'I said Death.'
'Sorry?'
'Death. You know ... Death?'
'You mean the robes, the---'
'-scythe, white horse, bones . . .. yes. Death.'
'I just want to make sure I've got this dear,' said the oh god in a reasonable tone of voice. 'You think your grandfather is Death and you think he's acting strange?' The Eater of Socks looked up at the wizards, cautiously. Then its jaws started to work again. ... grnf, grnf ... 'Here, thats one of mine!' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, making a grab. The Eater of Socks backed away hurriedly. It looked like a very small elephant with a very wide, flared trunk, up which one of the Chair's socks was disappearing.
'Funny lookin' little thing, ain't it?' said Ridcully, leaning his staff against the wall. 'Let go, you wretched creature!' said the Chair, making a grab for the sock. 'Shoo!' The sock eater tried to get away while remaining where it was. This should be impossible, but it is in fact a move attempted by many small animals when they are caught eating something forbidden. The legs scrabble hurriedly but the neck and feverishly working jaws merely stretch and pivot around the food. Finally the last of the sock disappeared up the snout with a faint sucking noise and the creature lumbered off behind one of the boilers. After a while it poked one suspicious eye around the corner to watch them. 'They're expensive, you know, with the flaxreinforced heel,' muttered the Chair of Indefinite Studies. Ridcully pulled open a drawer in his hat and extracted his pipe and a pouch of herbal tobacco. He struck a match on the side of the washing engine. This was turning out to be a far more interesting evening than he had anticipated. 'We've got to get this sorted out,' he said, as the first few puffs filled the washing hall with the scent of autumn bonfires. 'Can't have creatures just popping into existence because someone's thought about them. It's unhygienic.' The sleigh slewed around at the end of Money Trap Lane. COME ON, ALBERT. 'You know you're not supposed to do this sort of thing, master. You know what happened last time.' THE HOGFATHER CAN DO IT, THOUGH. 'But ... little match girls dying in the snow is part of what the Hogswatch spirit is all about, master,' said Albert desperately. 'I mean, people hear about it and say, “We may be poorer than a disabled banana and only have mud and old boots to eat, but at least we're better off than the poor little match girl,” master. It makes them feel happy and grateful for what they've got, see.' I KNOW WHAT THE SPIRIT OF HOGSWATCH IS, ALBERT. 'Sorry, master. But, look, it's all right, anyway, because she wakes up and it's all bright and shining and tinkling music and there's angels, master.' Death stopped. AH. THEY TURN UP AT THE LAST MINUTE WITH WARM CLOTHES AND A HOT DRINK? Oh dear, thought Albert. The master's really in one of his funny moods now. 'Er. No. Not exactly at the last minute, master. Not as such.' WELL? 'More sort of just after the last minute.' Albert coughed nervously. YOU MEAN AFTER SHE'S--- 'Yes. That's how the story goes, master, 's not my fault.' WHY NOT TURN UP BEFORE? AN ANGEL HAS QUITE A LARGE CARRYING CAPACITY. 'Couldn't say, master. I suppose people think it's more ... satisfying the other way . . .' Albert hesitated, and then frowned. 'You know, now that I come to tell someone . . Death looked down at the shape under the falling snow. Then he set the lifetimer on the air and touched it with a finger. A spark flashed across. 'You ain't really allowed to do that,' said Albert, feeling wretched. THE HOGFATHER CAN. THE HOGFATHER GIVES PRESENTS. THERE'S NO BETTER PRESENT THAN A FUTURE. 'Yeah, but---' ALBERT.
'All right, master.' Death scooped up the girl and strode to the end of the alley. The snowflakes fen like angel's feathers. Death stepped out into the street and accosted two figures who were tramping through the drifts. TAKE HER SOMEWHERE WARM AND GIVE HER A GOOD DINNER, he commanded, pushing the bundle into the arms of one of them. AND I MAY WELL BE CHECKING UP LATER. Then he turned and disappeared into the swirling snow. Constable Visit looked down at the little girl in his arms, and then at Corporal Nobbs. 'What's all this about, corporal?' Nobby pulled aside the blanket. 'Search me,' he said. 'Looks like we've been chosen to do a bit of charity.'
'I don't call it very charitable, just dumping someone on people like this.'
