The Globe

THE NEW SCIENTIST

These was something called, as far as Ponder could work out, psyence. All his expertise as a reader of invisible writings was needed to get a grip on this idea -L-space was very hazy about the future of this world. 'As far as I can tell,' he reported, 'it's a way of making up stories that work. It's a way of finding things out and thinking about them ... psy-ence, you see? "Psy" means

"mind" and "ence" means, er, esness. It works on Roundworld in the way magic does at home.'

'Useful stuff, then,' said Ridcully. Anyone doing it?' 'Hex is going to try to take us to what appear to be practical examples of it,' said Ponder.

'Time travel again?' said the Dean. The white circle appeared on the floor ... ... and on the sand, and vanished. The wizards looked around.

'All right, then,' said Ponder. 'So ... dry climate, evidence of agriculture, fields of crops, irrigation ditches, naked man turning a handle, man staring at us, man screaming and running away ...'

Rincewind stepped down into the ditch and inspected the pipe-like device the man had been turning.

'It's just a water-lifting screw,' he announced. 'I've seen a lot of them. You turn the handle, water is screwed out of the ditch, goes up the thread inside and spills out of the top. The screw makes a sort of line of travelling buckets inside the tube. There's nothing special about it. It's just basic ...

stuff.'

'Not psyence, then?' said Ridcully.

'You tell me, sir,' said Rincewind.

'Psyence is quite a difficult concept,' said Ponder. 'But I think perhaps tinkering with this thing to make it more efficient might be psyence?'

'Sounds like engineering,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'That's where you try and make it in different ways to see if any of them are better.'

'The Librarian did turn up one book, very grudgingly,' said Ponder, pulling it out of his pocket.

It was called Basic Science for Schools, pub.1920.

'They've spelt it wrong,' said Ridcully.

'And it's not very helpful,' said Ponder. 'There's quite a lot of what looks like alchemy. You know, mixing stuff up to see what happens.'

'Is that all it is, then?' said the Archchancellor, leafing through the book. 'Hold on, hold on.

Alchemy is, at bottom, all about the alchemist. His books tell him all the stuff he's got to do in order make things work - what to wear, when to wear it, that sort of thing. It's very personal.'

'And?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'Hark at this,' said Ridcully. 'There's no invocations, nothing to tell you what to wear or what phase of the moon it should be. Nothing important. It just says here "A clean beaker was taken.

To this was added 20 grammes" - whatever they are - "of copper sulphate" ...' He stopped.

'Well?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

'Well, who did the taking? Who added the stuff? What's going on here?'

'Perhaps it's trying to say that it doesn't matter who does it?' said Ponder. He'd already glanced at the book, and felt that the perfectly ordinary ignorance he'd had just before opening it had been multiplied several times by page ten.

'Anyone can do it?' shouted Ridcully. 'Science is incredibly important but anyone can do it? And what's this?'

He held the book open for all to see, his finger pointing at an illustration. It showed a drawing of an eye, side on, to one side of the apparatus.

'Perhaps it's a God of Science?' Rincewind suggested. 'Watching to see who keeps taking things?'

'So ... science is done by anyone,' said Ridcully, 'and most of the equipment is stolen and it's all watched by a giant eyeball?'

As one wizard, they looked around, guiltily.

'There's just us,' said Ponder.

'Then this isn't science,' said Ridcully. 'No giant eyeball visible. Anyway, we can see it isn't science. It's just engineering. Any bright lad could have built it. It's obvious how it works.'

'How does it work?' said Rincewind.

'Very simply,' said Ridcully. The screw goes round and round and the water comes out here.'

'Hex?' said Ponder, and held out his hand. A large volume appeared in it. It was slim, full of colourful pictures, and entitled Great Moments in Science. It hadn't escaped his notice that when Hex or the Librarian wanted to explain something to the wizards they used a children's book.

He flicked through the passages. Big pictures, big writing.

'Ah,' he said. 'Archimedes invented this. He was a philosopher. He's also famous because one day, when he got into his bath, it overflowed. It says here this gave him an idea—'

'Buy a bigger bath?' said the Dean.

