Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett [8]
She wasn’t ugly. She might be called homely, perhaps, but it was quite a nice home, clean and decent and with roses round the door and a welcome on the mat and an apple pie in the oven. But the thoughts of the wizards were, astonishingly, not on food at this point, although some of them were still a bit hazy as to why not.
She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her.*
The faculty was crestfallen, but it brightened up considerably as the caravan of trolleys wound its way into the room. There was nothing like a 3 a.m. snack to raise the spirits, everyone knew that.
Well, Ponder thought, at least we’ve got through the evening without anything breaking. Better than Tuesday, at least.
It is a well-known fact in any organization that, if you want a job done, you should give it to someone who is already very busy. It has been the cause of a number of homicides, and in one case the death of a senior director from having his head shut repeatedly in quite a small filing cabinet.
In UU, Ponder Stibbons was that busy man. He had come to enjoy it. For one thing, most of the jobs he was asked to do did not need doing, and most of the senior wizards did not care if they were not done, provided they were not not done by themselves. Besides, Ponder was very good at thinking up efficient little systems to save time, and was, in particular, very proud of his system for writing the minutes of meetings, which he had devised with the help of Hex, the university’s increasingly useful thinking engine. A detailed analysis of past minutes, coupled with Hex’s enormous predictive abilities, meant that for a simple range of easily accessible givens, such as the agenda (which Ponder controlled in any case), the committee members, the time since breakfast, the time to dinner, and so on, in most cases the minutes could be written beforehand.
All in all, he considered that he was doing his bit in maintaining UU in its self-chosen course of amiable, dynamic stagnation. It was always a rewarding effort, knowing the alternative, to keep things that way.
But a page that turns itself was, to Ponder, an anomaly. Now, while the sound of the pre-breakfast supper grew around him, he smoothed out the page and read, carefully.
Glenda would have cheerfully broken a plate over Juliet’s sweet, empty head when the girl finally turned up in the Night Kitchen. At least, she would cheerfully have thought about it, in quite a deliberate way, but there was no point in losing her temper, because its target was not really much good at noticing what other people were thinking. There wasn’t a nasty bone in Juliet’s body, it’s just that she had a great deal of trouble homing in on the idea that someone was trying to be unpleasant to her.
So Glenda made do with ‘Where have you been? I told Mrs Whitlow you’d gone home ill. Your dad’ll be worried sick! And it looks bad to the other girls.’
Juliet slumped into a chair, with a movement so graceful that it seemed to sing.
‘Went to the football, didn’t I. You know, we were playing those buggers in Dimwell.’
‘Until three in the morning?’
‘That’s the rules, innit? Play until full time, first dead man or first score.’
‘Who won?’
‘Dunno.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘When we left it was being decided on head wounds. Anyway, I went with Rotten Johnny, didn’t I.’
‘I thought you’d broken up with him.’
‘He bought me supper, didn’t ’e.’
‘You shouldn’t have gone. That’s not the sort of thing you should do.’
‘Like you know?’ said Juliet, who sometimes thought that questions were answers.
‘Just do the washing-up, will you?’ said Glenda. And I’ll have to do it again after you, she thought, as her best friend drifted over to the line of big stone sinks. Juliet didn’t exactly wash dishes, she gave them a light baptism. Wizards weren’t the type of people who noticed yesterday’s dried egg on the plate, but Mrs Whitlow could see it from two rooms away.
Glenda liked Juliet, she really did, although