Unseen Academicals

includes an attractive package of remuneration”, whatever the hells that means, “and other benefits including a generous pension”! A pension, mark you! When ever has a wizard retired?’
    ‘Well. Doctor Earwig—’ Ponder began, unable to stop himself.
    ‘He left to get married!’ snapped Ridcully. ‘That’s not retirin’, that’s the same as dyin’.’
    ‘What about Doctor Housemartin?’ Ponder went on.
    The Lecturer in Recent Runes kicked him on the ankle, but Ponder merely said, ‘Ouch!’ and continued. ‘He left with a bad case of work-related frogs, sir!’
    ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get off the pot,’ muttered Ridcully. Things were subsiding a bit now, and the pointy hats were tentatively raised. The Archchancellor’s little moments only lasted a few minutes. This would have been more comforting were it not for the fact that at approximately five-minute intervals something suddenly reminded him of what he considered to be the Dean’s totally treasonable activity, to wit, applying for and getting a job at another university via a common advertisement in a newspaper. That was not how a prince of magic behaved. He didn’t sit in front of a panel of drapers, greengrocers and bootmakers (wonderful people though they may be, salt of the earth, no doubt, but even so…) to be judged and assessed like some champion terrier (had his teeth counted, no doubt!). He’d let down the entire brotherhood of wizardry, that’s what he’d done—
    There was a squeaking of wheels out in the corridor, and every wizard stiffened in anticipation. The door swung open and the first overloaded trolley was pushed in.
    There was a series of sighs as every eye focused on the maid who was pushing it, and then some rather louder sighs when they realized that she was not, as it were, the intended.
    She wasn’t ugly. She might be called homely, perhaps, but it was quite a nice home, clean and decent and with roses round the door and a welcome on the mat and an apple pie in the oven. But the thoughts of the wizards were, astonishingly, not on food at this point, although some of them were still a bit hazy as to why not.
    She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her. *
    The faculty was crestfallen, but it brightened up considerably as the caravan of trolleys wound its way into the room. There was nothing like a 3 a.m. snack to raise the spirits, everyone knew that.
    Well, Ponder thought, at least we’ve got through the evening without anything breaking. Better than Tuesday, at least.
    It is a well-known fact in any organization that, if you want a job done, you should give it to someone who is already very busy. It has been the cause of a number of homicides, and in one case the death of a senior director from having his head shut repeatedly in quite a small filing cabinet.
    In UU, Ponder Stibbons was that busy man. He had come to enjoy it. For one thing, most of the jobs he was asked to do did not need doing, and most of the senior wizards did not care if they were not done, provided they were not not done by themselves. Besides, Ponder was very good at thinking up efficient little systems to save time, and was, in particular, very proud of his system for writing the minutes of meetings, which he had devised with the help of Hex, the university’s increasingly useful thinking engine. A detailed analysis of past minutes, coupled with Hex’s enormous predictive abilities, meant that for a simple range of easily accessible givens, such as the agenda (which Ponder controlled in any case), the committee members, the time since breakfast, the time to dinner, and so on, in most cases the minutes could be written beforehand.
    All in all, he considered that he was doing his bit in maintaining UU in its self-chosen course of amiable, dynamic stagnation. It was always a rewarding effort, knowing the alternative, to keep things that way.
    But a page that turns itself was, to Ponder, an anomaly. Now, while the sound of the pre-breakfast supper grew around him, he smoothed out the page and read, carefully.

    Glenda would have cheerfully broken a plate over Juliet’s sweet, empty head when the girl finally turned up in the Night Kitchen. At least, she would cheerfully have thought about it, in quite a deliberate way, but there was no point in losing her temper, because its target was not really much good at noticing what other