'Philosophers are always having ideas in the bath,' said Ridcully. 'All right, if we've got nothing else to go on ...'

'Gentlemen, please?' pleaded Ponder. 'Hex, take us to Archimedes. Oh, and give me a towel.'

'Nice place,' said the Dean, as the wizards sat on the sea wall, staring out at the wine-dark sea. 'I can feel the sea air doing me good. Anyone got more wine?'

It had been quite an interesting day. But, Ponder asked, had it been science? There was a pile of books beside him. Hex had been busy.

'Must have been science,' said Ridcully. 'King gave your man a problem. How to tell if the crown was all gold. He was thinking about it. Water sloshed out of bath. He leaped out, we handed him a towel, and then he worked out that ... what was it?'

'The apparent loss of weight of a body totally or partially immersed in a liquid is equal to the weight of the liquid it displaces,' said Ponder.

'Right. And he sees it doesn't just work with bodies, it works with crowns, too. A few tests, and bingo, science,' said Ridcully. 'Science is just working things out. And paying attention. And hoping there's someone around to dry you off.'

'I'm not ... exactly sure that's all there is to it,' said Ponder. 'I've been doing some reading and even people who do science don't seem clear about what it is. Look at Archimedes, for example.

Is a bright idea enough? Is it science if you just solve problems? Is that science, or what you get before you have science?'

'Your book of Great Moments calls him a scienter,' Ridcully pointed.

'Scientist,' Ponder corrected him. 'But I'm not sure about that, either. I mean, that sort of thing happens a lot. People always like to believe that what they're doing has been hallowed by history. Supposing men found out how to fly. They'd probably say "Early experimenters with man-powered flight included Gudrun the Idiot, who leaped off the clock tower in Pseudopolis after soaking his trousers in dew and gluing swan feathers to his shirt" when in fact he wasn't an early aviator—'

'—he was a late idiot?' said Rincewind.

'Exactly. It's like with wizards, Archchancellor. You can't just call yourself a wizard. Other wizards have to agree that you're a wizard.'

'So you can't have just one scientist, but you can have two?'

'It appears so, Archchancellor.'

Ridcully lit his pipe. 'Well, mildly entertaining though it is to watch philosophers having a bath, can we simply ask Hex to find us a scientist who is definitely a scientist and who is regarded by other scientists as a scientist? Then all we have to do is find out if what he's doing is any use to us. We don't want to be all day at this, Stibbons.'

'Yes, sir. Hex, we—'

They were in a cellar. It was quite large, which was just as well because several of the wizards fell over upon landing. When they had picked themselves up and all found the right hat, they saw

...

... something familiar.

'Mr Stibbons?' said Ridcully.

'I don't understand ...' muttered Ponder. But it really was an alchemical laboratory. It smelled like one. Moreover, it looked like one. There were the big heavy retorts, the crucibles, the fire ...

'We know what alchemists are, Mr Stibbons.'

'Yes, er, I'm sorry, sir, something seems to have gone wrong ...' Ponder held out his hand. 'Book, please, Hex.'

A small volume appeared.

'"Great Men Of Science No.2",' Ponder read. 'Er ... if I can just take a quick look inside, Archchancellor ...'

'I don't think that will be necessary,' said the Dean, who had picked up a manuscript that was on the table. 'Listen to this, gentlemen: "... The spirit of this earth is ye fire in wch Pontanus digests his feculent matter, the blood of infants in wch ye 0 & 2) bath themselves, the unclean green Lion wch, saith Ripley, is y* means of joyning ye tinctures of 0 and 3), the broth wch Medea poured on ye two serpents, the Venus by meditation of wch 0 vulgar and the $ of 7 eagles saith Philalethes must be decocted ..." yada yada yada.'

He thumped the manuscript on to the table.

'Genuine alchemical gibberish,' he said, 'and I don't like the sound of it. What's "feculent" mean?

Do we dare find out? I think not.'

'Er ... the man who apparently lived here is described as a giant amongst scientists ...' muttered Ponder, leafing though the booklet.

