Terry Pratchett - Making Money

'But all the ingots and bags put together aren't much bigger than the desks out there!'

'It is very heavy, Mr Lipwig. It is the one true metal, pure and unsullied,' said Bent. His left eye twitched. 'It is the metal that never fell from grace.'

'Really?' said Moist, checking that the door out of there was still open.

'And it is also the only basis of a sound financial system,' Mr Bent went on, while the torchlight reflected off the bullion and gilded his face. 'There is Value! There is Worth! Without the anchor of gold, all would be chaos.'

'Why?'

'Who would set the value of the dollar?'

'Our dollars are not pure gold, though, are they?'

'Aha, yes. Gold-coloured, Mr Lipwig,' said Bent. 'Less gold than seawater, gold-ish. We adulterated our own currency! Infamy! There can be no greater crime!' His eye twitched again.

'Er… murder?' Moist ventured. Yep, the door was still open.

Mr Bent waved a hand. 'Murder only happens once,' he said, 'but when the trust in gold breaks down, chaos rules. But it had to be done. The abominable coins are, admittedly, only gold-ish, but they are at least a solid token of the true gold in the reserves. In their wretchedness, they nevertheless acknowledge the primacy of gold and our independence from the machinations of government! We ourselves have more gold than any other bank in the city, and only I have a key to that door! And the chairman has one too, of course,' he added, very much as a grudging and unwelcome afterthought.

'I read somewhere that the coin represents a promise to hand over a dollar's worth of gold,' said Moist helpfully.

Mr Bent steepled his hands in front of his face and turned his eyes upwards, as though praying.

'In theory, yes,' he said after a few moments. 'I would prefer to say that it is a tacit understanding that we will honour our promise to exchange it for a dollar's worth of gold provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to.'

'So… it's not really a promise?'

'It certainly is, sir, in financial circles. It is, you see, about trust.'

'You mean, trust us, we've got a big expensive building?'

'You jest, Mr Lipwig, but there may be a grain of truth there.' Bent sighed. 'I can see you have a lot to learn. At least you'll have me to teach you. And now, I think, you would like to see the Mint. People always like to see the Mint. It's twenty-seven minutes and thirty-six seconds past one, so they should have finished their lunch hour.'

It was a cavern. Moist was pleased about that, at least. A mint should be lit by flames.

Its main hall was three storeys high, and picked up some grey daylight from the rows of barred windows. And, in terms of primary architecture, that was it. Everything else was sheds.

Sheds were built on to the walls and even hung like swallows' nests up near the ceiling, accessed by unsafe-looking wooden stairs. The uneven floor itself was a small village of sheds, placed any old how, no two alike, each one carefully roofed against the non-existent prospect of rain. Wisps of smoke spiralled gently through the thick air. Against one wall a forge glowed dark orange, providing the right Stygian atmosphere. The place looked like the after-death destination for people who had committed small and rather dull sins.

This was, however, just the background. What dominated the hall was the Bad Penny. The treadmill was… strange.

Moist had seen treadmills before. There had been one in the Tanty, wherein inmates could invigorate their cardiovascular systems whether they wanted to or not. Moist had taken a turn or two before he worked out how to play the system. It had been a brute of a thing, cramped, heavy and depressing. The Bad Penny was much larger, but hardly seemed to be there at all. There was a metal rim that, from here, looked frighteningly thin. Moist tried in vain to see the spokes, until he realized that there weren't any, just hundreds of thin wires.

'All right, I can see it must work, but—' he began, staring up at the huge gearbox.

'It works very well, I gather,' said Bent. 'They have a golem to power it when needed.'

'But surely it should fall to bits!'

'Should it? I am not in a position to say, sir. Ah, here they come…'

Figures were heading towards them from various sheds and from the door at the far end of the building. They walked slowly and deliberately and with one purpose, rather like the living dead.

In the end, Moist thought of them as the Men of the Sheds. They weren't, all of them, that old, but even the young ones, most of them, appeared to have donned the mantle of middle age very early. Apparently, to get a job in the Mint, you had to wait until someone died; it was a case of Dead Man's Sheds. Illuminating the bright side, however, was the fact that when your prospective vacancy became available you got the job even if you were only slightly less dead than the previous incumbent.

The Men of the Sheds ran the linishing shed, the milling shed, the finishing shed, the Foundry (two sheds) and the Security (one shed, but quite a big one) and the storage shed, which had a lock Moist could have opened with a sneeze. The other sheds were a mystery, but presumably had been built in case someone needed a shed in a hurry.

The Men of the Sheds had what passed within the sheds as names: Alf, Young Alf, Gobber, Boy Charlie, King Henry… but the one who was, as it were, the designated speaker to the world beyond the sheds had a whole name.

'This is Mr Shady the Eighteenth, Mr Lipwig,' said Bent. 'Mr Lipwig is… just visiting.'

'The Eighteenth?' said Moist. 'There are another seventeen of you?'

'Not any more, sir,' said Shady, grinning.

'Mr Shady is the hereditary foreman, sir,' Bent supplied.

'Hereditary foreman…' Moist repeated blankly.

'That's right, sir,' said Shady. 'Does Mr Lipwig want to know the history, sir?'

'No,' said Bent firmly.

'Yes,' said Moist, seeing his firmly and raising him an emphatically.

'Oh, it appears that he does,' sighed Bent. Mr Shady smiled.

It was a very full history, and took some telling. At one point Moist was sure it was time for an ice age. Words streamed past him like sleet but, like sleet, some stuck. The post of hereditary foreman had been treated hundreds of years before, when the post of Master of the Mint was a sinecure handed to a drinking pal of the current king or patrician, who used it as a money box and did nothing more than turn up now and again with a big sack, a hangover and a meaningful look. The foremanship was instituted because it was dimly realized that someone ought to be in charge and, if possible, sober.

'So you actually run it all?' said Moist quickly, to stem the flow of really interesting facts about money.

"That's right, sir. Pro tern. There hasn't been a master for a hundred years.'

'So how do you get paid?'

There was a moment's silence, and then Mr Shady said, like a man talking to a child: 'This is a mint, sir.'

'You make your own wages?'

'Who else is going to, sir? But it's all official, isn't that right, Mr Bent? He gets all the dockets. We cut out the middle man, really.'

'Well, at least you're in a profitable business,' said Moist cheerfully. 'I mean, you must be making money hand over fist!'

'We manage to break even, sir, yes,' said Shady, as if it was a close-run thing.

'Break even? You're a mint!' said Moist. 'How can you not make a profit by making money?'

'Overheads, sir. There's overheads wherever you look.'

'Even underfoot?'

'There too, sir,' said Shady. 'It's ruinous, sir, it really is. Y'see, it costs a ha'penny to make a farthin' an' nearly a penny to make a ha'penny. A penny comes in at a penny farthin'. Sixpences costs tuppence farthin', so we're in pocket there. Half a dollar costs seven pence. And it's only sixpence to make a dollar, a definite improvement, but that's 'cos we does 'em here. The real buggers are the mites, 'cos they're worth half a farthin' but cost sixpence 'cos it's fiddly work, their bein' so small and havin' that hole in the middle. The thruppenny bit, sir, we've only got a couple of people makin' those, a lot of work which runs out at seven pence. And don't ask me about the tuppenny piece!'