The Science of Discworld II

Bursar.
    Rincewind got seven because the Archchancellor had found him a useful recipient of all the titles, chairs and posts which (because of ancient bequests, covenants and, in one case at least, a curse) the University was obliged to keep filled. In most instances no one knew what the hell they were for or wanted anything to do with them, in case some clause somewhere involved students, so they were given to Rincewind.
    Every morning, therefore, Blunk stoically delivered seven buckets to the joint door of the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, the Chair of Experimental Serendipity, the Reader in Slood Dynamics, the Fretwork Teacher, 2 the Chair for the Public Misunderstanding of Magic, the Professor of Virtual Anthropology and the Lecturer in Approximate Accuracy … who usually opened the door in his underpants – that is to say, opened the door in the wall whilst wearing his underpants – and took the coal happily, even if it was a sweltering day. At Unseen University you had budgets, and if you didn’t use up everything you’d been given you wouldn’t get as much next time. If this meant you roasted all summer in order to be moderately warm during the winter, then that was a small price to pay for proper fiscal procedures.
    On this day, Rincewind carried the buckets inside and tipped the coal on the heap in the corner.
    Something behind him went ‘gloink’.
    It was a small, subtle and yet curiously intrusive sound, and it accompanied the appearance, on a shelf above Rincewind’s desk, of a beer bottle where no beer bottle had hitherto been .
    He took it down and stared at it. It had recently contained a pint of Winkle’s Old Peculiar. There was absolutely nothing ethereal about it, except that it was blue. The label was the wrong colour and full of spelling mistakes but it was mostly there, right down to the warning in tiny, tiny print: May Contain Nuts. 3
    Now it contained a note.
    He removed this with some care, and unrolled it, and read it.
    Then he stared at the thing beside the beer bottle. It was a glass globe, about a foot across, and contained, floating within it, a smaller blue-and-fluffy-white globe.
    The smaller globe was a world, and the space inside the globe was infinitely large. The world and indeed the whole universe of which it was part had been created by the wizards of Unseen University more or less by accident, and the fact that it had ended up on a shelf in Rincewind’s tiny study was an accurate indication of how interested they were in it once the initial excitement had worn off.
    Rincewind watched the world, sometimes, through an omniscope. It mostly had ice ages, and was less engrossing than an ant farm. Sometimes he shook it up to see if it would make it interesting, but this never seemed to have much of an effect.
    Now he looked back at the note.
    It was extremely puzzling. And the university had someone to deal with things like that.
    Ponder Stibbons, like Rincewind, also had a number of jobs. However, instead of aspiring to seven, he perspired at three. He had long been the Reader in Invisible Writings, had drifted into the new post as Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and had walked in all innocence into the office of Praelector, which is a university title meaning ‘person who gets given the nuisance jobs’.
    That meant that he was in charge in the absence of the senior members of the faculty. And, currently, this being the spring break,they were absent. And so were the students. The University was, therefore, running at near peak efficiency.
    Ponder smoothed out the beer-smelling paper and read:
    TELL STIBBONS GET HERE AT ONCE. BRING LIBRARIAN. WAS IN FOREST, AM IN ROUNDWORLD. FOOD GOOD, BEER AWFUL. WIZARDS USELESS. ELVES HERE TOO. DIRTY DEEDS AFOOT.
RIDCULLY
    He looked up at the humming, clicking, busy bulk of Hex, the University’s magical thinking engine, then, with great care, he placed the message on a tray that was part of the machine’s rambling structure.
    A mechanical eyeball about a foot across lowered itself carefully from the ceiling. Ponder didn’t know how it worked, except that it contained vast amounts of incredibly finely drawn tubing. Hex had drawn up the plans one night and Ponder had taken them along to the gnome jewellers; he’d long ago lost track of what Hex was doing. The machine changed almost on a daily basis.
    The write-out began to clatter and produced the message:
    +++ Elves