Mr Ottomy, recognizing this, leered and touched the brim of his uniform cap.‘Afternoon, gents,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing. Me and Alf herewill see you right. We’d better get movin’, though, they bully off in half anhour.’

The Senior Wrangler would not have been the Senior Wrangler if he did not hatethe sound of silence. As they shuffled out of the back door, wincing at theunfamiliar chafing of trouser upon knee, he turned to Mr Nobbs and said,‘Nobbs… that’s not a common name. Tell me, Alf, are you by any chance relatedto the famous Corporal Nobby Nobbs of the Watch?’

Mr Nobbs took it well, Ridcully thought, given the clumsy lack of protocol.

‘Nosir!’

‘Ah, a distant branch of the name, then… ’

‘Nosir! Different tree!’

In the greyness of her front room, Glenda looked at the suitcase, anddespaired. She’d done her best with brown boot polish, week after week, but ithad been bought from a shonky shop and the cardboard under the leather-ishexterior was beginning to show through. Her customers never seemed to notice,but she did, even when it was out of sight.

It was a secret part of a secret life that she lived for an hour or two on herhalf-day off once a week, and maybe a little longer if today’s cold callsworked out.

She looked at her face in the mirror, and said in a voice that was full ofjaunt: ‘We all know the problem of underarm defoliation. It is so hard, isn’tit, to keep the lichens healthy… But,’ she flourished a green and bluecontainer with a golden stopper, ‘one spray with Verdant Spring will keep thosecrevices moist and forest fresh all day long… ’

She faltered, because it really wasn’t her. She couldn’t do jaunty. The stuffwas a dollar a bottle! Who could afford that? Well, a lot of troll ladies,that’s who, but Mr Stronginthearm said it was okay because they had the money,and anyway it did let the moss grow. She’d said all right, but a dollar for afancy bottle of water with some plant food in it was a bit steep. And he’d saidyou are Selling the Dream.

And they bought it. That was the worrying part. They bought it and recommendedit to their friends. The city had discovered the Heavy Dollar now. She’d readabout it in the paper. There had always been trolls around, doing the heavylifting and generally being there in the background if not being the actualbackground itself. But now they were raising families and running businesses,moving on and up and buying things, and that made them people at last. And soyou got other people like Mr Stronginthearm, a dwarf, selling beauty productsto Miss and Mrs Troll, via ladies like Glenda, a human, because although dwarfsand trolls were officially great chums these days, because of something calledthe Koom Valley Accord, that sort of thing only meant much to the sort ofpeople who signed treaties. Even the most well-intentioned dwarf would not walkdown some of the roads along which Glenda, every week, dragged her nasty,semi-cardboard case, Selling the Dream. It got her out of the house and paidfor the little treats. There was money to put away for a rainy day. MrStronginthearm had the knack of coming up with new ideas, too. Who would havethought that lady trolls would go for fake-tan lotion? It sold. Everythingsold. The Dream sold, and it was shallow and expensive and made her feel cheap.It—

Her ever-straining ears caught the sound of next door’s front door opening veryslowly. Ha! Juliet jumped as Glenda suddenly loomed beside her.

‘Off somewhere?’

‘Gonna watch the game, ain’t I?’

Glenda glanced up the street. A figure was disappearing rapidly around thecorner. She grinned a grim grin.

‘Oh yes. Good idea. I wasn’t doing anything. Just wait while I fetch my scarf,will you?’ To herself she added, You just keep walking, Johnny!

With a thump that caused pigeons to explode away like a detonating daisy, theLibrarian landed on his chosen rooftop.

He liked football. Something about the shouting and the fighting appealed tohis ancestral memories. And this was fascinating, because, strictly speaking,his ancestors had been blamelessly engaged for centuries as upstanding corn andfeed merchants and, moreover, were allergic to heights.

He sat down on the parapet with his feet over the edge, and his nostrils flaredas he snuffed up the scents rising from below.

It is said that the onlooker sees most of the game. But the Librarian couldsmell as well, and the game, seen from outside, was humanity. Not a day wentpast without his thanking the magical accident that had moved him a few littlegenes away from it. Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, ‘Themountain is, and is not.’ They would think, ‘The banana is. I will eat thebanana. There is no banana. I want another banana.’

He peeled one now, in a preoccupied way, while watching the evolving tableaubelow. Not only does said onlooker see most of the game, he might even see morethan one game.

This street was indeed a crescent, which would probably have an effect ontactics if the players had any truck with such high-flown concepts.

People were pouring in from either end and also from a couple of alleyways.Mostly they were male-extremely so. The women fell into two categories: thosewho had been tugged there by the ties of blood or prospective matrimony (afterwhich they could stop pretending that this bloody mess was in any wayengrossing), and a number of elderly women of a ‘sweet old lady’ construction,who bawled indiscriminately, in a rising cloud of lavender and peppermint,screams of ‘Get ’im dahn an’ kick ’im inna nuts!’ and similar exhortations.

And there was another smell now, one he’d learned to recognize but could notquite fathom. It was the smell of Nutt. Tangled with it were the smells oftallow, cheap soap and shonky-shop clothing that the ape part of himcategorized as belonging to ‘Tin Flinging Man’. He had been just anotherservant in the maze of the university, but now he was a friend of Nutt, andNutt was important. He was also wrong. He had no place in the world, but he wasin it, and the world was becoming aware of him soon enough.

The Librarian knew all about this sort of thing. There had been no space in thefabric of reality marked ‘simian librarian’ until he’d been dropped into one,and the ripples had made his life a very strange one.

Ah, another scent was riding the gentle updraught. It was easy: ScreamingBanana Pie Woman. The Librarian liked her. Oh, she had screamed and run awaythe first time she’d seen him. They all did. But she had come back, and she’dsmelled ashamed. She also respected the primacy of words, and, as a primate, sodid he. And sometimes she baked him a banana pie, which was a kind act. TheLibrarian was not very familiar with love, which had always struck him as a bitethereal and soppy, but kindness, on the other hand, was practical. You knewwhere you were with kindness, especially if you were holding a pie it had justgiven you. She was a friend of Nutt, too. Nutt made friends easily for someonewho had come from nowhere. Interesting…

The Librarian, despite appearances, liked order. Books about cabbages went onthe Brassica shelves, (blit) UUSSFY890–9046 (antiblit1.1), although obviouslyMr Cauliflower’s Big Adventure would be better placed in UUSS J3.2 (>blit) 9,while The Tau of Cabbage would certainly be a candidate for UUSS (blit+)60-sp55-o9-hl (blit). To anyone familiar with a seven-dimensional librarysystem in blit dimensional space it was as clear as daylight, if you rememberedto keep your eye on the blit.

Ah, and here came his fellow wizards, walking awkwardly in the chafing trousersand trying so hard not to stand out in a crowd that they would have stood outeven more if the rest of the crowd had been the least bit interested.