Going Postal

Pratchett, Terry

Anyone who couldn’t simply remember where he stashed a great big fortune deserved to lose it,


“Oh, that’s just Thud! That’s easy!” yapped a voice. Both men turned to look at Horsefry, who had been made perky by sheer relief. “I used to play it when I was a kid,” he burbled. “It’s boring. The dwarfs always win!” Gilt and Vetinari shared a look. It said: While I loathe you and every aspect of your personal philosophy to a depth unplumbable by any line, I’ll credit you at least with not being Crispin Horsefry.


And if Moist von Lipwig couldn’t cream a little something—a big something off the top, and the bottom, and maybe a little off the sides, then he didn’t deserve to!


this place isn’t for a young man with a future,”


People skills weren’t much good in the face of Mr. Parker. He was one of the impervious people, whose grasp of volume control was about as good as his understanding of personal space.


“My grandad used to work there!” “Well done him,” said Moist. “He said there was a curse!” said the woman, as if the idea was rather pleasing.


Pumping Water Teaches One The Value Of Rational Thought.


“Calm yourself, Crispin. Nothing is going to go wrong. You think about money in the old-fashioned way. Money is not a thing, it is not even a process. It is a kind of shared dream. We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money.”


“And . . . did I actually rise up in the air, glowing gold?” said Moist. “I Think I Must Have Missed That, Sir,” said Mr. Pump. “You mean I didn’t, then.” “In A Manner Of Speaking, You Did, Sir,” said the golem. “But in common, everyday reality, I didn’t?” “You Were Lit, As It Were, By An Inner Fire, Sir. The Postmen Were Extremely Impressed.”


There was silence. In that silence, Moist tried out a variety of responses, from “Pull the other one, it has got bells on” to “That’s impossible,” and decided they all sounded stupid. Groat looked deadly serious. So instead he said: “How?”


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.


Obviously we are still finding our feet, but I intend that we soon should be capable of delivering a letter to anyone, anywhere in the world.” It was a stupid thing to say, but his tongue had taken over. “Aren’t you being rather ambitious, Mr. Lipwig?” she said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know any other way to be,”


That was an important rule of any game: always make it easy for people to give you money.


he felt the fizz die away. He was employing Stanley, a bunch of game but creaky old men, and some golems. He couldn’t keep this up. But the thing was, you added sparkle. You told people what you intended to do and they believed you could do it.


Anyone could have done this ride. No one had. They kept waiting for the clacks to be repaired.


“Anghammarad Said She Reminded Him of Lela The Volcano Goddess, Who Smokes All The Time Because The God Of Rain Has Rained On Her Lava,” the golem went on. “Yes, but women always complain about that sort of thing,” said Moist.


Albert and all the rest of them had met hundreds, and had all kinds of fun, including once getting his jaw dislocated, which was only fun in a no-fun-at-all kind of way.


All they want to do is make money. They don’t care about the Trunk. They’ll run it into the ground and make more money by selling it.


An imagination is a terrible thing to bring along.


They say it’ll do me good but I told ’em it’s hard work that does me good, sir, not sitting in soapy water with young wimmin lookin’ at my rattle-and-flute.


He wanted to say, oh, how he wanted to say: Craftsmen. D’you know what that means? It means men with some pride, who get fed up and leave when they’re told to do skimpy work in a rush, no matter what you pay them.


“Gilt will have to accept the challenge, of course,” said Vetinari. “But he is a man of . . . ingenious resource.” That seemed to Moist to be a very careful way of saying “murderous bastard.”


“You challenged the Grand Trunk! You mean you just talked big and hoped something would turn up?” said Miss Dearheart. “It’s always worked before! Where’s the sense in promising to achieve the achievable? What kind of success would that be?”


what was happening now . . . this was magical. Ordinary men had dreamed it up and put it together, building towers on rafts in swamps and across the frozen spines of mountains. They’d cursed and, worse, used logarithms.


You could buy anything in the middle of the night. Timber? No problem. Moist wondered whether there were vampire carpenters, quietly making vampire chairs. Canvas? There was bound to be someone in a city who’d wake up in the wee small hours for a wee and think, What I could really do with right now is one thousand square yards of medium-grade canvas! and, down by the docks, there were chandlers open to deal with the rush.