'Really?' said Ridcully, with a dismissive sniff. 'Hex, please take us to a scientist. We don't mind where he is. Not some dabbler. We want someone who embodies the very essence of science.'

Ponder sighed, and dropped the booklet on to the ground.

The wizards vanished.

For a moment the book lay on the floorboards, front cover upwards showing its title: Great Men of Science No. 2: Sir Isaac Newton. Then it, too, vanished.

There was a thunderstorm grumbling in the distance, and black clouds hung over the sea. The wizards were back on a beach again. Why is it always beaches?' said Rincewind.

'Edges,' said Ridcully. 'Things happen on the edges.'

They had been happening here. At first glance the place looked like a shipyard that had launched its last ship. Large wooden constructions, most of them in disrepair, littered the sand. There were a few shacks, too, also with that hopeless look of things abandoned. There was nothing but desolation.

And an oppressive, silence. A few sea birds cried and flew away, but that only left the world to the sound of waves and the footfalls of the wizards as they approached the shacks.

At which point, another sound became apparent. It was a rhythmical cracking, a khss ... khss ...

khss behind which it was just possible to hear voices raised in song; the singers sounded as if they were far away and at the bottom of a tin bath.

Ridcully stopped outside the largest shack, from which the sound appeared to be issuing.

'Rincewind?' he said, beckoning. 'One for you, I think.'

'Yes, yes, all right,' said Rincewind, and entered with extreme caution.

It was dark inside, but he could see workbenches and a few tools, with a forgotten look about them. The shack must have been thrown up quickly. There wasn't even a floor; it had been built directly on the sand.

The singing was coming from a large horn attached to a device on a bench. Rincewind wasn't very good at technical things, but there was a large wheel projecting over the edge of the bench and it was turning slowly, probably because of the small weight, attached to it by string, which was gently descending towards the sand.

'Is everything okay?' said Ridcully, from outside.

'I've found a kind of voice mill,' said Rincewind.

'That's amazing,' said a voice from the shadows. 'That's exactly what my master called it.'

His name, he said, was Niklias the Cretan, and he was very old. And very pleased to see the wizards.

'I come up here sometimes,' he said. 'I listen to the voice mill and remember the old days. No one else comes here. They say it's the abode of madness. And they are right.'

The wizards were sitting around a fire of driftwood, that burned blue with the salt. They were tending to huddle, although they'd never admit it. They wouldn't have been wizards if they couldn't sense the strangeness in the place. It had the same depressing effect on the senses as an old battlefield. It had ghosts.

'Tell us,' said Ridcully.

'My master was Phocian the Touched,' said Niklias, and he said it the way of a man telling a story he'd told many times before. 'He was a pupil of the great philosopher Antigonus, who one day declared that a trotting horse must at all times have at least one foot on the ground, lest it fall over.

'There was much debate about this and my master, being very rich and also being a keen pupil, decided to prove that the philosopher was correct. Oh, dreadful day! For it was then the troubles began!

The old slave pointed to some derelict woodwork at the far end of the beach.

'That was our test track,' he said. 'The first of four. I helped him build it with my own hands.

There was a lot of interest at that time, and many people came to watch the tests. We had hundreds, hundreds of slaves lying in rows, peering through little slits at just one tiny area of the track each. It didn't work. They argued about what they had seen.'

Niklias sighed. 'Time, said my master, was important. So I told him about work gangs, and how songs helped us keep time. He was very excited about that, and after some thought we built the voice mill which you have heard. Do not be afraid. There is no magic in it. Sound makes things shake, does it not? Sound in the big parchment horn, which I stiffened with shellac, writes the pattern of the sounds it hears on a warm wax cylinder. We used the weighted wheel to spin the cylinder, and it worked quite well after we devised the rocking-trap mechanism. After that, we used it to inscribe the perfect song, and every dawn before we began work we would sing it with the machine. Hundreds of slaves, all singing in perfect time on this beach. The effect was amazing.'

'I bet it was,' said Ridcully.

