President Astfgl, sitting in a pool of light in his huge, dark office, blew into the speaking tube again.
“Hallo?” he said. “Hallo?”
There didn’t seem to be anyone answering.
Strange.
He picked up one of his coloured pens, and looked around at the stack of work behind him. All those records, to be analysed, considered, assessed and evaluated, and then suitable management directives to be arrived at, and an in-depth policy document to be drafted and then, after due consideration, redrafted again…
He tried the tube once more.
“Hallo? Hallo?”
No-one there. Still, not to worry, lots to do. His time was far too important to waste.
He sank his feet into his thick, warm carpet.
He looked proudly at his plotted plants.
He tapped a complicated assembly of chromed wire and balls, which began to swing and click executively.
He unscrewed the top of his pen with a firm, decisive hand.
He wrote: What business are we in???
He thought for a bit, and then carefully wrote, underneath: We are in the damnation business!!!
And this, too, was happiness. Of a sort.
1 Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It’s the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.
2 It took thirty years to subside. The inhabitants spent a lot of the time wading. It went down in history as the multiverse’s most embarrassing continental catastrophe.
3 Old Tom was the single cracked bronze bell in the University bell tower. The clapper dropped out shortly after it was cast, but the bell still tolled out some tremendously sonorous silences every hour.
4 The Bursar was referring obliquely to the difficult occasion when the University very nearly caused the end of the world, and would in fact have done so had it not been for a chain of events involving Rincewind, a magic carpet and a half-brick in a sock. (See Sourcery.) The whole affair was very embarrassing to wizards, as it always is to people who find out afterwards that they were on the wrong side all along, and it was remarkable how many of the University’s senior staff were now adamant that at the time they had been off sick, visiting their aunt, or doing research with the door locked while humming loudly and had had no idea of what was going on outside. There had been some desultory talk about putting a statue up to Rincewind but, by the curious alchemy that tends to apply in these sensitive issues, this quickly became a plaque, then a note on the Roll of Honour, and finally a motion of censure for being improperly dressed.
5 Demons and their Hell are quite different from the Dungeon Dimensions, those endless parallel wastelands outside space and time. The sad, mad things in the Dungeon Dimensions have no understanding of the world but simply crave light and shape and try to warm themselves by the fires of reality, clustering around it with about the same effect – if they ever broke through – as an ocean trying to warm itself around a candle. Whereas demons belong to the same space-time wossname, more or less, as humans, and have a deep and abiding interest in humanity’s day-to-day affairs. Interestingly enough, the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight.
6 Demons have a distorted sense of values.
7 Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, “Where’s my clean socks?”, no-one answers.
8 This is because wiring plugs, putting up shelves, sorting out the funny noise in attics and mowing lawns can eventually reduce even the strongest constitution.
9 From a distance it did, anyway. Close to, no.
10 Ball games were unknown in the Discworld at this time.
11 Many people think it should have been a hydrogen molecule, but this is against the observed facts. Everyone who has found a hitherto unknown egg-whisk jamming an innocent kitchen drawer knows that raw matter is continually flowing into the universe in fairly developed forms, popping into existence normally in ashtrays, vases and glove compartments. It chooses its shape to allay suspicion, and common manifestations are paperclips, the pins out of shirt packaging, the little keys for central heating radiators, marbles, bits of crayon, mysterious sections of herb-chopping devices and old Kate Bush albums. Why matter does this is unclear, but it is evident that matter has Plans.
It is also apparent that creators sometimes favour the Big Bang method of universe construction, and at other times use the more gentle methods of Continual Creation. This follows studies by cosmotherapists which have revealed that the violence of the Big Bang can give a universe serious psychological problems when it gets older.