The Last Hero

‘All that in one syllable?’

‘He's a very concise thinker! Look, Stibbons must have made a mistake. I wouldn't trust a wizard to give me directions to the other side of a very small room!’

‘He does seem to be a bright young man, though,’ said Carrot.

‘You'll be bright, too, if you're in this thing when it hits the sun,’ said Rincewind. ‘Incandescent, I expect.’

‘We can point the Kite if we're very careful how we operate the port and starboard mirrors,’ said Leonard thoughtfully. ‘There may be a little trial and error…’

‘Ah, we seem to have the hang of it,’ said Leonard. He turned over a small eggtimer. ‘And now, all dragons for two minutes…’

‘I ssuppose he'll ttell uss ssoon wwhat happens nnext?’ shouted Carrot, while behind them things tinkled and creaked.

‘Mmr Sstibbonss hhas ttwo ththousand yyears of uuniversity eexpertise bbehind hhim!’ yelled Leonard, above the din.

‘Hhow mmuch of ththat hhas iinvolved ssteering fflying sships wwith ddragons?’ screamed Rincewind.

Leonard leaned against the tug of home-made gravity and looked at the eggtimer.

‘Aabout wwwwwone hhundred sseconds!’

‘Ah! Iiit'ss ppractically aaa ttradition, tthenn!’

Erratically, the dragons stopped flaming. Once again, things filled the air.

And there was the sun. But no longer circular. Something had clipped its edge.

‘Ah,’ said Leonard. ‘How clever. Gentlemen, behold the moon!’

‘We're going to hit the moon instead?’ said Carrot. ‘Is that better?’

‘My feelings exactly,’ said Rincewind.

‘Ook!’

‘I don't think we're going so very fast,’ said Leonard. ‘We're only just catching it up. I think Mr Stibbons intends that we land on it.’

He flexed his fingers.

‘There's some air there, I'm sure of it,’ he went on. ‘Which means there is probably something we can feed to the dragons. And then, and this is very clever thinking, we ride on the moon until it rises over the Disc, and all we need to do is drop down lightly.’

He kicked the release on the wing levers. The cabin rattled to the spinning of the flywheels. On either side, the Kite spread its wings.

‘Any questions?’ he said.

‘I'm trying to think of all the things that could go wrong,’ said Carrot.

‘I've got to nine so far,’ said Rincewind. ‘And I haven't started on the fine detail.’

The moon was getting bigger, a dark sphere eclipsing the light of the distant sun.

‘As I understand it,’ said Leonard, as it began to loom in the windows, ‘the moon, being much smaller and lighter than the Disc, can only hold on to light things, like air. Heavier things, like the Kite, should hardly be able to stay on the ground.’

‘And that means…?’ said Carrot.

‘Er… we should just float down,’ said Leonard. ‘But holding on to something might be a good idea…’

They landed. It's a short sentence, but contains a lot of incident.

There was silence on the boat, apart from the sound of the sea and Ponder Stibbons's urgent muttering as he tried to adjust the omniscope.

‘The screams…’ murmured Mustrum Ridcully, after a while.

‘But then they screamed a second time, a few seconds later,’ said Lord Vetinari.

‘And a few seconds after that,’ said the Dean.

‘I thought the omniscope could see anywhere,’ said the Patrician, watching the sweat pour off Ponder.

‘The shards, er, don't seem stable when they're too far apart, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘Uh… and there's still a couple of thousand miles of world and elephant between them… ah…’

The omniscope flickered, and then went blank again.

‘A good wizard, Rincewind,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘Not particularly bright, but, frankly, I've never been quite happy with intelligence. An overrated talent, in my humble opinion.’

Ponder's ears went red.

‘Perhaps we should put a small plaque up somewhere in the University,’ said Ridcully. ‘Nothing garish, of course.’

‘Gentlemen, are you forgetting?’ said Lord Vetinari. ‘Soon there will be no University.’

‘Ah. Well, a small saving there, then.’

‘Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there?’

And there was, fuzzy but recognisable, a face peering out of the omniscope.

‘Captain Carrot?’ Ridcully roared. ‘How did you get that damn thing to work?’

‘I just stopped sitting on it, sir.’

‘Are you all right? We heard screams!’ said Ponder.

‘That was when we hit the ground, sir.’

‘But then we heard screams again?’

‘That was probably when we hit the ground for the second time, sir.’

‘And the third time?’

‘Ground again, sir. You could say the landing was a bit… tentative… for a while there.’

Lord Vetinari leaned forward. ‘Where are you?’

‘Here, sir. On the moon. Mr Stibbons was right. There is air here. It's a bit thin, but it's fine if your plans for the day include breathing.’