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lawyer pits?
    (Where, since the first lawyer sent in the first lawyer’s bill, countless millions of advocates, notaries and solicitors have sat giving legal advice to wealthy clients only too happy to pay by the hour, facing clocks whose hands never budge so much as a millionth of an inch. Not for nothing have the lawyer pits received the prestigious Dante Award for two thousand years in succession.)
    He looked again; no, it’s just the usual exquisitely slow passage of time in Hell between clocking on and morning coffee, during which a minute seems a year, an hour feels like a century; and that’s only here in the admin block. Come to think of it, more so in the admin block than anywhere else. After all, Artofel mused bitterly, we haven’t done anything wrong.
    A valid point; and one to which his mind kept returning, like a duck in a public park. The admin staff hadn’t been part of the Great Sideways Promotions, when Flipside was first established. As far as they were concerned, they were just celestial civil servants, doing their duty in that station of everlasting life to which it had pleased the Chief to call them. As between Artofel and Alizeth, his opposite number in the Wages Department of Topside, there was no moral differential. They both belonged to the same grade, contributed to the same pension scheme, had the same number of days’ annual holiday a year. True, the view from Alizeth’s office window was rather more cheerful; but he had further to walk to the lifts, and the coffee on this level was reckoned to be rather better. No; the main difference between Flipside and Topside was time. In Heaven there is no time, while in Hell there’s all the time in the world.
    In practice, this meant Alizeth put his nose round the door of his office on average about once a century, while Artofel was stuck behind his desk twelve hours a day, two hundred and fifty-eight days a year, Flipside Mean time (and no time anywhere is meaner). There was a policy explanation for that, of course. For the Elect in Topside, standing before the face of the living God is its own reward, so the need for wages clerks isn’t all that great; whereas the wages of sin is death.
    Come on, clock. Give it some welly. Put yer mainspring into it . . .
    The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling, for you but not for me. Artofel sighed, and picked up the receiver.
    â€˜Wages,’ he mumbled. ‘Artofel speaking.’
    â€˜Central,’ chirped a voice at the other end of the wire. ‘Going off line in three minutes.’
    Artofel made a disapproving noise with his nose and the back of his throat. ‘Oh for crying out loud, that’s the fourth time this week. How are we supposed to get any work done if you lot keep fiddling with the computers? All right then, tell me where I can back up to, and I’ll get today’s stuff patched through.’
    â€˜Sorry,’ replied the voice, ‘no can do.The entire system’s got to come off.’
    Artofel’s eyebrows shot up like interest rates just after an election. ‘What, the whole thing?’ he gasped. ‘You must be kidding, we’ll lose the lot. Have you clowns up there got any idea how long it’ll take us to . . .?’
    â€˜Don’t blame me,’ said the voice indifferently. ‘Apparently it’s all to do with gremlins up in Mainframe. Got to go. Bye.’
    The line died on him, and he dropped the receiver back on to its cradle. Something wrong with Mainframe? Impossible. Mainframe was . . . Well, it was, and ever had been. Only a very brave or a very foolish gremlin would venture in there; certainly not any of the ones he occasionally shared a table with in the canteen. Mostly, in fact, the gremlins he knew were quiet, staid little chaps, more-than-my-job’s-worth types, forever quoting the rule book and worrying about what they could justifiably put down on their expense sheets. Unless—
    Maybe