Reaper Man

me!”
    “What about the child?”
    “Search me. This woman had one of the baskets and she bought some peaches off of me an’ then—”
    They all turned. A basket rattled out of the mouth of an alleyway, saw them, turned smartly and shot off across the square.
    “But why?” said Ridcully.
    “They’re so handy to put things in, right?” said the man. “I got to get them peaches. You know how they bruise.”
    “And they’re all going in the same direction,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “Anyone else notice that?”
    “After them!” screamed the Dean. The other wizards, too bewildered to argue, lumbered after him.
    “No—” Ridcully began, and realized that it was hopeless. And he was losing the initiative. He carefully formulated the most genteel battle cry in the history of bowdlerism.
    “Darn them to Heck!” he yelled, and ran after the Dean.

    Bill Door worked through the long heavy afternoon, at the head of a trail of binders and stackers.
    Until there was a shout, and the men ran toward the hedge.
    Iago Peedbury’s big field was right on the other side. His farmhands were wheeling the Combination Harvester through the gate.
    Bill joined the others leaning over the hedge. The distant figure of Simnel could be seen, giving instructions. A frightened horse was backed into the shafts. The blacksmith climbed into the little metal seat in the middle of the machinery and took up the reins.
    The horse walked forward. The sparge arms unfolded. The canvas sheets started to revolve, and probably the riffling screw was turning, but that didn’t matter because something somewhere went “clonk” and everything stopped.
    From the crowd at the hedge there were shouts of “Get out and milk it!”, “We had one but the end fell off!”, “Tuppence more and up goes the donkey!” and other time-honored witticisms.
    Simnel got down, held a whispered conversation with Peedbury and his men, and then disappeared into the machinery for a moment.
    “It’ll never fly!”
    “Veal will be cheap tomorrow!”
    This time the Combination Harvester got several feet before one of the rotating sheets split and folded up.
    By now some of the older men at the hedge were doubled up with laughter.
    “Any old iron, sixpence a load!”
    “Fetch the other one, this one’s broke!”
    Simnel got down again. Distant catcalls drifted toward him as he untied the sheet and replaced it with a new one; he ignored them.
    Without moving his gaze from the scene in the opposite field, Bill Door pulled a sharpening stone out of his pocket and began to hone his scythe, slowly and deliberately.
    Apart from the distant clink of the blacksmith’s tools, the schip-schip of stone on metal was the only sound in the heavy air.
    Simnel climbed back into the Harvester and nodded to the man leading the horse.
    “Here we go again!”
    “Any more for the Skylark?”
    “Put a sock in it….”
    The cries trailed off.
    Half a dozen pairs of eyes followed the Combination Harvester up the field, stared while it was turned around on the headland, watched it come back again.
    It clicked past, reciprocating and oscillating.
    At the bottom of the field it turned around neatly.
    It whirred by again.
    After a while one of the watchers said, gloomily, “It’ll never catch on, you mark my words.”
    “Right enough. Who’s going to want a gadget like that?” said another.
    “Sure and it’s only like a big clock. Can’t do anything more than go up and down a field—”
    “—very fast—”
    “—cutting the corn like that and stripping the grain off—”
    “It’s done three rows already.”
    “Bugger me!”
    “You can’t hardly see the bits move! What do you think of that, Bill? Bill?”
    They looked around.
    He was halfway up his second row, but accelerating.

    Miss Flitworth opened the door a fraction.
    “Yes?” she said, suspiciously.
    “It’s Bill Door, Miss Flitworth. We’ve brought him home.”
    She opened the door wider.
    “What happened to him?”
    The two men shuffled in awkwardly, trying to support a figure a foot taller than they were. It raised it’s head and squinted muzzily at Miss Flitworth.
    “Don’t know what come over him,” said Duke Bottomley.
    “He’s a devil for working,” said William Spigot. “You’re getting your money’s worth out of him all right, Miss Flitworth.”
    “It’ll be the first time, then, in these parts,” she said sourly.
    “Up and down the field like a madman, trying to