Free Snuff by Terry Pratchett Page A

wasn’t keen on games because they led to crowds, and crowds led to work for coppers. But here in fact he wasn’t a copper, was he? It was a strange feeling, so he left the pub and became an innocent bystander. He couldn’t remember when he had been one before. It felt…vulnerable. He strolled over to the nearest man, who was hammering some stakes into the ground, and asked, “What’s going on here, then?” Realizing that he had spoken in copper rather than in ordinary citizen, he added quickly, “If you don’t mind me asking?”
    The man straightened up. He was one of the ones with the colorful caps. “Haven’t you ever seen a game of crockett, sir? It’s the game of games!”
    Mr. Civilian Vimes did his best to look like a man eager for more delicious information. Judging by his informant’s enthusiastic grin, he was about to learn the rules of crockett, whether he wanted to or not. Well, he thought, I did ask…
    â€œAt first sight, sir, Crockett might seem like just another ball game wherein two sides strive against one another by endeavoring to propel the ball by hand or bat or other device into the opponents’ goal of some sort. Crockett, however, was invented during a game of croquet at St. Onan’s Theological College in Ham-on-Rye, when the novice priest Jackson Fieldfair, now the Bishop of Quirm, took his mallet in both hands, and instead of giving the ball a gentle tap…”
    After that Vimes gave up, not only because the rules of the game were incomprehensible in their own right, but also because the extremely enthusiastic young man allowed his enthusiasm to overtake any consideration of the need to explain things in some sensible order, which meant that the flood of information was continually punctuated by apologetic comments on the lines of “I’m sorry, I should have explained earlier that a second cone is not allowed more than once per exchange, and in normal play there is only one tump, unless, of course, you’re talking about royal crockett…”
    Vimes died…The sun dropped out of the sky, giant lizards took over the world, the stars exploded and went out and all hope vanished with a gurgle into the sink-trap of oblivion, and gas filled the firmament and combusted and behold there was a new heaven, one careful owner, and a new disc, and lo, and possibly verily, life crawled out of the sea, or possibly didn’t because it had been made by the gods—that was really up to the bystander—and lizards turned into less scaly lizards, or possibly did not, and lizards turned into birds, and worms turned into butterflies, and a species of apple turned into bananas, and possibly a kind of monkey fell out of a tree and realized that life was better when you didn’t have to spend your time hanging onto something, and, in only a few million years, evolved trousers and ornamental stripy hats and lastly the game of crockett and there, magically reincarnated, was Vimes, a little dizzy, standing on the village green looking into the smiling countenance of an enthusiast.
    He managed to say, “Well, that’s amazing, thank you so very much. I look forward to enjoying the game.” At which point, he thought, a brisk walk home might be in order, only to be foiled by a regrettably familiar voice behind him saying, “You, I say you, yes, you! Aren’t you Vimes?”
    It was Lord Rust, usually of Ankh-Morpork, and a fierce old warhorse, without whose unique grasp of strategy and tactics several wars would not have been so bloodily won. Now he was in a wheelchair, a newfangled variety pushed by a man, whose life was, knowing his lordship, quite probably unbearable.
    But hatred tends not to have a long half-life and in recent years Vimes had regarded the man as now no more than a titled idiot, rendered helpless by age, yet still possessed of an annoying horsy voice that, suitably harnessed, might be used