another universe to run to they weren’t really certain; and lastly, sir, the bloody thing was getting on my nerves. Never could stand machinery, sir.”
    “And that was the end of it, sir,” said Mr. Groat as they left the room. “Actually, I heard where the wizards were saying that the universe was destroyed all in one go but instantly came back in one go. They said they could tell by lookin’, sir. So that was okay and it let old Rumbelow off’ve the hook, on account it’s hard to discipline a man under Post Office Regulations for destroying the universe all in one go. Mind you, hah, there’ve been postmasters that would have given it a try. But it knocked the stuffing out of us, sir. It was all downhill after that.