The Last Continent

route might be via your jugular.
    Therefore there’s something comforting in knowing that some of the best brains in the University, who a generation ago would be coming up with some really exciting plans involving trick floorboards and exploding wallpaper, were spending all night in the High Energy Magic Building, trying to teach Hex to sing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady,” exulting at getting a machine to do after six hours’ work something that any human off the street would do for tuppence, then sending out for banana-and-sushi pizza and falling asleep at the keyboard. Their seniors called it technomancy, and slept a little easier in their beds in the knowledge that Ponder and his students weren’t sleeping in theirs .
    Ponder must have nodded off, because he was awakened just before two A.M . by a scream and realized he was face down in half of his supper. He pulled a piece of banana-flavored mackerel off his cheek, left Hex quietly clicking through its routine and followed the noises.
    The commotion led him to the hall in front of the big doors leading to the Library. The Bursar was lying on the floor, being fanned with the Senior Wrangler’s hat.
    “As far as we can gather, Archchancellor,” said the Dean, “the poor chap couldn’t sleep and came down for a book—”
    Ponder looked at the Library doors. A big strip of black and yellow tape had been stuck across them, along with a sign saying: D ANGER , D O W OTTE E NTER IN A NY C IRCUMSTANCES . It was now hanging off, and the doors were ajar. This was no surprise. Any true wizard, faced with a sign like “Do not open this door. Really. We mean it. We’re not kidding. Opening this door will mean the end of the universe,” would automatically open the door in order to see what all the fuss was about. This made signs rather a waste of time, but at least it meant that when you handed what was left of the wizard to his grieving relatives you could say, as they grasped the jar, “We told him not to.”
    There was silence from the darkness on the other side of the doorway.
    Ridcully extended a finger and pushed one door slightly.
    Behind it something made a fluttering noise and the doors were slammed shut. The wizards jumped back.
    “Don’t risk it, Archchancellor!” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. “I tried to go in earlier and the whole section of Critical Essays had gone critical!”
    Blue light flickered under the doors.
    Elsewhere, someone might have said, “It’s just books! Books aren’t dangerous!” But even ordinary books are dangerous, and not only the ones like Make Gelignite the Professional Way . A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke. Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.
    And the Unseen University Library was a magical library, built on a very thin patch of space-time. There were books on distant shelves that hadn’t been written yet, books that never would be written. At least, not here. It had a circumference of a few hundred yards, but there was no known limit to its radius.
    And in a magical library the books leak, and learn from one another…
    “They’ve started attacking anyone who goes in,” moaned the Dean. “No one can control them when the Librarian’s not here!”
    “But we’re a university! We have to have a library!” said Ridcully. “It adds tone . What sort of people would we be if we didn’t go into the Library?”
    “Students,” said the Senior Wrangler morosely.
    “Hah, I remember when I was a student,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. “Old ‘Bogeyboy’ Swallett took us on an expedition to find the Lost Reading Room. Three weeks we were wandering around. Had to eat our own boots.”
    “Did you find it?” said the Dean.
    “No, but we found the remains of the previous year’s expedition.”
    “What did you do?”
    “We ate their boots, too.”
    From beyond the door came a flapping, as of leather covers.
    “There’s some pretty vicious grimoires in there,” said the Senior Wrangler. “They can take a man’s arm right off.”
    “Yes, but at least they don’t know about door-handles,” said the Dean.
    “They do if there’s a book in there somewhere called Doorknobs for Beginners ,” said the Senior Wrangler. “They read each