The Colour of Magic

show Jack Zweiblumen around when they got back to the States . Yes, that was it. And then Jack had been taken ill and he’d panicked and come through here and surprised this hijacker. Of course. What on earth was “Hublandish?”
    Dr. Rjinswand rubbed his forehead. What he could do with was a drink.

    Ripples of paradox spread out across the sea of causality.
    Possibly the most important point that would have to be borne in mind by anyone outside the sum totality of the multiverse was that although the wizard and the tourist had indeed only recently appeared in an aircraft in midair, they had also at one and the same time been riding on that airplane in the normal course of things. That is to say: while it was true that they had just appeared in this particular set of dimensions, it was also true that they had been living in them all along. It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.
    The point is that several quintillion atoms had just materialized (however, they had not. See below) in a universe where they should not strictly had been. The usual upshot of this sort of thing is a vast explosion but, since universes are fairly resilient things, this particular universe had saved itself by instantaneously unraveling its space-time continuum back to a point where the surplus atoms could safely be accommodated and then rapidly rewinding back to that circle of firelight which for want of a better term its inhabitants were wont to call The Present. This had of course changed history—there had been a few less wars, a few extra dinosaurs and so on—but on the whole the episode passed remarkably quietly.
    Outside of this particular universe, however, the repercussions of the sudden double-take bounced to and fro across the face of The Sum of Things, bending whole dimensions and sinking galaxies without a trace.
    All this was however totally lost on Dr. Rjinswand, 33, a bachelor, born in Sweden, raised in New Jersey, and a specialist in the breakaway oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors. Anyway, he probably would not have believed any of it.
    Zweiblumen still seemed to be unconscious. The stewardess, who had helped Rjinswand to his seat to the applause of the rest of the passengers, was bending over him anxiously.
    “We’ve radioed ahead,” she told Rjinswand. “There’ll be an ambulance waiting when we land. Uh, it says on the passenger list that you’re a doctor—”
    “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” said Rjinswand hurriedly. “It might be a different matter if he was a Magnox reactor of course. Is it shock of some kind?”
    “I’ve never—”
    Her sentence terminated in a tremendous crash from the rear of the plane. Several passengers screamed. A sudden gale of air swept every loose magazine and newspaper into a screaming whirlwind that twisted madly down the aisle.
    Something else was coming up the aisle. Something big and oblong and wooden and brass-bound. It had hundreds of legs. If it was what it seemed—a walking chest of the kind that appeared in pirate stories brim full of ill-gotten gold and jewels—then what would have been its lid suddenly gaped open.
    There were no jewels. But there were lots of big square teeth, white as sycamore, and a pulsating tongue, red as mahogany.
    An ancient suitcase was coming to eat him.
    Rjinswand clutched at the unconscious Zweiblumen for what little comfort there was there, and gibbered. He wished fervently that he was somewhere else…
    There was a sudden darkness .
    There was a brilliant flash .
    The sudden departure of several quintillion atoms from a universe that they had no right to be in anyway caused a wild imbalance in the harmony of the Sum Totality which it tried frantically to retrieve, wiping out a number of subrealities in the process. Huge surges of raw magic boiled uncontrolled around the very foundations of the multiverse itself, welling up through every crevice into hitherto peaceful dimensions and causing novas, supernovas, stellar collisions, wild flights of geese and drowning of imaginary continents. Worlds as far away as the other end of time experienced brilliant sunsets of corruscating octarine as highly charged magical particles roared through the atmosphere. In the cometary halo around the fabled Ice System of Zeret a noble comet died as a prince flamed across the sky.
    All this was however lost on Rincewind as, clutching the inert Twoflower around the waist, he plunged toward the