'Come on, there'll still be some grub left in the Watchhouse,' said Nobby. He'd got a very deep and certain feeling that this was expected of him. He remembered a big man in a grotto, although he couldn't quite remember the face. And he couldn't quite remember the face of the person who had handed over the girl, so that meant it must be the same one. Shortly afterwards there was some tinkling music and a very bright light and two rather affronted angels appeared at the other end of the alley, but Albert threw snowballs at them until they went away. Hex worried Ponder Stibbons. He didn't know how it worked, but everyone else assumed that he did. Oh, he had a good idea about some parts, and he was pretty certain that Hex thought about things by turning them all into numbers and crunching them (a clothes wringer from the laundry, or CWL, had been plumbed in for this very purpose), but why did it need a lot of small religious pictures? And there was the mouse. It didn't seem to do much, but whenever they forgot to give it its cheese Hex stopped working. There were all those ram skulls. The ants wandered over to them occasionally but they didn't seem to do anything. What Ponder was worried about was the fear that he was simply engaged in a cargo cult. He'd read about them. Ignorant 16 and credulous 17 people, whose island might once have been visited by some itinerant merchant vessel that traded pearls and coconuts for such fruits of civilization as glass beads, mirrors, axes and sexual diseases, would later make big model ships out of bamboo in the hope of once again attracting this magical cargo. Of course, they were far too ignorant and credulous to know that just because you built the shape you didn't get the substance ... He'd built the shape of Hex and, it occurred to him, he'd built it in a magical university where the border between the real and 'not real' was stretched so thin you could almost see through it. He got the horrible suspicion that, somehow, they were merely making solid a sketch that was hidden somewhere in the air. Hex knew what it ought to be. All that business about the electricity, for example. Hex had raised the subject one night, not long after it'd asked for the mouse. 16 Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identicallooking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sagosago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. 17 Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
Ponder prided himself that he knew pretty much all there was to know about electricity. But they'd tried rubbing balloons and glass rods until they'd been able to stick Adrian onto the ceiling, and it hadn't had any effect on Hex. Then they'd tried tying a lot of. cats to a wheel which, when revolved against some beads of amber, caused any amount of electricity all over the place. The wretched stuff hung around for days, but there didn't seem any way of ladling it into Hex and anyway no one could stand the noise. So far the Archchancellor had vetoed the lightning rod idea. All this depressed Ponder. He was certain that the world ought to work in a more efficient way. And now even the things that he thought were going right were going wrong. - He stared glumly at Hex's quill pen in its tangle of springs and wire. The door was thrown open. Only one person could make a door bang on its hinges like that. Ponder didn't even turn round. 'Hello again, Archchancellor.'
'That thinking engine of yours working?' said Ridcully. 'Only there's an interesting little---'
'It's not working,' said Ponder. 'It ain't. What's this, a half-holiday for Hogswatch?'
'Look' said Ponder. Hex wrote: +++ Whoops! Here Comes The Cheese! +++MELON MELON MELON +++ Error At Address: 14, Treacle Mine Road, AnkhMorpork+++ !!!!! +++Oneoneoneoneoneone +++ Redo From Start +++ 'What's going on?' said Ridcully, as the others pushed in behind them. 'I know it -sounds stupid, Archchancellor, but we think it might have caught something off the Bursar.'
'Daftness, you mean?'
'That's ridiculous, boy!' said the Dean. 'Idiocy is not a communicable disease.' Ridcully puffed his pipe. 'I used to think that, too,' he said. 'Now Im not so sure. Anyway, you can catch wisdom, can't you?'
'No, you can't,' snapped the Dean. 'It's not like 'flu, Ridcully. Wisdom is ... well, instilled.'
'We bring students here and hope they catch wisdom off us, don't we?' said Ridcully. 'Well, metaphorically,' said the Dean. 'And if you hang around with a bunch of idiots you're bound to become pretty daft yourself,' Ridcully went on. 'I suppose in a manner of speaking . . 'And you've only got to talk to the poor old Bursar for five minutes and you think you're going a bit potty yourself, am I right?' The wizards nodded glumly. The Bursar's company, although quite harmless, had a habit of making one's brain squeak. 'So Hex here has caught daftness off the Bursar,' said Ridcully. 'Simple. Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.' He banged his pipe on the side of Hex's listening tube and shouted: 'FEELING ALL RIGHT, OLD CHAP?' Hex wrote: +++ Hi Mum Is Testing +++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out Of Cheese Error +++ !!!!! +++ Mr Jelly! Mr Jelly! +++ 'Hex seems perfectly able to work out anything purely to do with numbers but when it tries anything else it does this,' said Ponder. 'See? Bursar Disease,' said Ridcully. 'The bee's knees when it comes to adding up, the pig's ear at everything else. Try giving him dried frog pills?'
