IT'S A DEVICE OF SOME SORT?

Simnel looked mildly affronted.

"I prefer the term machine," he said. "It will revolutionise farming methods, and drag them kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat. My folk have had this forge for three hundred years, but Ned Simnel doesn't intend to spend the rest of his life nailing bits of bent metal on to horses, I call tell you."

Bill looked at him blankly. Then he bent down and glanced under the machine. A dozen sickles were bolted to a big horizontal wheel. Ingenious linkages took power from the wheels, via a selection of pulleys, to a whirligig arrangement of metal arms.

He began to experience a horrible feeling about the thing in front of him, but he asked anyway.

"Well, the heart of it all is this cam shaft," said Simnel, gratified at the interest. ‘The power comes up via the pulley here, and the cams move the swaging arms - that's these things - and the combing gate, which is operated by the reciprocating mechanism, comes down just as the gripping shutter drops in this slot here, and of course at the same time the two brass balls go round and round and the flatting sheets carry off the straw while the grain drops with the aid of gravity down the riffling screw and into the hopper. Simple."

AND THE THREE-EIGHTHS GRIPLEY?

"Good job you reminded me. " Simnel fished around among the debris on the floor, picked up a small knurled object, and screwed it on to a protruding piece of the mechanism. "Very important job. It stops the elliptical cam gradually sliding up the beam shaft and catching on the flange rebate, with disastrous results as you can no doubt imagine."

Simnel stood back and wiped his hands on a cloth, making them slightly more oily.

"I'm calling it the Combination Harvester," he said.

Bill Door felt very old. In fact he was very old. But he'd never felt it as much as this. Somewhere in the shadow of his soul he felt he knew, without the blacksmith explaining, what it was that the Combination Harvester was supposed to do.

OH.

"We're going to give it a trial run this afternoon up in old Peedbury's big field. It looks very promising, I must say. What you're looking at now, Mr. Door, is the future."

YES.

Bill Door ran his hand over the framework.

AND THE HARVEST ITSELF?

"Hmm? What about it?"

WHAT WILL IT THINK OF IT? WILL IT KNOW?

Simnel wrinkled his nose. "Know? Know? It won't know anything. Corn's corn."

AND SIXPENCE IS SIXPENCE.

"Exactly. " Simnel hesitated. "What was it you were wanting?"

The tall figure ran a disconsolate finger over the oily mechanism.

"Mr. Door?"

PARDON? OH. YES. I HAD SOMETHING FOR YOU TO DO -

He strode out of the forge and returned almost immediately with something wrapped in silk. He unwrapped it carefully.

He'd made a new handle for the blade - not a straight one, such as they used in the mountains, but the heavy doublecurved handle of the plains.

"You want it beaten out? A new grass nail? Metalwork replacing?"

Bill Door shook his head.

I WANT IT KILLED.

"Killed?"

YES. TOTALLY. EVERY BIT DESTROYED. SO THAT IT IS ABSOLUTELY DEAD.

"Nice scythe," said Simnel. ‘Seems a shame. You've kept a good edge on it -"

DON'T TOUCH IT!

Simnel sucked his finger.

"Funny," he said, "I could have sworn I didn't touch it. My hand was inches away. Well, it's sharp, anyway."

He swished it through the air.

"Yes. Pretty sharp

He paused, stuck his little finger in his ear and swivelled it around a bit.

"You sure you know what you want?" he said.

Bill Door solemnly repeated his request.

Simnel shrugged. "Well, I suppose I could melt it and burn the handle," he said.

YES.

"Well, OK. It's your scythe. And you're basically right, of course. This is old technology now. Redundant."

I FEAR YOU MAY BE RIGHT.

Simnel jerked a grimy thumb towards the Combination Harvester. Bill Door knew it was made only of metal and canvas, and therefore couldn't possibly lurk. But it was lurking. Moreover, it was doing so with a chilling, metallic smugness.

"You could get Miss Flitworth to buy you one of these, Mr. Door. It'd be just the job for a one-man farm like that. I can see you now, up there, up in the breeze, with the belts clacking away and the sparge arms oscillating -"

NO.

"Go on. She could afford it. They say she's got boxes full of treasure from the old days. "

NO!

"Er -' Simnel hesitated. The last ‘No' contained a threat more certain than the creak of thin ice on a deep river. It said that going any further could be the most foolhardy thing Simnel would ever do.

"I'm sure you know your own mind best," he mumbled.

YES.

"Then it'll just be, oh, call it a farthing for the scythe," Simnel gabbled. "Sorry about that, but it'll use a lot of coals, you see, and those dwarfs keep winding up the price of -"

HERE. IT MUST BE DONE BY TONIGHT.

Simnel didn't argue. Arguing would mean that Bill Door remained in the forge, and he was getting quite anxious that this should not be so.

"Fine, fine."

YOU UNDERSTAND?

"Right. Right."

FAREWELL, said Bill Door solemnly, and left.

Simnel shut the doors after him, and leaned against them. Whew. Nice man, of course, everyone was talking about him, it was just that after a couple of minutes in his presence you got a pins-and-needles sensation that someone was walking over your grave and it hadn't even been dug yet.

He wandered across the oily floor, filled the tea kettle and wedged it on a corner of the forge. He picked up a spanner to do some final adjustments to the Combination Harvester, and spotted the scythe leaning against the wall.

He tiptoed towards it, and realised that tiptoeing was an amazingly stupid thing to do. It wasn't alive. It couldn't hear. It just looked sharp.

He raised the spanner, and felt guilty about it. By Mr. Door had said - well, Mr. Door had said something very odd, using the wrong sort of words to use in talking about a mere implement. But he could hardly object to this.

Simnel brought the spanner down hard.

There was no resistance. He would have sworn, again, that the spanner sheared in two, as though it was made of bread, several inches from the edge of the blade.

He wondered if something could be so sharp that it began to possess, not just a sharp edge, but the very essence of sharpness itself, a field of absolute sharpness that actually extended beyond the last atoms of metal.

"Bloody hell "

And then he remembered that this was sloppy and superstitious thinking for a man who knew how to bevel a three eighths Gripley. You knew where you were with a reciprocating linkage. It either worked or it didn't. It certainly didn't present you with mysteries.

He looked proudly at the Combination Harvester. Of course, you needed a horse to pull it. That spoiled things a bit. Horses belonged to Yesterday; Tomorrow belonged to the Combination Harvester and its descendants, which would make the world a cleaner and better place. It was just a matter of taking the horse out of the equation. He'd tried clockwork, and that wasn't powerful enough. Maybe if he tried winding a -

Behind him, the kettle boiled over and put the fire out.

Simnel fought his way through the steam. That was the bloody trouble, every time. Whenever someone was trying to do a bit of sensible thinking, there was always some pointless distraction.

Mrs. Cake drew the curtains.

"Who exactly is One-Man-Bucket?" said Windle.

She lit a couple of candles and sat down.

" ‘e belonged to one of them heathen Howondaland tribes," she said shortly.

"Very strange name, One-Man-Bucket," said Windle.

"It's not ‘is full name. " said Mrs. Cake darkly. ‘Now, we've got to ‘old ‘ands. " She looked at him speculatively. "We need someone else."