There was definitely what Ponder’s aunt, who’d raised him, would have called An Atmosphere.
‘I still think I ought to climb the mast,’ he protested.
‘Ah! A peeping torn, eh?’ snarled the Senior Wrangler.
‘No, I just think it would be a good idea to see where the boat is going,’ said Ponder. There’re some big black clouds ahead.’
‘Good, we could do with the rain,’ snapped the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
‘In which case, I shall be honoured to make Mrs Whitlow a suitable shelter,’ said the Dean.
Ponder walked back to the stern, where the Archchancellor was gloomily fishing.
‘Honestly, you’d think Mrs Whitlow was the only woman in the world,’ he said.
‘Do you think she might be?’ said Ridcully.
Ponder’s mind raced, and hit some horrible speed bumps in his imagination. ‘Surely not, sir!’ he said.
‘We don’t know, Ponder. Still, look on the bright side. We may all be drowned.’
‘Er . . . sir? Have you looked at the horizon?’
The everlasting storm was seven thousand miles long but only a mile wide, a great turning, boiling mass of enraged air circling the last continent like a family of foxes circling a henhouse. The clouds were mounded up all the way to the edge of the atmosphere – and they were ancient clouds now, clouds that had rolled around their tortured circuit for years, building up personality and hatred and, above all, voltage.
It was not a storm, it was a battle. Mere gales, a few hundred miles long, fought amongst themselves within the cloud wall. Lightning forked from thunderhead to thunderhead, rain fell and flashed into steam half a mile from the ground.
The air glowed.
And below, emerging from the ocean of potentiality in a rainstorm so thunderous that it was no more than a descending sea, rose the last continent.
On the wall of the deserted cell in Bugarup Gaol, among the scratches and stick drawings and tallies of a man’s last few days, a drawing of a sheep became a drawing of a kangaroo and then faded completely into the stone.
‘So?’ said the Dean. ‘We’re in for a bit of a blow?’ The grey line filled the immediate future like a dental appointment.
‘I think it might be a lot worse,’ said Ponder.
‘Well, let’s steer somewhere else, then.’
‘There’s no rudder, sir. And we don’t know where anywhere else is. And we’re low on water anyway.’
‘Don’t they say that a big bank of cloud means there’s land ahead?’ said the Dean.
‘Bloody big land, then. EcksEcksEcksEcks, do you think?’
‘I hope so, sir.’ Above Ponder, the sail flapped and billowed. ‘Wind’s freshening, sir. I think the storm’s sucking the air towards it. And . . . there’s something else, I think. I wish I hadn’t left my thaumometer on the beach, sir, because I think there’s a very high level of background magic in this area.’
‘What makes you say this, boy?’ said the Dean.
‘Well, for one thing everyone seems to be getting a bit tense, and wizards tend to get stro— to get touchy in the presence of large amounts of magic,’ said Ponder. ‘But my suspicions were first aroused when the Bursar developed planets.’
There were two of them, orbiting his head at a height of a few inches. As was so often the case with magical phenomena, they possessed virtual unreality and passed unscathed through him and one another. They were slightly transparent.
‘Oh dear, Mugroop’s Syndrome,’ said Ridcully. ‘Cerebral manifestation. Better than a canary down a coalmine, a sign like that.’
A little sub-routine in Ponder’s head began a short countdown.
‘Remember old “Dicky” Bird?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘He—’
‘Three! No, I don’t, as a matter of fact. Do tell!’ Ponder heard himself bark, louder than he would have done even if he had meant to vocalize his thoughts.
‘Indeed I shall, Mister Stibbons,’ said the Chair calmly. ‘He was very susceptible to high magical fields, and if his mind wandered, as it might do when he was dozing off, sometimes around his head there’d be, hehehe, there’d be these little—’
‘Yes, certainly,’ said Ponder, quickly. ‘We’ll have to be very careful to keep an eye open for unusual behaviour.’