'But still it did not work, no matter what we devised. A trotting horse travels too fast. My master told me that we must be able to count in tiny parts of time, and after much thinking we built the toc-toc machine. Would you care to see it?'

It was like the voice mill, but had a much bigger wheel. And a pendulum. And a big pointer. As the big wheel turned very slowly, smaller wheels inside the mechanism spun in a blur, and caused a long pointer to revolve against a white-painted wooden wall, along an arc covered in tiny markers. The whole device was mounted on wheels, and had probably taken four men to move.

'I come and grease it occasionally,' said Niklias, patting the wheel. 'For old time's sake.'

The wizards looked at one another with a tame surmise, which is a wild surmise that had been thought about for a while.

'It's a clock,' said the Dean.

'Pardon?' said Niklias.

'We have something like them,' said Ponder. 'We use them for telling the time.'

The slave looked puzzled. 'For telling the time what?' he said.

'He means, so that we know what time it is,' said Ridcully.

'What ... time ... it ... is ... ' muttered the slave, as if trying a square thought in a round mind.

'What hour of the day it is,' said Rincewind, who had run into minds like this before.

'But we can see the sun,' said the slave. 'The toc-toc mechanism does not know where the sun is.'

'Oh, I know ... supposing a baker needed to know how long he should bake his loaves,' said Rincewind. 'Well, with a clock he—'

'How could he be a baker if he did not know how long it takes to bake a loaf?' said Niklias, smiling nervously. 'No, this is a special thing, sirs. It is not for uncursed men.'

'But, but ... you've got a device for recording sound, too!' Ponder burst out. 'You could record the speeches of great thinkers! Why, even after they were dead you could still hear—'

'Listen to the voice of people who aren't there?' said Niklias. His face clouded. 'Listen to the voices of dead men?

There was silence.

'Do tell us more about the fascinating project to find out if a trotting horse is ever entirely airborne,' said Rincewind, loudly and brightly.

The sun drifted down the sky or, rather, the horizon gradually rose. The wizards hated to think about that. You could lose your balance if you thought about it too much.

'... finally my master came up with a new idea,' said Niklias.

'Another one?' said the Dean. 'Was it better than his idea about dropping a horse from, a sling to see if it fell over?'

'Dean!' snapped Ridcully.

'Yes, it was,' said the old slave, who didn't seem to notice the sarcasm. 'We still used the sling, but this time we put it in a very large cart. The bottom of the cart was open, so that the horse's hooves just touched the ground. Are you following me? And then -and this is the clever part, I felt - my master arranged that the cart was pulled by four trotting horses'

He sat back, giving them a pleased look, as if expecting praise.

The Dean's expression slowly changed.

'Eureka!' he said.

'I've got a towel in my—' Rincewind began.

'No, don't you see? If the cart is being pulled forward then whatever the horse does, the ground is disappearing backwards. So if you've got a trained horse and you can get it to trot while it's in the harness ... you designed the cart so that the pulling horses were offset, so that the supported horse was trotting over unmarked sand?'

'Yes!' beamed Niklias.

'And you raked the sand so that the prints showed up?'

'Yes!'

Then whenever the horse touched the ground and the hoof was stationary relative to the ground, the ground would in fact be moving, and you'd get a smeared print, and if you carefully measured the total length of the ground covered during the trot, and added up the total of all the smears, and found that they were less than the total length of the track, then—'

'You'd be doing it wrong,' said Ponder.

'Yes!' said Niklias, delightedly. 'That's what we found!'

'No, of course it's right,' said the Dean. 'Listen: when the hoof is stationary—'

'It's moving backwards relative to the horse at the same speed that the horse is moving forward,'

said Ponder. 'Sorry.'

'No, listen,' the Dean protested. 'It must work, because when the ground isn 't moving—'

Rincewind groaned. Any minute now all the wizards would express an opinion, and none of them would listen to anyone else. And here it came ...

'Are you telling us parts of the horse are actually going backwards?'

