‘Which consist largely of niggling, big dinners and shouting damnfool things about keys in the middle of the night,’ said Ridcully. ‘So I don’t think we—’
The expressions on the faces of the other wizards made him turn around.
The Librarian had entered the hall. He walked very slowly, because of the amount of clothing he’d put on; the sheer volume of coats and sweaters meant that his arms, instead of being used as extra feet, were sticking out very nearly horizontally on either side of his body. But the most horrifying aspect of the shuffling apparition was the red woolly bat.
It was jolly. It had a bobble on it. It had been knitted by Mrs Whitlow, who was technically an extremely good needlewoman, but if she had a fault it lay in failing to take into account the precise dimensions of the intended recipient. Several wizards had on occasion been presented with one of her creations, which often assumed they had three ankles or a neck two metres across. Most of the things were surreptitiously given away to charitable institutions. You can say this about Ankh-Morpork – no matter how misshapen a garment, there will always be someone somewhere it would fit.
Mrs Whitlow’s mistake here was the assumption that the Librarian, for whom she had considerable respect, would like a red bobble hat with side flaps that tied under his chin. Given that this would technically require that they be tied under his groin, he’d opted to let them flap loose.
He turned a sad face towards the wizards as he stopped outside the Library door. He reached for the handle. He said, in a very weak voice, ‘ ‘k,’ and then sneezed.
The pile of clothing settled. When the wizards pulled it away, they found underneath a very large, thick book bound in hairy red leather.
‘Says Ook on the cover,’ said the Senior Wrangler after a while, in a rather strained voice.
‘Does it say who it’s by?’ said the Dean.
‘Bad taste, that man.’
‘I meant that maybe it’d be his real name.’
‘Can we look inside?’ said the Chair oi Indefinite Studies. ‘There may be an index.’
‘Any volunteers to look inside the Librarian?’ said Ridcully. ‘Don’t all shout.’
‘The morphic instability responds to the environment,’ said Ponder. ‘Isn’t that interesting? He’s near the Library, so it turns him into a book. Sort of . . . protective camouflage, you could say. It’s as if he evolves to fit in with—’
‘Thank you, Mister Stibbons. And is there a point to this?’
‘Well, I assume we can look inside,’ said Ponder. ‘A book is meant to be opened. There’s even a black leather bookmark, see?’
‘Oh, that’s a bookmark, is it?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, who had been watching it nervously.
Ponder touched the book. It was warm. And it opened easily enough.
Every page was covered with ‘ook’.
‘Good dialogue, but the plot is a little dull.’
‘Dean! I’d be obliged if you’d take this seriously, please!’ said Ridcully. He tapped his foot once or twice. ‘Anyone got any more ideas?’
The wizards stared at one another and shrugged.
‘I suppose . . ,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘Yes, Runes . . . Arnold, isn’t it?’
‘No, Archchancellor . . .’
‘Well, out with it anyway.’
‘I suppose . . . I know this sounds ridiculous, but . . .’
‘Go on, man. We’re almost all agog.’
‘I suppose there’s always . . . Rincewind.’
Ridcully stared at him for a moment. ‘Skinny fella? Scruffy beard? Bloody useless wizard? Got that box on legs thingy?’
‘That’s right, Archchancellor. Well done. Er . . . he was the Deputy Librarian for a while, as I expect you remember.’
‘Not really, but do go on,’ he said.
‘In fact he was here when the Librarian . . . became the Librarian. And I remember once, when we were watching the Librarian stamping four books all at the same time, he said, “Amazing, really, when you think he was born in Ankh-Morpork.” I’m sure if anyone knows the name of the Librarian it’s Rincewind.’
‘Well, go and fetch him, then! I suppose you do know where he is, do you?’
‘Technically, yes, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder quickly. ‘But we’re not sure quite where the place where he is is, if you follow me.’
Ridcully gave him another stare.
‘You see, we think he’s on EcksEcksEcksEcks, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder.
‘EcksEcks—’
‘—EcksEcks, Archchancellor.’
‘I thought no one knew where that place was,’ said Ridcully.