'Sorry, sir, but that is a very uninformed suggestion,' said Ponder. 'You can't give medicine to machines.'
'Don't see why not,' said Ridcully. He banged on the tube again and bellowed, 'SOON HAVE YOU BACK ON YOUR ... your ... yes, indeed, old chap! Where's that board with all the letter and number buttons, Mr Stibbons? Ah, good.' He sat down and typed, with one finger, as slowly as a company chairman: D-R-Y-D-F-R-O-R-G-½-P-I-L-L-S Hex's pipes jangled. 'That can't possibly work sir,' said Ponder. 'It ought to,' said Ridcully. 'If he can get the idea of being ill, he can get the idea of being cured.' He typed: L-O-T-S-O-F-D-R-Y-D-F-R-O-R-C-P- ¼-L-L-S 'Seems to me'
' he said, `that this thing believes what it's told, right?'
'Well, it's true that Hex has, if you want to put it that way, no idea of an untruth.' `Right. Well, I've just told the thing it's had a lot of dried frog pills. It's not going to call me a liar, is it?' There was some clickings and whirrings within the structure of Hex. Then it wrote: +++ Good Evening, Archchancellor. I Am Fully Recovered And Enthusiastic About My Tasks +++ 'Not mad, then?' +++ I Assure You I Am As Sane As The Next Man +++ 'Bursar, just move away from the machine, will you?' said Ridcully. 'Oh well, I expect it's the best we're going to get. Right, let's get all this sorted out. We want to find out what's going on.'
'Anywhere specific or just everywhere?' said Ponder, a shade sarcastically. There was a scratching noise from Hex's pen. Ridcully glanced down at the paper. 'Says here “Implied Creation Of Anthropomorphic Personification”,' he said. 'What's that mean?'
'Er ... I think Hex has tried to work out the answer,' said Ponder. 'Has it, bigods? I hadn't even worked out what the question was yet . . .'
'It heard you talking, sir.' Ridcully raised his eyebrows. Then he leaned down towards the speaking tube. 'CAN YOU HEAR ME IN THERE?' The pen scratched. +++ Yes +++ 'LOOKIN' AFTER YOU ALL RIGHT, ARE THEY?'
'You don't have to shout, Archchancellor,' said Ponder. 'What's this Implied Creation, then?' said Ridcully. 'Er, I think I've heard of it, Archchancellor,' said Ponder. 'It means the existence of some things automatically brings into existence other things. If some things exist, certain other things have to exist as well.'
'Like... crime and punishment, say?' said Ridcully. 'Drinking and hangovers ... of course. . 'Something like that, sir, yes.'
'So ... if there's a Tooth Fairy there has to be a Verruca Gnome?' Ridcully stroked his beard. 'Makes a sort of sense, I suppose. But why not a Wisdom Tooth Goblin? You know, bringing them extra ones? Some little devil with a bag of big teeth?' There was silence. But in the depths of the silence there was a little tingly fairy bell sound. 'Er ... do you think I might have---' Ridcully began. 'Sounds logical to me,' said the Senior Wrangler. 'I remember the agony I had when my wisdom teeth came through.'
'Last week?' said the Dean, and smirked. 'Ah,' said Ridcully. He didn't look embarrassed because people like Ridcully are never, ever embarrassed about anything, although often people are embarrassed on their behalf. He bent down to the ear Hex again. 'YOU STILL IN THERE?' Ponder Stibbons rolled his eyes. 'MIND TELLING US WHAT THE REALITY IS LW ROUND HERE?' The pen wrote: +++ On A Scale Of One To Ten Query +++ FINE,' Ridcully shouted. ++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++ 'Interestin',' said Ridcully. 'Anyone know what that means?'
'Damn,' said Ponder. 'It's crashed again.' Ridcully looked mystified. 'Has it? I never even saw it take off.'