“How long to the doorway?”
“The launch window,” corrected the master launchcontroller carefully. “Three days, your prominence. Great A’Tuin’s tail will be in an unmatched position.”
“Then all that remains,” concluded the Arch-astronomer, “is to find the appropriate sacrifice.”
The master launchcontroller bowed.
“The ocean shall provide,” he said.
The old man smiled. it always does,” he said.
“If only you could navigate”
“If only you could steer-“
A wave washed over the deck. Rincewind and Twoflower looked at each other. “Keep bailing!” they screamed in unison, and reached for the buckets.
After a while Twoflower’s peevish voice filtered up from the waterlogged cabin.
“I don’t see how it’s my fault,” he said. He handed up another bucket, which the wizard tipped over the side.
“You were supposed to be on watch,” snapped Rincewind.
“I saved us from the slavers, remember,” said Twoflower.
“I’d rather be a slave than a corpse,” replied the wizard. He straightened up and looked out to sea. He appeared puzzled.
He was a somewhat different Rincewind from the one that escaped the fire of Ankh-Morpork six months before. More scarred, for one thing. And much more travelled. He had visited the Hublands, discovered the curious folkways of many colourful peoples invariably obtaining more scars in the process - and had even, for a never-to-be-forgotten few days, sailed on the legendary Dehydrated Ocean at the heart of the incredibly dry desert known as the Great Nef. On a colder and wetter sea he had seen floating mountains of ice. He had ridden on an imaginary dragon. He had very nearly said
es of paradox spread out across the sea of causality.
Possibly the most important point that would have to be borne in mind by anyone outside the sum totality of the multiverse was that although the wizard and the tourist had indeed only recently appeared in an aircraft in mid-air, they had also at one and the same time been riding on that aeroplane in the normal course of things. That is to say: “while it was true that they had just appeared in this particular set of dimensions, it was also true that they had been living in them all along. It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.
The point is that several quintillion atoms had just materialized (however, they had not. See below) in a universe where they should not strictly have been. The usual upshot of this sort of thing is a vast explosion but, since universes are fairly resilient things, this particular universe had saved itself by instantaneously unravelling its spacetime continuum back to a point where the surplus atoms could safely be accommodated and then rapidly rewinding back to that circle of firelight which for want of a better term its inhabitants were wont to call The Present. This had of course changed history - there had been a few less wars, a few extra dinosaurs and so on - but on the whole the episode passed remarkably quietly.
Outside of this particular universe, however, the repercussions of the sudden double-take bounced to and fro across the face of The Sum of Things, bending whole dimensions and sinking galaxies without a trace.
All this was however totally lost on Dr Rjinswand, 33, a bachelor, born in Sweden, raised in New Jersey, and a specialist in the breakaway oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors. Anyway, he probably would not have believed any of it.
Zweiblumen still seemed to be unconscious. The stewardess, who had helped Rjinswand to his seat to the applause of the rest of the passengers, was bering over him anxiously.
“I radioed ahead,” she told Rjinswand “there’ll be an ambulance waiting when we land Uh, it says on the passenger list that you’re a doctor”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” said Rincewind hurriedly, it might be a different matter if he was a Magnox reactor of course.
“Is it shock of some kind?”
“I’ve never-“
Her sentence terminated in a tremendous crash from the rear of the plane. Several passengers screamed. A sudden gale of air swept every loose magazine and newspaper into a screaming whirlwind that twisted madly down the aisle.
Something else was coming up the aisle.
Something big and oblong and wooden and brassbound. It had hundreds of legs. If it was what it seemed - a walking chest of the kind that appeared in pirate stories brim full of ill-gotten gold and jewels - then what would have been its lid suddenly gaped open.
There were no jewels. But there were lots of big square teeth, white as sycamore, and a pulsating tongue, red as mahogany.
An ancient suitcase was coming to eat him.