Read Making Money for Free Online Page B

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    “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 comes everyone…”
    Figures were heading toward 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 kept thinking 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 Men’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), 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 anymore, 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 created 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 piggy bank 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 tem. 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 middleman, 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 cost tuppence farthin’, so we’re in pocket there. Half a dollar cost seven pence. And it’s only sixpence to make a dollar, a definite improvement, but