Going Postal

throat.
    “Hur, hur,” said Moist solemnly. “Just carry the bags, gents. The Post Office is going places and you could be in the driving seat.”
    The brothers exchanged a glance. Then they grinned. It was as if one grin spread across two glistening, red faces.
    “Our dad would’ve liked you,” said Jim.
    “He sure as hell wouldn’t like the Grand Trunk devils,” said Harry. “They need cutting down to size, Mr. Lipwig, and people are saying you’re the man to do it.”
    “People die on them towers,” said Jim. “We see, you know. Damn right! The towers follows the coach roads. We used to have the contract to haul lads out to the towers and we heard ’em talking. They used to have an hour a day when they shut the whole Trunk down for mait’nance.”
    “The Hour of the Dead, they called it,” said Harry. “Just before dawn. That’s when people die.”

    A CROSS A CONTINENT , the line of light beads on the pre-dawn darkness. And then, the Hour of the Dead begins, at either end of the Grand Trunk, as the upline and down-line shutters clear their messages and stop moving, one after the other.
    The men of the towers had prided themselves on the speed with which they could switch their towers from black-and-white daylight transmission to the light-and-dark mode of the night. On a good day, they could do it with barely a break in transmission, clinging to swaying ladders high above the ground, while around them the shutters rattled and chattered. There were heroes who’d lit all sixteen lamps on a big tower in less than a minute, sliding down ladders, swinging on ropes, keeping their tower alive. “Alive” was the word they used. No one wanted a dark tower, not even for a minute.
    The Hour of the Dead was different. That was one hour for repairs, replacements, maybe even some paperwork. It was mostly replacements. It was fiddly to repair a shutter high up on the tower, with the wind making it tremble and freezing the blood in your fingers, and always better to swing it out and down to the ground and slot another one in place. But when you were running out of time, it was tempting to brave the wind and try to free the bloody shutters by hand.
    Sometimes the wind won. The Hour of the Dead was when men died.
    And when a man died, they sent him home by clacks.

    M OIST’S MOUTH dropped open.
    “That’s what they call it,” said Harry. “Not lit’rally, o’course. But they send his name from one end of the Trunk to the other, ending up at the tower nearest his home.”
    “Yeah, but sometimes they say the person stays on in the towers, somehow,” said Jim. “‘Living in the overhead,’ they call it.”
    “But they’re mostly drunk when they say that,” said Harry.
    “Oh, yes, mostly drunk, I’ll grant you,” said his brother. “They get worked too hard. There’s no Hour of the Dead now, they only get twenty minutes. They cut the staff, too.
    “They used to run a slow service on Octedays, now it’s high speed all the time, except towers keep breaking down. We seen lads come down from them towers with their eyes spinning and their hands shaking and no idea what day it is. It drives ’em mad. Eh? Damn right!”
    “Except that they’re already mad,” said Harry. “You’d have to be mad to work up in them things.”
    “They get so mad even ordinary mad people think they’re mad.”
    “That’s right. But they still go back up there. The clacks drives them back. The clacks owns them, gets into their souls,” said Harry. “They get paid practically nothing but I’ll swear they’d go up those towers for free.”
    “The Grand Trunk runs on blood now, since the new gang took over. It’s killin’ men for money,” said Jim.
    Harry drained his mug. “We won’t have none of it,” he said. “We’ll run your mail for you, Mr. Lipwig, for all that you wear a damn silly hat.”
    “Tell me,” said Moist, “have you ever hear of something called the Smoking Gnu?”
    “Dunno much,” said Jim. “A couple of the boys mentioned them once. Some kind of outlaw signalers or something. Something to do with the overhead.”
    “What is the overhead? Er…dead people live in it?”
    “Look, Mr. Lipwig, we just listen, okay?” said Jim. “We chat to ’em nice and easy, ’cos when they come down from the towers they’re so dozy they’ll walk under your coach wheels—”
    “It’s the rocking in the wind,” said Harry. “They walk like sailors.”
    “Right. The overhead? Well,