The Last Continent

When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but takes a little while for this to really be the case – in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along. Using Hex to remake the attempt in minutely different ways at very high speed had resulted in a high success rate, and he was now assembling whole paragraphs in a matter of hours.

'It's like a conjurin' trick, then,' Ridcully had said. 'You're pullin' the tablecloth away before all the crockery has time to remember to fall over.'

And Ponder had winced and said, 'Yes, exactly like that, Archchancellor. Well done.'

And that had led to all the trouble with How to Dynamically Manage People for Dynamic Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a Short Time Dynamically. Ponder didn't know when this book would be written, or even in which world it might be published, but it was obviously going to be popular because random trawls in the depths of L-space often turned up fragments. Perhaps it wasn't even just one book.

And the fragments had been on Ponder's desk when Ridcully had been poking around.

Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

His mental approach to it could be visualized as a sort of business flowchart with, at the top, a circle entitled 'Me, who does the telling' and, connected below it by a line, a large circle entitled 'Everyone else'.

Until now this had worked quite well, because, although Ridcully was an impossible manager, the University was impossible to manage and so everything worked seamlessly.

And it would have continued to do so if he hadn't suddenly started to see the point in preparing career development packages and, worst of all, job descriptions.

As the Lecturer in Recent Runes put it: 'He called me in and asked me what I did, exactly. Have you ever heard of such a thing? What sort of question is that? This is a university!'

'He asked me whether I had any personal worries,' said the Senior Wrangler. 'I don't see why I have to stand for that sort of thing.'

'And did you see that sign on his desk?' the Dean had said.

'You mean the one that says, "The Buck Starts Here"?'

'No, the other one. The one which says, "When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators, Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life."'

'And that means...?'

'I don't think it's supposed to mean anything. I think it's just supposed to be.'

'Be what?'

'Pro-active, I think. It's a word he's using a lot.'

'What does that mean?'

'Well... in favour of activity, I suppose.'

'Really? Dangerous. In my experience, inactivity sees you through.'

Altogether, it was not a happy university at the moment, and mealtimes were the worst. Ponder tended to be isolated at one end of the High Table as the unwilling architect of this sudden tendency on the part of the Archchancellor to try to Weld Them Into A Lean Mean Team. The wizards had no intention of being lean, but were getting as mean as anything.

On top of that, Ridcully's sudden interest in taking an interest meant that Ponder had to explain something about his own current project, and one aspect of Ridcully that had not changed was his horrible habit of, Ponder suspected, deliberately misunderstanding things.

Ponder had long been struck by the fact that the Librarian, an ape – at least generally an ape, although this evening he seemed to have settled on being a small table set with a red-furred tea service – was, well, so human shaped. In fact, so many things were pretty much the same shape. Nearly everything you met was really a sort of complicated tube with two eyes and four arms or legs or wings. Oh, or they were fish. Or insects. All right, spiders as well. And a few odd things like starfish and whelks. But still there was a remarkably unimaginative range of designs. Where were the six-armed, six-eyed monkeys pinwheeling through the jungle canopy?

Oh, yes, octopussies too, but that was the point, they were really only a kind of underwater spider...

Ponder had poked around among the University's more or less abandoned Museum of Quite Unusual Things, and noticed something rather odd. Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off. Some ribcages were longer, some legs were shorter, some hands became wings, but they all seemed to be based on one design, one size stretched or shrunk to fit all.