Hogfather - Terry Pratchett [53]
He placed a thumb over the cork and shook the bottle vigorously. There was a crash as the Chair of Indefinite Studies and the Senior Wrangler tried to get under the same table.
“And these fellows seem to have taken against it for some reason,” he said, approaching the beaker.
“I prefer a sauce that doesn’t mean you mustn’t make any jolting movements for half an hour after using it,” muttered the Dean.
“And that can’t be used for breaking up small rocks,” said the Senior Wrangler.
“Or getting rid of tree roots,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
“And which isn’t actually outlawed in three cities,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
Ridcully cautiously uncorked the bottle. There was a brief hiss of indrawn air.
He allowed a few drops to splash into the beaker. Nothing happened.
A more generous helping was allowed to fall. The mixture remained irredeemably inert.
Ridcully sniffed suspiciously at the bottle.
“I wonder if I added enough grated wahooni?” he said, and then upturned the sauce and let most of it slide into the mixture.
It merely went gloop.
The wizards began to stand up and brush themselves off, giving one another the rather embarrassed grins of people who know that they’ve just been part of a synchronized making-a-fool-of-yourself team.
“I know we’ve had that asafoetida rather a long time,” said Ridcully. He turned the bottle round, peering at it sadly.
Finally he tipped it up for the last time and thumped it hard on the base.
A trickle of sauce arrived on the lip of the bottle and glistened there for a moment. Then it began to form a bead.
As if drawn by invisible strings, the heads of the wizards turned to look at it.
Wizards wouldn’t be wizards if they couldn’t see a little way into the future.
As the bead swelled and started to go pear-shaped they turned and, with a surprising turn of speed for men so wealthy in years and waistline, began to dive for the floor.
The drop fell.
It went gloop.
And that was all.
Ridcully, who’d been standing like a statue, sagged in relief.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning away, “I wish you fellows would show some backbone—”
The fireball lifted him off his feet. Then it rose to the ceiling, where it spread out widely and vanished with a pop, leaving a perfect chrysanthemum of scorched plaster.
Pure white light filled the room. And there was a sound.
TINKLE. TINKLE.
FIZZ.
The wizards risked looking around.
The beaker gleamed. It was filled with a liquid glow, which bubbled gently and sent out sparkles like a spinning diamond.
“My word…” breathed the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
Ridcully picked himself up off the floor. Wizards tended to roll well, or in any case are well padded enough to bounce.
Slowly, the flickering brilliance casting their long shadows on the walls, the wizards gravitated toward the beaker.
“Well, what is it?” said the Dean.
“I remember my father tellin’ me some very valuable advice about drinks,” said Ridcully. “He said, ‘Son, never drink any drink with a paper umbrella in it, never drink any drink with a humorous name, and never drink any drink that changes color when the last ingredient goes in. And never, ever, do this—’”
He dipped his finger into the beaker.
It came out with one glistening drop on the end.
“Careful, Archchancellor,” warned the Dean. “What you have there might represent pure sobriety.”
Ridcully paused with the finger halfway to his lips.
“Good point,” he said. “I don’t want to start being sober at my time of life.” He looked around. “How do we usually test stuff?”
“Generally we ask for student volunteers,” said the Dean.
“What happens if we don’t get any?”
“We give it to them anyway.”
“Isn’t that a bit unethical?”
“Not if we don’t tell them,