Interesting Times

'Yes. Er.' Ponder felt guilty. 'Look, whatever happens I'm sure you'll get there alive, which is more than would happen if it'd just been left to them. And I'm pretty sure you'll end up on the right continent.'

'Oh, good.'

'Come along, Mr Stibbons. We're all agog to hear how you wish us to do this,' said Ridcully.

'Ah, er, yes. Right. Now, you, Mr Rincewind, if you will go and stand in the centre of the octagon... thank you. Um. You see, gentlemen, what has always been the problem with teleporting over large distances is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, since the object teleported, that's from tele, "I see", and porte, "to go", the whole meaning "I see it's gone", er, the object teleported, er, no matter how large, is reduced to a thuamic particle and is therefore the subject of an eventually fatal dichotomy: it can either know what it is or where it is going, but not both. Er, the tension this creates in the morphic field eventually causes it to disintegrate, leaving the subject as a randomly shaped object, er, smeared across up to eleven dimensions. But I'm sure you all know this.'

There was a snore from the Chair of Indefinite Studies, who was suddenly giving a lecture in room 3B.

Rincewind was grinning. At least, his mouth had gaped open and his teeth were showing.

'Er, excuse me,' he said. 'I don't remember anyone saying anything about being sm—'

'Of course,' said Ponder, 'the subject would not, er, actually experience this—'

'Oh.'

'—as far as we know—'

'What?'

'—although it is theoretically possible for the psyche to remain present—'

'Eh?'

'—briefly witness the explosive discorporation.'

'Hey?'

'Now, we're all familiar with the use of the spell as a fulcrum, er, so that one does not actually move one object but simply exchanges the position of two objects of similar mass. It is my aim tonight, er, to demonstrate that by imparting exactly the right amount of spin and the maximum velocity to the object—'

'Me?'

'—from the very first moment, it is virtually cetain—'

'Virtually?'

'—to hold together for distances of up to, er, six thousand miles—'

'Up to?'

'—give or take ten per cent—'

'Give or take?'

'So if you'd - excuse me, Dean, I'd be obliged if you'd stop dripping wax - if you'd all take up the positions I've marked on the floor...'

Rincewind looked longingly towards the door. It was no distance at all for the experienced coward. He could just trot out of here and they could... they could...

What could they do? They could just take his hat away and stop him ever coming back to the University. Now he came to think about it, they probably wouldn't be bothered about the nailing bit if he was too much bother to find.

And that was the problem. He wouldn't be dead, but then neither would he be a wizard. And, he thought, as the wizards shuffled into position and screwed down the knobs on the end of their staffs, not being able to think of himself as a wizard was being dead.

The spell began.

Rincewind the shoemaker? Rincewind the beggar? Rincewind the thief? Just about everything apart from Rincewind the corpse demanded training or aptitudes that he didn't have.

He was no good at anything else. Wizardry was the only refuge. Well, actually he was no good at wizardry either, but at least he was definitively no good at it. He'd always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn't do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn't a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid. It was a vaguely noble thought that had kept him warm during those occasional 3 a.m. awakenings when he had evaluated his life and found it weighed a little less than a puff of warm hydrogen. And he probably had saved the world a few times, but it had generally happened accidentally, while he was trying to do something else. So you almost certainly didn't actually get any karmic points for that. It probably only counted if you started out by thinking in a loud way 'By criminy, it's jolly well time to save the world, and no two ways about it!' instead of 'Oh shit, this time I'm really going to die.'

The spell continued.

It didn't seem to be going very well.

'Come on, you chaps,' said Ridcully. 'Put some backbone into it!'

'Are you sure... it's... just something small?' said the Dean, who'd broken into a sweat.

'Looks like a... wheelbarrow...' muttered the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

The knob on the end of Ridcully's staff began to smoke.

'Will you look at the magic I'm using!' he said.

'What's goin' on, Mr Stibbons?'

'Er. Of course, size isn't the same as mass...'

And then, in the same way that it can take considerable effot to push at a sticking door and no effort at all to fall full length into the room beyond, the spell caught.