Interesting Times

inappropriately happy way. “I expect we’d try for months and months without succeeding. I expect we’d attempt everything with no luck. Damn it.”
    “I can see you are agog to rise to this challenge,” said the Patrician. “Let me not detain you from rushing back to the University and putting measures in hand.”
    “But…‘wizzard’…” Ridcully murmured. “Rings a faint bell, that. Think I’ve seen it before, somewhere.”

    The shark didn’t think much. Sharks don’t. Their thought processes can largely be represented by “=".”" You see it = you eat it.
    But, as it arrowed through the waters of the lagoon, its tiny brain began to receive little packages of selachian existential dread that could only be called doubts.
    It knew it was the biggest shark around. All the challengers had fled, or run up against good old “=".”" Yet its body told it that something was coming up fast behind it.
    It turned gracefully, and the first thing it saw was hundreds of legs and thousands of toes, a whole pork pie factory of piggy-wiggies.

    Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.
    The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of a tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued (by the Reader in Woolly Thinking * ) that lectures had taken place in essence , so that was all right, too.
    And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.
    It was the middle of the afternoon. The Chair of Indefinite Studies was giving a lecture in room 3B and therefore his presence asleep in front of the fire in the Uncommon Room was a technicality upon which no diplomatic man would comment.
    Ridcully kicked him on the shins.
    “Ow!”
    “Sorry to interrupt, Chair,” said Ridcully, in a very perfunctory way. “Gods help me, I need the Council of Wizards. Where is everybody?”
    The Chair of Indefinite Studies rubbed his leg. “I know the Lecturer in Recent Runes is giving a lecture in 3B † ,” he said. “But I don’t know where he is . You know, that really hurt—”
    “Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,” said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to. §

    Nothing in nature had that many feet. True, some things had that many legs —damp, wriggling things that live under rocks—but those weren’t legs with feet, they were just legs that ended without ceremony.
    Something brighter than the shark might have been wary. But “="”" swung treacherously into play and shot it forward.
    That was its first mistake.
    In these circumstances, one mistake = oblivion.

    Ridcully was waiting impatiently when, one by one, the senior wizards filed in from serious lecturing in room 3B. Senior wizards needed a lot of lecturing in order to digest their food.
    “Everyone here?” he said. “Right. Sit down. Listen carefully. Now…Vetinari hasn’t had an albatross. It hasn’t come all the way from the Counterweight Continent, and there isn’t a strange message that we’ve got to obey, apparently. Follow me so far?”
    The senior wizards exchanged glances.
    “I think we may be a shade unclear on the detail,” said the Dean.
    “I was using diplomatic language.”
    “Could you, perhaps, try to be a little more indiscreet?”
    “We’ve got to send a wizard to the Counterweight Continent,” said Ridcully. “And we’ve got to do it by teatime. Someone’s asked for a Great Wizard and it seems we’ve got to send one. Only they spell it Wizzard—”
    “Oook?”
    “Yes, Librarian?”
    Unseen University’s