‘Among wizards?’ said Ridcully. ‘Mister Stibbons, unusual behaviour is perfectly ordinary for wizards.’
‘People acting out of character, then!’ Ponder shouted. Talking sense for two minutes together, perhaps! Acting like normal civilized people instead of a herd of self-regarding village idiots!’
‘Stibbons, it’s not like you to take that tone,’ said Ridcully.
‘That’s what I mean!’
‘Now then, Mustrum, go easy on him, we’re all under a lot of stress,’ said the Dean.
‘Now he’s doing it!’ Ponder yelled, pointing a shaking finger. The Dean is normally never nice! Now he’s being aggressively reasonable!’
Historians have pointed out that it is in times of plenty that people feel like going to war. In times of famine they’re simply trying to find enough to eat. When they’ve just enough to go round they tend to be polite. But when a banquet is spread before them, it’s time to argue over the place settings.[19]
And Unseen University, as even wizards realized at somewhere just below the top level of their minds, existed not to further magic but, in a very creative way, to suppress it. The world had seen what happened when wizards got their hands on enormous amounts of magical power. It had happened a long time ago and there were still some areas where you didn’t go, if you wanted to walk out on the same kind of feet that you’d had when you went in.
Once upon a time the plural of ‘wizard’ was ‘war’.
But the great, open ingenious purpose of UU was to be the weight on the arm of magic, causing it to swing with grave majesty like a pendulum rather than spin with deadly purpose like a morn-ingstar. Instead of hurling fireballs at one another from fortified towers the wizards learned to snipe at their colleagues over the interpretation of Faculty Council minutes, and long ago were amazed to find that they got just as much vicious fun out of it. They consumed big dinners, and after a really good meal and a fine cigar even the most rabid Dark Lord is inclined to put his feet up and feel amicable towards the world, especially if it’s offering him another brandy. And slowly, and by degrees, they absorbed the most important magical power of all, which is the one that persuades you to stop using all the others.
The trouble is that it’s easy to abstain from sweets when you’re not standing knee deep in treacle and it’s raining sugar.
There does indeed seem to be a certain . . . tang in the air,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. Magic tastes like tin.
‘Hold on a moment,’ said Ridcully. He reached up, pulled open one of the many drawers in his wizarding hat, and removed a cube of greenish glass.
‘Here we are,’ he said, handing it to Ponder.
Ponder took the thaumometer and peered into it.
‘Never used it myself,’ Ridcully said. ‘Wetting a finger and holding it up has always been good enough for me.’
‘It’s not working!’ said Ponder, tapping the thaumometer as the ship rocked under them. The needle’s . . . Oow!’
He dropped the cube, which was molten by the time it hit the deck.
‘That’s impossible!’ he said. These things are good up to a million thaums!’
Ridcully licked his finger and held it up. It sprouted a halo of purple and octarine.
‘Yep, that’s about right,’ he said.
‘There’s not that much magic anywhere any more!’ shouted Ponder.
There was a gale behind the boat now. Ahead, the wall of storm was widening and seemed to be a lot blacker.
‘How much magic does it take to create a continent?’ said Ridcully.
They looked up at the clouds. And further up.
‘We’d better batten down the hatches,’ said the Dean.
‘We don’t have any hatches.’
‘Batten down Mrs Whitlow at least. Get the Bursar and the Librarian somewhere safe—’
They hit the storm.
Rincewind dropped into an alley and reflected that he’d been in far worse prisons. The Ecksians were a friendly lot, when not drunk or trying to kill you or both. What Rincewind looked for in a good gaol were guards who, instead of ruining everyone’s night by prowling around the corridors, got together in one room with a few tins and a pack of cards and relaxed. It made it so much more . . . friendly. And, of course, easier to walk past.
He turned – and there was the kangaroo, huge and bright and outlined against the sky. Rincewind shrank back for a moment and then realized that it was nothing but an advertising sign on the roof of a building some way off and further down the hill. Someone had rigged up lamps and mirrors below it.