“Shut up,” said Ridcully. “Hmm. Is this made, though?”
“It’s wire,” said the Senior Wrangler. “Wire’s something that you have to make. And there’s wheels. Hardly anything natural’s got wheels.”
“It’s just that up close, it looks—”
“—all one thing,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, who had knelt down painfully to inspect it the better. “Like one unit. Made all in one lump. Like a machine that’s been grown. But that’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe. Isn’t there a sort of cuckoo in the Ramtops that builds clocks to nest in?” said the Bursar.
“Yes, but that’s just courtship ritual,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes airily. “Besides, they keep lousy time.”
The trolley leapt for a gap in the wizards and would have made it except that the gap was occupied by the Bursar, who gave a scream and pitched forward into the basket. The trolley didn’t stop but rattled onward, toward the gates.
The Dean raised his staff. The Archchancellor grabbed it.
“You might hit the Bursar,” he said.
“Just one small fireball?”
“It’s tempting, but no. Come on. After it.”
“Yo!”
“If you like.”
The wizards lumbered in pursuit. Behind them, as yet unnoticed, a whole flock of the Archchancellor’s swearwords fluttered and buzzed. And Windle Poons was leading a small deputation to the Library.
The Librarian of Unseen University knuckled his way hurriedly across the floor as the door shook to a thunderous knocking.
“I know you’re in there,” came the voice of Windle Poons. “You must let us in. It’s vitally important.”
“Oook.”
“You won’t open the doors?”
“Oook!”
“Then you leave me no choice…”
Ancient blocks of masonry moved aside slowly. Mortar crumbled. Then part of the wall fell in, leaving Windle Poons standing in a Windle Poons-shaped hole. He coughed on the dust.
“I hate having to do that,” he said. “I can’t help feeling it’s pandering to popular prejudice.”
The Librarian landed on his shoulders. To the orangutan’s surprise, this made very little difference. A 300-pound orangutan usually had a noticeable effect on a person’s rate of progress, but Windle wore him like a collar.
“I think we need Ancient History,” he said. “I wonder, could you stop trying to twist my head off?”
The Librarian looked around wildly. It was a technique that normally never failed.
Then his nostrils flared.
The Librarian hadn’t always been an ape. Amagical library is a dangerous place to work, and he’d been turned into an orangutan as a result of a magical explosion. He’d been a quite inoffensive human, although by now so many people had come to terms with his new shape that few people remembered it. But with the change had come the key to a whole bundle of senses and racial memories. And one of the deepest, most fundamental, most borne-in-the-bone of all of them was to do with shapes. It went back to the dawn of sapience. Shapes with muzzles, teeth and four legs were, in the evolving simian mind, definitely filed under Bad News.
A very large wolf had padded through the hole in the wall, followed by an attractive young woman. The Librarian’s signal input was temporarily fused.
“Also,” said Windle, “it is just possible that I could knot your arms behind you.”
“Eeek!”