The Last Continent

They say the heat and the flies here can drive a man insane. But you don't have to believe that, and nor does that bright mauve elephant that just cycled past.

Strangely enough, the madman in the hole was the only person currently on the continent who might throw any kind of light on a small drama being enacted a thousand miles away and several metres below, where the opal miner known only to his mates as Strewth was about to make the most valuable yet dangerous discovery of his career.

Strewth's pick knocked aside the rock and dust of millennia, and something gleamed in the candlelight.

It was green, like frosty green fire.

Carefully, his mind suddenly as frozen as the light under his fingers, he picked away at the loose rock. The opal picked up and reflected more and more light on to his face as the debris fell away. There seemed to be no end to the glow.

Finally, he let his breath out in one go.

'Strewth!'

If he'd found a little piece of green opal, say about the size of a bean, he'd have called his mates over and they'd have knocked off for a few beers. A piece the size of his fist would have had him pounding the floor. But with this... He was still standing there, brushing it gently with his fingers, when the other miners noticed the light and hurried over.

At least... they started out hurrying. As they came closer, they slowed to a kind of reverential walk.

No one said anything for a moment. The green light shone on their faces.

Then one of the men whispered: 'Good on yer, Strewth.'

There isn't enough money in all the world, mate.'

'Watch out, it might just be a glaze...'

'Still worth a mint. Go on, Strewth... get it out.'

They watched like cats as the pick pried loose more and more rock, and found an edge. And another edge.

Now Strewth's fingers began to shake.

'Careful, mate... there's a side of it...'

The men took a step back as the last of the obscuring earth was knocked away. The thing was oblong, although the bottom edge was a confusion of twisted opal and dirt.

Strewth reversed his pick and laid the wooden handle against the glowing crystal.

'Strewth, it's no good,' he said. 'I just gots to know...'

He tapped the rock.

It echoed.

'Can't be hollow, can it?' said one of the miners. 'Never heard of that.'

Strewth picked up a crowbar. 'Right! Let's—'

There was a faint plink. A large piece of opal broke away near the bottom. It turned out to be no thicker than a plate.

It revealed a couple of toes, which moved very slowly inside their iridescent shell.

'Oh, strewth,' said a miner, as they backed further away. 'It's alive.'

Ponder knew he should never have let Ridcully look at the invisible writings. Wasn't it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?

But no matter what precautions you took, sooner or later the boss was bound to come in and poke around and say things like, 'Is this where you work, then?' and 'I thought I sent a memo out about people bringing in potted plants,' and 'What d'you call that thing with the keyboard?'

And this had been particularly problematical for Ponder, because reading the invisible writings was a delicate and meticulous job, suited to the kind of temperament that follows Grand Prix Continental Drift and keeps bonsai mountains as a hobby or even drives a Volvo. It needed painstaking care. It needed a mind that could enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles in a dark room. It did not need Mustrum Ridcully.

The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated. All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers.

But the primitive techniques used hitherto, based on ancient spells like Weezencake's Unreliable Algorithm, had meant that it took years to put together even the ghost of a page of an unwritten book.

It was Ponder's particular genius that he had found a way around this by considering the phrase, 'How do you know it's not possible until you've tried?' And experiments with Hex, the University's thinking engine, had found that, indeed, many things are not impossible until they have been tried.

Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all.