'Come on, then. Where were we?'
'Look, I really think this is most unwise,' said the Dean.
'Just shut up, old chap, and hold this brick.'
'Very well, but tell me this; how do you propose to get the wheelchair over?'
They looked at Poons' wheelchair.
There are wheelchairs which are lightweight and built to let their owners function fully and independently in modern society. To the thing inhabited by Poons, they were as gazelles to a hippopotamus. Poona was well aware of his function in modern society, and as far as he was concerned it was to be pushed everywhere and generally pandered to.
It was wide and long and steered by means of a little front wheel and a long cast-iron handle. Cast iron, in fact, featured largely in its construction. Bits of baroque ironwork adorned its frame, which seemed to have been made of iron drainpipes welded together. The rear wheels did not in fact have blades affixed to them, but looked as though these were optional extras. There were various dread levers which only Poons knew the purpose of. There was a huge oilskin hood that could be erected in a matter of hours to protect its occupant from showers, storms and, probably, meteor strikes and falling buildings. By way of fight relief, the front handle was adorned with a selection of trumpets, hooters and whistles, with which Poons was wont to announce his progress around the passages and quadrangles of the University. For the fact was that although the wheelchair needed all the efforts of one strong man to get it moving it had, once actually locomotive, a sort of ponderous unstoppability; it may have had brakes, but Windle Poons had never bothered to find out. Staff and students alike knew that the only hope of survival, if they heard a honk or a blast at close range, was to flatten themselves against the nearest wall while the dreaded conveyance rattled by.
'We'll never get that over,' said the Dean firmly. 'It must weigh at least a ton. We ought to leave him behind, anyway. He's too old for this sort of thing.'
'When I was a lad I was over this wall, nun, every night,' said Poons, resentfully. He chuckled. 'We had some scrapes in those days, I can tell you. If I had a penny, mm, for every time the Watch chased me home,' his ancient lips moved in a sudden frenzy of calculation, 'I'd have fivepence-ha'penny.'
'Maybe if we-' the Chair began, and then said 'What do you mean, fivepence-ha'penny?'
'I recall once they gave up halfway,' said Poons, happily. 'Oh, those were great times. I remember me and old “Numbers” Riktor and “Tudgy” Spold climbed up on the Temple of Small Gods, you see, in the middle of a service, and Tudgy had got this piglet in a sack, and he-'
'See what you've done?' complained the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'You've set him off now.'
'We could try lifting it by magic,' said the Chair. 'Gindle's Effortless Elevator should do the trick.'
'-and then the high priest turned around and, heh, the look on his face! And then old Numbers said, let's-'
'It's hardly a very dignified use of magic,' sniffed the Dean.
'Considerably more dignified than heaving the bloody
thing over the wall ourselves, wouldn't you say?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, rolling up his sleeves. 'Come on, lads.'
'-and next thing, Pimple was hammering on the door of the Assassins' Guild, and then old Scummidge, who was the porter there, heehee, he was a right terror, anyway, he came out, mm, and then the guards come around the corner-'
'All ready? Right!'
'-which puts me in mind of the time me and “Cucumber” Framer got some glue and went round to-'
'Up your end, Dean!'
The wizards grunted with effort.
'-and, mm, I can remember it as if it was only yesterday, the look on his face when-'
'Now lower away!'
The iron-shod wheels clanged gently on the cobbles of the alley.
Poons nodded amiably. 'Great times. Great times,' he muttered, and fell asleep.
The wizards climbed slowly and unsteadily over the wall, ample backsides gleaming in the moonlight, and stood wheezing gently on the far side.
'Tell me, Dean,' said the Lecturer, leaning on the wall to stop the shaking in his legs, 'have we made . . . the wall . . . higher in the last fifty years?'
'I . . . don't . . . think . . . so.'
'Odd. Used to go up it like a gazelle. Not many years ago. Not many at all, really.'