'Let me guess,' said Rincewind. 'It's cruel and unusual geography, yes?'
'Well, done, that man! And all you have to do...'
A sound that had been on the limit of hearing suddenly descended through the scales. And there was silence.
'What's that?' said Ridcully.
'Nothing,' said Rincewind, with unusual accuracy.
'The reacting engine has shut down,' said Ponder.
'By itself?'
'Not unless it can pull its own levers, no ...'
The wizards clustered around the door to the old squash court. Ponder held up his thaumometer.
'There's hardly any flux now,' he said. 'It's practically background ... Stand back ...'
He opened the door.
A couple of white pigeons flew out, followed by a billiard ball. Ponder pulled aside a cluster of flags of all nations.
'Just natural fallout,' he called out. 'Oh ...'
The Bursar ambled around the side of the reacting engine, waving a squash racket.
'Ah, Ponder,' he said. 'Have you wondered if Time isn't simply Space rotated through a right angle?'
'Er ... no ...' said Ponder, watching the man carefully for signs of thaumic breakdown.
'It would certainly make pretzels very interesting, don't you think?'
'Er ... have you been playing squash, sir?' said Ponder
'You know, I'm really coming to believe that a closed contour is a boundary, up to parametrization, if and only if it is homotopic to zero,' said the Bursar. 'And, for preference, coloured green.'
'Did you touch any switches, sir?' said Ponder, maintaining a careful distance.
'This thingy here does make some shots very difficult,' said the Bursar, hitting the reacting engine. 'I was trying to hit the rear wall around last Wednesday.'
'I think perhaps we should leave,' said Ponder in a clear, firm tone. 'It will soon be teatime. There will be jelly,' he added.
'Ah, the fifth form of matter,' said the Bursar brightly, following Ponder.
The other wizards were waiting just outside the door.
'Is he all right?' said Ridcully. 'I mean by general bursarial standards, of course.'
'It's hard to tell,' said Ponder, as the Bursar beamed at them. 'I think so. But the reacting engine must had been putting out quite a high flux when he went in.'
'Perhaps none of the thaumic particles hit him?' said the Senior Wrangler.
'But there's millions of them, sir, and they can pass through anything!'
Ridcully slapped the Bursar on the back.
'Bit of luck for you, eh, Bursar?'
The Bursar looked puzzled for a moment, and then vanished.
EDEN AND CAMELOT
THIS BOOK WASN'T CALLED The Religion of Discworld for a reason, although, Heaven knows, there is plenty of raw material. All religions are true, for a given value of 'truth'.
The disciplines of science, however, tell us that we live on a world formed from interstellar debris some four billion years ago in a universe which itself is about 15 billion years old (which is science-speak for 'a very long time'); that in the ensuing years it has been pummelled and frozen and re-arranged on a regular basis; that despite or rather because of this, life turned up very quickly and seems to spring back renewed and re-formed from every blow; and that we ourselves evolved on this planet and, with the suddenness of a bursting dam, became Top Species in a very short period of time.
Actually, science tells us that many cockroaches, bacteria, beetles, and even small mammals might argue that last statement, but since they are not good at debate and can't speak, who cares what they think? Especially since they can't, eh? A key thing about big brains is this: they know big brains are good.
Most of us don't think like scientists. We think like the wizards of Discworld. Everything in the past was leading inevitably to Now, which is the important time.
While the news that the Earth is a small planet in a dull part of the universe has caught on in recent centuries, it's only in the last few decades that the words 'the Earth' have come to mean, for a significant proportion of any society, 'the planet' rather than 'the soil'. We watch the fireworks as great balls of ice plummet into the atmosphere of a nearby planet and, although any one of them would have seriously troubled the Earth, the event was just that: a firework display. As one old lady told a news reporter, 'that sort of thing happens in Outer Space'. But we're in Outer Space, too, and it might pay us to get good at it.
The dinosaurs were not, as suggested in Jurassic Park, 'selected for extinction', they were clobbered by a very large rock, and/or its after-effects. Rocks don't think.
The dinosaurs were in fact doing very well, and had merely neglected to develop three-mile thick armour plating. They may even have evolved something that we'd recognize as 'early civilization'; we shouldn't underestimate how much the surface of the planet can change in 65 million years. But rocks don't care, either.
But even if the rock had missed, there were other rocks. And if they had missed too, then we should be aware that the planet has other, home-grown means of disposal.
Evidence is emerging that suggests that other extinctions were caused by 'natural' but catastrophic changes in the planet's atmosphere. A case is being made that indicates that the very existence of life on Earth will, periodically, trip a catastrophe.
Rocks don't mind.
This will probably not happen tomorrow. But, one day, it will. And then Rincewind's kaleidoscope is shaken up for a new pretty pattern.
Eden and Camelot, the wondrous garden-worlds of myth and legend, are here now. This is about as good as it ever gets. Mostly, it's a lot worse. And it won't stay like this for very long.
There are, perhaps, choices. We could leave. We've dealt with that. Considerable optimism is required. But there might be other small blue planets out there ... By definition, though, Earthlike worlds will have life on them. That's why they'll be Earthlike. And the trouble is that the more Earthlike it is, the more troublesome it would be. Don't worry about the laser-wielding monsters, you can talk to them, if only about lasers. The real problem is more likely to be something very, very small. In the morning you get a rash. In the afternoon, your legs explode.
The other 'choice' is to stay. We may be lucky, we tend to be. But we won't be lucky forever. The average life of a species is about five million years. Depending on how you define humanity, we may already be close to the average.
A useful project, and one that's much cheaper to achieve, is to leave a note to the next occupiers, even if it is only to say 'We Were Here'. It may be of interest to a future species that even if they are, alone in space, they're not alone in Time.
We may already have left our marker. It depends on how long things will really last on the Moon, and if, in a hundred million years, anyone else feels it necessary to go there. If they do, they may find the abandoned descent stages of the Apollo Moon landers. And they'll wonder what a 'Richard M. Nixon' was.
How much luckier are the inhabitants of Discworld. They know they live on a world made for people. With a large hungry turtle, not to mention the four elephants, interstellar debris becomes lunch rather than catastrophe. Large-scale extinction has more to do with magical interference than random rocks or built-in fluctuations; it may have the same effect, but at least there is someone to blame.