The Last Continent

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 it takes a little while for this to really be the case * —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.
    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.”
    “And did you see that sign on his desk?” the Dean had said.
    “You mean the one that says, ‘The Buck Starts Here’?”
    “No, the other one. The one which says, ‘When You’re Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.’”
    “And that means…?”
    “I don’t think it’s supposed to mean anything. I think it’s just