The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

heat is … free,’ said Ponder. A little bead of sweat ran down his face.
    ‘Really?’ said the Dean. ‘That’ll be a saving, then, eh, Bursar? Eh? Where’s the Bursar?’
    ‘Ah … er … the Bursar is assisting me today, sir,’ said Ponder. He pointed to the high gallery over the court. The Bursar was standing there, smiling his distant smile, and holding an axe. A rope was tied around the handrail, looped over a beam, and held a long heavy rod suspended over the centre of the reaction engine.
    ‘It is … er …
just
possible that the engine may produce too much magic,’ said Ponder. ‘The rod is lead, laminated with rowan wood. Together they naturally damp down any magical reaction, you see. So if things get too … if we want to settle things down, you see, he just chops through the rope and it drops into the very centre of the reacting engine, you see.’
    ‘What’s that man standing next to him for?’
    ‘That’s Mr Turnipseed, my assistant. He’s the backup fail-safe device.’
    ‘What does he do, then?’
    ‘His job is to shout “For gods’ sakes cut the rope now!” sir.’
    The wizard nodded at one another. By the standards of Ankh-Morpork, where the common thumb was used as a temperature measuring device, this was health and safety at work taken to extremes.
    ‘Well, that all seems safe enough to me,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
    ‘Where did you get the idea for this, Mister Stibbons?’ said Ridcully.
    ‘Well, er, a lot of it is from my own research, but I got quite a few leads from a careful reading of the Scrolls of Loko in the Library, sir.’ Ponder reckoned he was safe enough there. The wizards liked ancient wisdom, provided it was ancient
enough
. They felt wisdom was like wine, and got better the longer it was left alone. Something that hadn’t been known for a few hundred years probably wasn’t worth knowing.
    ‘Loko … Loko … Loko,’ mused Ridcully. ‘That’s up on Uberwald, isn’t it?’
    ‘That’s right, sir.’
    ‘Tryin’ to bring it to mind,’ Ridcully went on, rubbing his beard. ‘Isn’t that where there’s that big deep valley with the ring of mountains round it? Very deep valley indeed, as I recall.’
    ‘That’s right, sir. According to the library catalogue the scrolls were found in a cave by the Crustley Expedition –’
    ‘Lots of centaurs and fauns and other curiously shaped magical whatnots are there, I remember reading.’
    ‘Is there, sir?’
    ‘Wasn’t Stanmer Crustley the one who died of planets?’
    ‘I’m not familiar with –’
    ‘Extremely rare magical disease, I believe.’
    ‘Indeed, sir, but –’
    ‘Now I come to think about it, everyone on that expedition contracted something seriously magical within a few months of getting back ,’ Ridcully went on.
    ‘Er, yes, sir. The suggestion was that there was some kind of curse on the place. Ridiculous notion, of course.’
    ‘I somehow feel I need to ask, Mister Stibbons … what chance is there of this just blowin’ up and destroyin’ the entire university?’
    Ponder’s heart sank. He mentally scanned the sentence, and took refuge in truth. ‘None, sir.’
    ‘Now try honesty, Mister Stibbons.’ And that was the problem with the Archchancellor. He mostly strode around the place shouting at people, but when he did bother to get all his brain cells lined up he could point them straight at the nearest weak spot.
    ‘Well … in the unlikely event of it going seriously wrong, it … wouldn’t
just
blow up the university, sir.’
    ‘What would it blow up, pray?’
    ‘Er … everything, sir.’
    ‘Everything there is, you mean?’
    ‘Within a radius of about fifty thousand miles out into space, sir, yes. According to H EX it’d happen instantaneously. We wouldn’t even know about it.’
    ‘And the odds of this are …?’
    ‘About fifty to one, sir.’
    The wizards relaxed.
    ‘That’s pretty safe. I wouldn’t bet on a horse at those odds,’ said the Senior Wrangler. There was half an inch of ice on the
inside
of his bedroom windows. Things like this give you a very personal view of risk.
    1 Wizard or ‘Real’ Squash bears very little relationship to the high speed sweat bath played elsewhere. Wizards see no point in moving fast. The ball is lobbed lazily. Certain magical inconsistencies are built into the floor and walls, however, so that the wall a ball hits is not necessarily the wall it rebounds from. This was one of the factors which, Ponder Stibbons