The Truth

eighteen more copies. As an afterthought, and feeling rather daring, he looked through his notes for the addresses of eighteen prominent citizens who could probably afford it, wrote a short covering letter to each one offering this service for…he thought for a while, and then carefully wrote “$5”…and folded the free sheets into eighteen envelopes. Of course, he could always have asked Mr. Cripslock to do more copies as well, but it had never seemed right. After the old boy had spent all day chipping out the words, asking him to sully his craftsmanship by making dozens of duplicates seemed disrespectful. But you didn’t have to respect lumps of metal and machines. Machines weren’t alive.
    That, really, was where the trouble was going to start. And there was going to be trouble. The dwarfs had seemed quite unconcerned when he’d told them how much of it there was going to be.

    The coach arrived at a large house in the city. A door was opened. A door was shut. Another door was knocked on. It was opened. It shut. The carriage pulled away.
    One ground-floor room was heavily curtained, and only the barest gleam of light filtered out. Only the faintest of noises filtered out, too, but any listener would have heard a murmur of conversation die down. Then a chair was knocked over and several people shouted, all at once.
    “That is him!”
    “It’s a trick…isn’t it?”
    “I’ll be damned!”
    “If it is him, so are we all!”
    The hubbub died away. And then, very calmly, someone began to talk.
    “Good. Good. Take him away, gentlemen. Make him comfortable in the cellar.”
    There were footsteps. A door opened and closed.
    A more querulous voice said: “We could simply replace—”
    “ No, we could not. I understand that our guest is, fortunately, a man of rather low intelligence.” There was this about the first speaker’s voice. It spoke as if disagreeing was not simply unthinkable, but impossible. It was used to being in the company of listeners.
    “But he looks the spit and image—”
    “Yes. Astonishing, isn’t it. Let us not overcomplicate matters, though. We are a bodyguard of lies, gentlemen. We are all that stands between the city and oblivion, so let us make this one chance work. Vetinari may be quite willing to see humans become a minority in their greatest city, but frankly his death by assassination would be…unfortunate. It would cause turmoil, and turmoil is hard to steer. And we all know that there are people who take too much of an interest. No. There is a third way. A gentle slide from one condition to another.”
    “And what will happen to our new friend?”
    “Oh, our employees are known to be men of resource, gentlemen. I’m sure they know how to deal with a man whose face no longer fits, eh?”
    There was laughter.

    Things were a little fraught in Unseen University just at the moment. The wizards tended to scuttle from building to building, glancing at the sky.
    The problem, of course, was the frogs. Not rains of frogs, which were uncommon now in Ankh-Morpork, but specifically foreign treefrogs from the humid jungles of Klatch. They were small, brightly colored, and happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the basis that if they got things wrong there wouldn’t be too much education wasted.
    Very occasionally, a frog was removed from the vivarium and put into a rather smaller jar where it briefly became a very happy frog indeed, and then went to sleep and woke up in that great big jungle in the sky.
    And thus the university got the active ingredient that it made up into pills and fed to the Bursar, to keep him sane. At least, apparently sane, because nothing was that simple at good old UU. In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continually, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned, in that case, that the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane. *
    This had worked well. There had been a few false starts. For several hours, at one point, he had hallucinated that he was a bookcase. But now he was permanently hallucinating that he was a bursar, and that almost made up for the small side effect which also led him to hallucinate that he could fly.
    Of course, many