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boiled water, and Galder had the nasty suspicion that he was clever. He didn’t smile often enough, and he liked figures and the sort of organization charts that show lots of squares with arrows pointing to other squares. In short, he was the sort of man who could use the word “personnel” and mean it.
    The whole of the visible Disc was now covered with a shimmering white skin that fitted it perfectly.
    Galder looked down at his own hands and saw them covered with a pale network of shining threads that followed every movement.
    He recognized this kind of spell. He’d used them himself. But his had been smaller—much smaller.
    “It’s a Change spell,” said Trymon. “The whole world is being changed.”
    Some people, thought Galder grimly, would have had the decency to put an exclamation mark on the end of a statement like that.
    There was the faintest of pure sounds, high and sharp, like the breaking of a mouse’s heart.
    “What was that?” he said.
    Trymon cocked his head.
    “C-sharp, I think,” he said.
    Galder said nothing. The white shimmer had vanished, and the first sounds of the waking city began to filter up to the two wizards. Everything seemed exactly the same as it had before. All that, just to make things stay the same?
    He patted his nightshirt pockets distractedly and finally found what he was looking for lodged behind his ear. He put the soggy dogend in his mouth, called up mystical fire from between his fingers, and dragged hard on the wretched rollup until little blue lights flashed in front of his eyes. He coughed once or twice.
    He was thinking very hard indeed.
    He was trying to remember if any gods owed him any favors.
     
    In fact the Gods were as puzzled by all this as the wizards were, but they were powerless to do anything and in any case were engaged in an eons-old battle with the Ice Giants, who had refused to return the lawnmower.
    But some clue as to what actually had happened might be found in the fact that Rincewind, whose past life had just got up to a quite interesting bit when he was fifteen, suddenly found himself not dying after all but hanging upside down in a pine tree.
    He got down easily by dropping uncontrollably from branch to branch until he landed on his head in a pile of pine needles, where he lay gasping for breath and wishing he’d been a better person.
    Somewhere, he knew, there had to be a perfectly logical connection. One minute one happens to be dying, having dropped off the rim of the world, and the next one is upside down in a tree.
    As always happened at times like this, the Spell rose up in his mind.
    Rincewind had been generally reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. He probably would have been thrown out of Unseen University anyway—he couldn’t remember spells and smoking made him feelill—but what had really caused trouble was all that stupid business about sneaking into the room where the Octavo was chained and opening it.
    And what made the trouble even worse was that no one could figure out why all the locks had temporarily become unlocked.
    The spell wasn’t a demanding lodger. It just sat there like an old toad at the bottom of a pond. But whenever Rincewind was feeling really tired or very afraid it tried to get itself said. No one knew what would happen if one of the Eight Great Spells was said by itself, but the general agreement was that the best place from which to watch the effects would be the next universe.
    It was a weird thought to have, lying on a heap of pine needles after just falling off the edge of the world, but Rincewind had a feeling that the spell wanted to keep him alive.
    “Suits me,” he thought.
    He sat up and looked at the trees. Rincewind was a city wizard and, although he was aware that there were various differences among types of tree by which their nearest and dearest could tell them apart, the only thing he knew for certain was that the end without the