Interesting Times

Librarian, who had been dozing with his head on the table, was suddenly sitting bolt upright. Then he pushed back his chair and, arms waving wildly for balance, left the room at a bowlegged run.
    “Probably remembered an overdue book,” said the Dean. He lowered his voice. “Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn’t add to the status of this University to have an ape on the faculty?”
    “Yes,” said Ridcully flatly. “You are. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that. Only the other day the head of the Thieves’ Guild was asking me if we could turn their librarian into an ape and, besides, he’s the only one of you buggers who stays awake more’n an hour a day. Anyway—”
    “Well, I find it embarrassing,” said the Dean. “Also, he’s not a proper orang-utan. I’ve been reading a book. It says a dominant male should have huge cheek pads. Has he got huge cheek pads? I don’t think so. And—”
    “Shut up, Dean,” said Ridcully, “or I won’t let you go to the Counterweight Continent.”
    “I don’t see what raising a perfectly valid—What?”
    “They’re asking for the Great Wizzard,” said Ridcully. “And I immediately thought of you.” As the only man I know who can sit on two chairs at the same time, he added silently.
    “The Empire?” squeaked the Dean. “Me? But they hate foreigners!”
    “So do you. You should get on famously.”
    “It’s six thousand miles!” said the Dean, trying a new tack. “Everyone knows you can’t get that far by magic.”
    “Er. As a matter of fact you can, I think,” said a voice from the other end of the table.
    They all looked at Ponder Stibbons, the youngest and most depressingly keen member of the faculty. He was holding a complicated mechanism of sliding wooden bars and peering at the other wizards over the top of it.
    “Er. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” he added. “People used to think it was, but I’m pretty sure it’s all a matter of energy absorption and attention to relative velocities.”
    The statement was followed with the kind of mystified and suspicious silence that generally succeeded one of his remarks.
    “Relative velocities,” said Ridcully.
    “Yes, Archchancellor.” Ponder looked down at his prototype slide rule and waited. He knew that Ridcully would feel it necessary to add a comment at this point in order to demonstrate that he’d grasped something.
    “My mother could move like lightning when—”
    “I mean how fast things are going when compared to other things,” Ponder said quickly, but not quite quickly enough. “We should be able to work it out quite easily. Er. On Hex.”
    “Oh, no,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, pushing his chair back. “Not that. That’s meddling with things you don’t understand.”
    “Well, we are wizards,” said Ridcully. “We’re supposed to meddle with things we don’t understand. If we hung around waitin’ till we understood things we’d never get anything done.”
    “Look, I don’t mind summoning some demon and asking it,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “That’s normal. But building some mechanical contrivance to do your thinking for you, that’s…against Nature. Besides,” he added in slightly less foreboding tones, “last time you did a big problem on it the wretched thing broke and we had ants all over the place.”
    “We’ve sorted that out,” said Ponder. “We—”
    “I must admit there was a ram’s skull in the middle of it last time I looked,” said Ridcully.
    “We had to add that to do occult transformations,” said Ponder, “but—”
    “And cogwheels and springs,” the Archchancellor went on.
    “Well, the ants aren’t very good at differential analysis, so—”
    “And that strange wobbly thing with the cuckoo?”
    “The unreal time clock,” said Ponder. “Yes, we think that’s essential for working out—”
    “Anyway, it’s all quite immaterial, because I certainly have no intention of going anywhere,” said the Dean. “Send a student, if you must. We’ve got a lot of spare ones.”
    “Good so be would you if, duff plum of helping second A,” said the Bursar.
    The table fell silent.
    “Anyone understand that?” said Ridcully.
    The Bursar was not technically insane. He had passed through the rapids of insanity some time previously, and was now sculling around in some peaceful pool on the other side. He was often quite coherent,