Unseen Academicals

of resigning at all. Tenure at Unseen University was for life, and often a long way beyond.
    The office of Master of The Traditions had fallen inevitably on Ponder Stibbons, who tended to get all the jobs that required someone who thought that things should happen on time and that numbers should add up.
    Regrettably, when he’d gone to check on things with the previous Master of The Traditions, who, everyone agreed, had not been seen around and about lately, he’d found that the man had been dead for two hundred years. This wasn’t a wholly unusual circumstance. Ponder, after years at Unseen, still didn’t know the full size of the faculty. How could you keep track of them in a place like this these days, where hundreds of studies all shared one window, but only on the outside, or rooms drifted away from their doorways during the night, travelled intangibly through the slumbering halls and ended up docking quite elsewhere?
    A wizard could do what he liked in his own study, and in the old days that had largely meant smoking anything he fancied and farting hugely without apologizing. These days it meant building out into a congruent set of dimensions. Even the Archchancellor was doing it, which made it hard for Ponder to protest: he had half a mile of trout stream in his bathroom, and claimed that messin’ about in his study was what kept a wizard out of mischief. And, as everyone knew, it did. It generally got him into trouble instead.
    Ponder had let that go, because he now saw it as his mission in life to stoke the fires that kept Mustrum Ridcully bubbling and made the university a happy place. As a dog reflects the mood of its owner, so a university reflects its Archchancellor. All he could do now, as the university’s sole self-confessed entirely sensible person, was to steer things as best he could, keep away from squalls involving the person previously known as the Dean, and find ways of keeping the Archchancellor too occupied to get under Ponder’s feet.
    Ponder was about to put the Book of Traditions away when the heavy pages flopped over.
    ‘That’s odd.’
    ‘Oh, those old book bindings get very stiff,’ said Ridcully. ‘They have a life of their own, sometimes.’
    ‘Has anyone heard of Professor H. F. Pullunder, or Doctor Erratamus?’
    The faculty stopped watching the door and looked at one another.
    ‘Ring a bell, anyone?’ said Ridcully.
    ‘Not a tinkle,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, cheerfully.
    The Archchancellor turned to his left. ‘What about you, Dean? You know all the old—’
    Ponder groaned. The rest of the wizards shut their eyes and braced themselves. This might be bad.
    Ridcully stared down at two empty chairs, with the imprint of a buttock in each one. One or two of the faculty pulled their hats down over their faces. It had been two weeks now, and it had not got any better.
    He took a deep breath and roared: ‘Traitor!’–which was a terrible thing to say to two dimples in leather.
    The Chair of Indefinite Studies gave Ponder Stibbons a nudge, indicating that he was the chosen sacrifice for today, again.
    Again.
    ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us!’ said Ridcully, to the universe in general.
    Ponder cleared his throat. He’d really hoped the Megapode hunt would take the Archchancellor’s mind off the subject, but Ridcully’s mind kept on swinging back to the absent Dean the way a tongue plunges back to the site of a missing tooth.
    ‘Er, in point of fact, I believe his remuneration is at least—’ he began, but in Ridcully’s current mood no answer would be the right one.
    ‘Remuneration? Since when did a wizard work for wages? We are pure academics, Mister Stibbons! We do not care for mere money!’
    Unfortunately, Ponder was a clear logical thinker who, in times of mental confusion, fell back on reason and honesty, which, when dealing with an angry Archchancellor, were, to use the proper academic term, unhelpful. And he neglected to think strategically, always a mistake when talking to fellow academics, and as a result made the mistake of employing, as at this point, common sense.
    ‘That’s because we never actually pay for anything very much,’ he said, ‘and if anyone needs any petty cash they just help themselves from the big jar—’
    ‘We are part of the very fabric of the university, Mister Stibbons! We take only what we require! We do not seek wealth! And most certainly we do not accept a “post of vital importance which