‘Exactly, Archchancellor,’ said Ponder. Sometimes you had to turn facts in several directions until you found the right way to fit them into Ridcully’s head.[8]
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘We don’t really know, Archchancellor. If you remember, we believe he ended up there after that Agatean business . . .’
‘What did he want to go there for?’
‘I don’t think he exactly wanted to,’ said Ponder. ‘Er . . . we sent him. It was a trivial error in bi-locational thaumaturgy that anyone could make.’
‘But you made it, as I recall,’ said Ridcully, whose memory could spring nasty surprises like that.
‘I am a member of the team, sir,’ said Ponder, pointedly.
‘Well, if he doesn’t want to be there, and we need him here, let’s bring him b—’
The rest of the sentence was drowned out not by a noise but by a sort of bloom of quietness, which rolled over the wizards and was so oppressive and soft that they couldn’t even hear their own heartbeats. Old Tom, the University’s magical and tongueless bell, tolled out 2 a.m. by striking the silences.
‘Er—’ said Ponder. ‘It’s not as simple as that.’
Ridcully blinked. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Bring him back by magic. We sent him there, we can bring him back.’
‘Er . . . it’d take months to set it up properly, if you want him back right here,’ said Ponder. ‘If we get it wrong he’ll end up arriving in a circle fifty feet wide.’
That’s not a problem, is it? If we keep out of it he can land anywhere.’
‘I don’t think you quite understand, sir. The signal to noise ratio of any thaumic transfer over an uncertain distance, coupled with the Disc’s own spin, will almost certainly result in a practical averaging of the arriving subject over an area of a couple of thousand square feet at least, sir.’
‘Say again?’
Ponder took a deep breath. ‘I mean he’ll end up arriving as a circle. Fifty feet wide.’
‘Ah. So he probably wouldn’t be very good in the Library after that, then.’
‘Only as a very large bookmark, sir.’
‘All right, then, it’s down to sheer geography. Who’ve we got who knows anything about geography?’
The miners emerged from the vertical shaft like ants leaving a burning nest. There were thumps and thuds from below, and at one point Strewth’s hat shot up into the air, turned over a few times and dropped back.
There was silence for a while and then, bits cracking off it like errant pieces of shell on a newly hatched chick, the thing pulled itself out of the shaft and . . .
. . . looked around it.
The miners, crouched behind various bushes and sheds, were quite certain of this, even though the monster had no visible eyes.
It turned, its hundreds of little legs moving rather stiffly, as if they’d spent too much time buried in the ground.
Then, weaving slightly, it set off.
And far away in the shimmering red desert, the man in the pointy hat climbed carefully out of his hole. He held in both hands a bowl made of bark. It contained . . . lots of vitamins, valuable protein and essential fats. See? No mention of wriggling at all.
A fire was smouldering a little way away. He put the bowl down carefully and picked up a large stick, stood quietly for a moment and then suddenly began to hop around the fire, smacking the ground with the stick and shouting, ‘Hah!’ When the ground had been subdued to his apparent satisfaction he whacked at the bushes as if they had personally offended him, and bashed a couple of trees as well.
Finally he advanced on a couple of flat rocks, lifted up each one in turn, averted his eyes, shouted, ‘Hah!’ again and flailed blindly at the ground beneath.
The landscape having been acceptably pacified, he sat down to eat his supper before it escaped.
It tasted a little like chicken. When you are hungry enough, practically anything can.
And eyes watched him from the nearby water-hole. They were not the tiny eyes of the swarming beetles and tadpoles that made a careful examination of every handful he drank a vital gastronomic precaution. These were far older eyes, and currently without any physical component.
For weeks a man whose ability to find water was limited to checking if his feet were wet had survived in this oven-ready country by falling into waterholes. A man who thought of spiders as harmless little creatures had experienced only a couple of nasty shocks when, by now, this approach should have left him with arms the size of beer barrels that glowed in the dark. The man had even hit the seashore once and paddled in a little way to look at the pretty blue jellyfish, and it was all the watcher could do to see that he got a mere light sting which ceased to be agonizing after only a few days.