'Couple of weeks,' said Ridcully. 'Not a bad place. Come and meet everyone.'

The rest of the wizards were sitting around a table. They were dressed in their normal wizarding outfits which, Rincewind had noticed, fitted in pretty well with the costumes in this town. But each man had equipped himself with a ruff, just to be on the safe side.

They nodded cheerfully at the newcomers. A forest of empty mugs in front of them went some way to explaining the cheer.

'You've detected elves?' said Ridcully, forcing enough wizards apart to give them seats.

'The place is lousy with glamour, sir.' said Ponder, sitting down.

'You're telling me,' said Ridcully. He glanced along the table. 'Oh, yes. We've found a friend.

Dee, this is Mister Stibbons. Remember we told you about him?'

It was then that Ponder realised there were a couple of non-wizards in the party. It was quite hard to spot one, though, since for all practical purposes he fitted in well. He even had the right kind of beard.

'Er ... the noddlepate?' said Dee.

'No, that's Rincewind,' said Ridcully. 'Ponder is the clever one. And this ...' he turned to the Librarian, and words failed even him, 'Is ... a ... friend of theirs.'

'From Spanish,' said Rincewind, who didn't know what noddlepate meant but had formed a pretty good idea.

'Dee here is a sort of local wizard,' said Ridcully, in the loud voice he thought was a confidential whisper. 'Sharp as a tack, mind like a razor, but spends all his spare time trying to do magic!'

'Which doesn't work here,' said Ponder.

'Right! But everyone believes it does, despite everything. Amazing! That's what elves can do to a place.' Ridcully leaned forward, conspiratorially. 'They came straight through our world and straight on into this one and we got caught up in the ... what's it you call it when it's all swirly and chilly as hell?'

'Trans-dimensional flux, sir,' said Ponder.

'Right. We'd have been totally lost if our friend Dee here hadn't been working a magic circle at the time.'

There was silence from Rincewind and Ponder. Then Rincewind said: 'You said magic doesn't work here.'

'As with this crystal sphere,' said a voice from Rincewind's pocket, 'this world is quite capable of maintaining a passive receptor. Rincewind removed the scrying stone from his pocket. 'But that is mine,' said Dee, staring at it.

'Sorry,' said Rincewind. 'We just sort of found it and sort of picked it sort of up.'

'But it speaks!' gasped Dee. 'An ethereal voice!'

'No, it's just from another world that is much bigger than this one and can't be seen,' said Ridcully. 'There's nothing mysterious about it at all.'

With trembling fingers, Dee took the sphere from Rincewind and held it in front of his eyes.

'Speak!' he commanded.

'Permission denied,' said the crystal. 'You do not have the rights to do this.'

'Where did you tell him you came from?' Rincewind whispered Ridcully, as Dee tried to polish the ball with the sleeve of his robe.

'I just said we'd dropped in from another sphere,' said Ridcully. 'After all, this universe is full of spheres. He seemed to be quite happy about that. I didn't mention the Discworld at all, in case it confused him.

Rincewind looked at Dee's shaking hands and the manic glint in his eye.

'I just want to be clear,' he said slowly. 'You appeared in a magic circle, you told him you're from another sphere, he'd just spoken to crystal ball, you've explained to him that magic doesn't work and you don't want to confuse him?'

'Make him any more confused than he is already, you mean,' said the Dean. 'Confusion is the natural state of mind here, believe us. Do you know they think numbers are magical? Doing sums can get you into real trouble in these parts.'

'Well, some numbers are magi—' Ponder began.

'Not here they're not,' said the Archchancellor. 'Here I am, out in the open air, no magical protection and I'm going to say the number that comes after seven. Here it comes: eight. There.

Nothing happened. Eight! Eighteen! Two fat ladies in very tight corsetry, eighty-eight! Oh someone pull Rincewind out from under the table, will you?'

While the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography was having some of it brushed off his robes, Ridcully continued: 'It's a mad world. No narrativium. People makin' up history as they go along. Brilliant men spendin' their time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—'

'Sixteen,' said Ponder.

'Yes, we know that because we can go and look, but here it's just another silly question,' said Ridcully. 'It'd make you cry. The history of this place goes backwards half the time. It's a mess.

A parody of a world.'

'We made it,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'We didn't make it this badly,' said the Dean. 'We've seen the history books here. There were some great civilisations thousands of years ago. There was a place like Ephebe that was really beginning to find things out. The wrong things, mostly, but at least they were making an effort.

Even had a decent pantheon of gods. All gone now. Our chum here and his friends think everything worth knowing has been discovered and forgotten and, frankly, they're not totally wrong.'

'What can we do about it?' said Ponder.

'You can talk to Hex on that thing?'

Yes, sir.'

'Then Hex can do the magic back at UU and we'll find out what the elves did,' said Ridcully.

'Er,' Rincewind began, 'do we have the right to interfere?' They all stared at him.

'I mean, we never did it before,' he went on. 'Remember all those other creatures that evolved here? The intelligent lizards? The intelligent crabs? Those dog things? They all got completely wiped out by ice ages and falling rocks and we never did anything to stop it.'18

They went on staring.

'I mean, elves are just another problem, aren't they?' said Rincewind. Maybe ... maybe they're just another form of big rock? Maybe ... maybe they always turn up when intelligence gets going? And the species is either clever enough to survive them or it ends up buried in the bedrock like all the others? I mean, perhaps it's a kind of, of a test? I mean…

It dawned on Rincewind that he was not carrying the meeting, wizards were glaring at him.

'Are you suggesting that someone somewhere is awarding marks, Rincewind?' said Ponder.

'Well, obviously there is no—'

'Good. Shut up,' said Ridcully. 'Now, lads, let's get back to Mort Lake and get started.'

'Mort Lake?' said Rincewind. 'But that's in Ankh-Morpork!' 'There's one here, too,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, beaming.

'Amazing, isn't it? We never guessed. This world is a cheap parody of our own. As Above, So Below and all that.'

'But without magic,' said Ridcully. 'And with no narrativium. It doesn't know where it's going.'

'But we do, sir,' said Ponder, who had been scribbling in notebook.

'Do we?'

'Yes, sir. Remember? In about a thousand years' time it's going to be hit by a really big rock. I keep looking at the numbers, sir, an that's what it means.'

'But I thought we found there'd been a race that built huge structures to get off the place?' 'That's right, sir.'

'Can a new species turn up in a thousand years?'

'I don't think so, sir.'

'You mean these are the ones that leave?'

'It seems like it, sir,' said Ponder.

The wizards looked at the people in the courtyard. Of course, the presence of beer always greases the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, but even so ...

At a nearby table, one man threw up on another one. There was general applause.

T think,' said Ridcully, summing up the general mood, 'that we are going to be here for some time.'