'Perhaps if we pulled the cart in the opposite direction—'

'The hoof would definitely be stationary, look, because if the ground was moving forward—'

'It's no different than it would be if the horse was trotting all by itself! Look, supposing the cart and all the other horses were invisible—'

'You're all wrong, you're all wrong! If the horse was ... no, wait a moment—'

Rincewind nodded to himself. The wizards were entering the special fugue state known as Hubbub, where no-one was going to be allowed to finish a sentence because someone else would drown them out. It was how the wizards decided things. In all likelihood, in this case it would result in them deciding that the horse should, logically, end up at one end of the beach, while all its feet were up at the other end.

'My master Phocian said we should try it, and the hooves just left hoofprints,' said Niklias the Cretan, when the argument had died away through lack of breath. 'Then we tried moving the beach under the horse ...'

'How?' said Ponder.

'We built a long flat barge, filled it full of sand and tried it in the lagoon,' said the slave. 'We suspended the horse from a gantry. Phocian felt we were getting somewhere when we moved the barge forward at twice the speed of the horse, but the beast kept trying to keep up ... and then there was the night of the big storm and the barge was sunk. Oh, those were a few busy months.

We lost four horses and Nosios the Carpenter was kicked in the head.' The smile faded. And then

... and then ...'

'Yes?'

'... something terrible happened.'

The wizards leaned forward.

'... Phocian designed the fourth test. It's over there. Not much to see now, of course. People stole all the heavy cloth of the Endless Road and a lot of the woodwork, too.' The slave sighed. 'It was Hades to build and took many months to get right but, in short, it worked like this. We used a huge roll of heavy white cloth, which we rolled off one huge spindle and on to the other. Believe me, sirs, even that took some doing, and the work of forty slaves. At the place where the horse was to be suspended, we stretched the cloth tight over a shallow trough of powdered charcoal, so that a little weight on the cloth would press it down on to the stuff…'

'Aha,' said the Dean. 'I think I can see this one ...'

Niklias nodded. 'My master commanded many changes before the device functioned to his satisfaction ... many gears and rollers and cranks, much rebuilding of strange mechanisms, much profanity which, I have no doubt, the gods noted. But finally we suspended the well-trained horse in its sling and the rider urged it into a trot as the cloth rolled beneath. And, yes, afterwards, oh sad that day, we measured the length of the cloth where the horse had trotted and the length of the smears of charcoal where a hoof had pressed on the cloth and ... I hardly dare say it, even now, the total length of the second was to the length of the first was as four is to five.'

'So for a fifth of the time all hooves were in the air!' said the Dean. Well done! I love a puzzle!'

'No, it was not well done!' shouted the slave. 'My master ranted! We did it again and again! And it was always the same!'

'I don't quite see the problem—' Ridcully began.

'He tore at his hair and raved at us, and most of the men fled! And then he went and sat in the waves on the shore, and after a long while I dared to go and speak to him, and he turned hollow eyes on me and said, "Great Antigonus is wrong. I proved him wrong! Not by thoughtful dispute, but by gross mechanical contrivances! I am ashamed! He is the greatest of philosophers! He had told us that the sun goes around the world, he had told us how the planets move! And if he is wrong, what is right? What have I done? I have squandered the wealth of my family. What fame is there for me now? What cursed work shall I do next? Should I steal the colours from a flower?

Shall I say to everyone, 'What you think is right, is not right'? Shall I weigh the stars? Shall I plumb the utter depths of the sea? Shall I ask the poet to measure the width of love and the direction of pleasure? What have I made of myself ..." and he wept.'

There was silence. None of the wizards moved.

Niklias settled down a little. 'And then he bade me go back and he told me to take the little money that was left. In the morning he was gone. Some say he fled to Egypt, some say to Italy.

But for myself. I think he did indeed plumb, at the last, the depth of the sea. For I do not know what he was, or what he had become. And presently people came and tore down most of the engines.'

He shifted his weight and looked at the remains of the strange devices, skeletal against the livid sunset. There was something wistful in his expression.

'No one comes now,' he said. 'Hardly anyone at all. This is where the Fates struck and the gods laughed at men. But I remember how he wept. And so I remain, to tell the story.'