Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett Page B

a fulcrum, er, so that one does not actually move one object but simply exchanges the position of two objects of similar mass. It is my aim tonight, er, to demonstrate that by imparting exactly the right amount of spin and the maximum velocity to the object—”
    “Me?”
    “—from the very first moment, it is virtually certain—”
    “Virtually?”
    “—to hold together for distances of up to, er, six thousand miles—”
    “ Up to? ”
    “—give or take ten percent—”
    “ Give or take? ”
    “So if you’d—excuse me, Dean, I’d be obliged if you’d stop dripping wax—if you’d all take up the positions I’ve marked on the floor…”
    Rincewind looked longingly towards the door. It was no distance at all for the experienced coward. He could just trot out of here and they could…they could…
    What could they do? They could just take his hat away and stop him ever coming back to the University. Now he came to think about it, they probably wouldn’t be bothered about the nailing bit if he was too much bother to find.
    And that was the problem. He wouldn’t be dead, but then neither would he be a wizard. And, he thought, as the wizards shuffled into position and screwed down the knobs on the ends of their staffs, not being able to think of himself as a wizard was being dead.
    The spell began.
    Rincewind the shoemaker? Rincewind the beggar? Rincewind the thief? Just about everything apart from Rincewind the corpse demanded training or aptitudes that he didn’t have.
    He was no good at anything else. Wizardry was the only refuge. Well, actually he was no good at wizardry either, but at least he was definitively no good at it. He’d always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn’t do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn’t a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid. It was a vaguely noble thought that had kept him warm during those occasional 3 A.M. awakenings when he had evaluated his life and found it weighed a little less than a puff of warm hydrogen. And he probably had saved the world a few times, but it had generally happened accidentally, while he was trying to do something else. So you almost certainly didn’t actually get any karmic points for that. It probably only counted if you started out by thinking in a loud way “By criminy, it’s jolly well time to save the world, and no two ways about it!” instead of “Oh, shit, this time I’m really going to die.”
    The spell continued.
    It didn’t seem to be going very well.
    “Come on, you chaps,” said Ridcully. “Put some backbone into it!”
    “Are you sure…it’s…just something small?” said the Dean, who’d broken into a sweat.
    “Looks like a…wheelbarrow…” muttered the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    The knob on the end of Ridcully’s staff began to smoke.
    “Will you look at the magic I’m using!” he said. “What’s goin’ on, Mr. Stibbons?”
    “Er. Of course, size isn’t the same as mass…”
    And then, in the same way that it can take considerable effort to push at a sticking door and no effort at all to fall full length into the room beyond, the spell caught.
    Ponder hoped, afterwards, that what he saw was an optical illusion. Certainly no one normally was suddenly stretched to about twelve feet tall and then snapped back into shape so fast that their boots ended up under their chin.
    There was a brief cry of “Oooooohhhhshhhhhh—” which ended abruptly, and this was probably just as well.

    The first thing that struck Rincewind when he appeared on the Counterweight Continent was a cold sensation.
    The next things, in order of the direction of travel, were: a surprised man with a sword, another man with a sword, a third man who’d dropped his sword and was trying to run away, two other men who were less alert and didn’t even see him, a small tree, about fifty yards of stunted undergrowth, a snowdrift, a