The words went something like this:
‘Grubs! That’s what we’re going to eat!{5} That’s why they call it grub! And what’re we doing to get the grub? Why, we’re grubbing for it! Hooray!’ Another shovelful of earth arced on to the heap, and the voice said, rather more quietly: ‘I wonder if you can eat flies?’
They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don’t have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past.
Strangely enough, the madman in the hole was the only person currently on the continent who might throw any kind of light on a small drama being enacted a thousand miles away and several metres below, where the opal miner known only to his mates as Strewth{6} was about to make the most valuable yet dangerous discovery of his career.
Strewth’s pick knocked aside the rock and dust of millennia, and something gleamed in the candlelight.
It was green, like frosty green fire.
Carefully, his mind suddenly as frozen as the light under his fingers, he picked away at the loose rock. The opal picked up and reflected more and more light on to his face as the debris fell away. There seemed to be no end to the glow.
Finally, he let his breath out in one go.
‘Strewth!’
If he’d found a little piece of green opal, say about the size of a bean, he’d have called his mates over and they’d have knocked off for a few beers. A piece the size of his fist would have had him pounding the floor. But with this … He was still standing there, brushing it gently with his fingers, when the other miners noticed the light and hurried over.
At least … they started out hurrying. As they came closer, they slowed to a kind of reverential walk.
No one said anything for a moment. The green light shone on their faces.
Then one of the men whispered: ‘Good on yer, Strewth.’
‘There isn’t enough money in all the world, mate.’
‘Watch out, it might just be a glaze …’
‘Still worth a mint. Go on, Strewth … get it out.’
They watched like cats as the pick pried loose more and more rock, and found an edge. And another edge.
Now Strewth’s fingers began to shake.
‘Careful, mate … there’s a side of it …’
The men took a step back as the last of the obscuring earth was knocked away. The thing was oblong, although the bottom edge was a confusion of twisted opal and dirt.
Strewth reversed his pick and laid the wooden handle against the glowing crystal.
‘Strewth, it’s no good,’ he said. ‘I just gots to know …’
He tapped the rock.
It echoed.
‘Can’t be hollow, can it?’ said one of the miners. ‘Never heard of that.’
Strewth picked up a crowbar. ‘Right! Let’s—’
There was a faint plink. A large piece of opal broke away near the bottom. It turned out to be no thicker than a plate.
It revealed a couple of toes, which moved very slowly inside their iridescent shell.
‘Oh, strewth,’ said a miner, as they backed further away. ‘It’s alive.’
Ponder knew he should never have let Ridcully look at the invisible writings. Wasn’t it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?
But no matter what precautions you took, sooner or later the boss was bound to come in and poke around and say things like, ‘Is this where you work, then?’ and ‘I thought I sent a memo out about people bringing in potted plants,’ and ‘What d’you call that thing with the keyboard?’
And this had been particularly problematical for Ponder, because reading the invisible writings was a delicate and meticulous job, suited to the kind of temperament that follows Grand Prix Continental Drift and keeps bonsai mountains as a hobby or even drives a Volvo. It needed painstaking care. It needed a mind that could enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles in a dark room. It did not need Mustrum Ridcully.
The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated. All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers.
But the primitive techniques used hitherto, based on ancient spells like Weezencake’s Unreliable Algorithm, had meant that it took years to put together even the ghost of a page of an unwritten book.
It was Ponder’s particular genius that he had found a way around this by considering the phrase, ‘How do you know it’s not possible until you’ve tried?’ And experiments with Hex, the University’s thinking engine, had found that, indeed, many things are not impossible until they have been tried.
Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all.
When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but takes a little while for this to really be the case[5] — in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along. Using Hex to remake the attempt in minutely different ways at very high speed had resulted in a high success rate, and he was now assembling whole paragraphs in a matter of hours.
‘It’s like a conjurin’ trick, then,’ Ridcully had said. ‘You’re pullin’ the tablecloth away before all the crockery has time to remember to fall over.’
And Ponder had winced and said, ‘Yes, exactly like that, Archchancellor. Well done.’
And that had led to all the trouble with How to Dynamically Manage People for Dynamic Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a Short Time Dynamically. Ponder didn’t know when this book would be written, or even in which world it might be published, but it was obviously going to be popular because random trawls in the depths of L-space often turned up fragments. Perhaps it wasn’t even just one book.
And the fragments had been on Ponder’s desk when Ridcully had been poking around.
Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.{7}
His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled ‘Me, who does the telling’ and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled ‘Everyone else’.
Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly.
And it would have continued to do so if he hadn’t suddenly started to see the point in preparing career development packages and, worst of all, job descriptions.
As the Lecturer in Recent Runes put it: ‘He called me in and asked me what I did, exactly. Have you ever heard of such a thing? What sort of question is that? This is a university!’
‘He asked me whether I had any personal worries,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘I don’t see why I have to stand for that sort of thing.’