Then he turned and disappeared into the swirling snow.
Constable Visit looked down at the little girl in his arms, and then at Corporal Nobbs.
‘What's all this about, corporal?’
Nobby pulled aside the blanket.
‘Search me,’ he said. ‘Looks like we've been chosen to do a bit of charity.’
‘I don't call it very charitable, just dumping someone on people like this.’
‘Come on, there'll still be some grub left in the Watchhouse,’ said Nobby. He'd got a very deep and certain feeling that this was expected of him. He remembered a big man in a grotto, although he couldn't quite remember the face. And he couldn't quite remember the face of the person who had handed over the girl, so that meant it must be the same one.
Shortly afterwards there was some tinkling music and a very bright light and two rather affronted angels appeared at the other end of the alley, but Albert threw snowballs at them until they went away.
Hex worried Ponder Stibbons. He didn't know how it worked, but everyone else assumed that he did. Oh, he had a good idea about some parts, and he was pretty certain that Hex thought about things by turning them all into numbers and crunching them (a clothes wringer from the laundry, or CWL, had been plumbed in for this very purpose), but why did it need a lot of small religious pictures? And there was the mouse. It didn't seem to do much, but whenever they forgot to give it its cheese Hex stopped working. There were all those ram skulls. The ants wandered over to them occasionally but they didn't seem to do anything.
What Ponder was worried about was the fear that he was simply engaged in a cargo cult. He'd read about them. Ignorant[16] and credulous[17] people, whose island might once have been visited by some itinerant merchant vessel that traded pearls and coconuts for such fruits of civilization as glass beads, mirrors, axes and sexual diseases, would later make big model ships out of bamboo in the hope of once again attracting this magical cargo. Of course, they were far too ignorant and credulous to know that just because you built the shape you didn't get the substance …
He'd built the shape of Hex and, it occurred to him, he'd built it in a magical university where the border between the real and ‘not real’ was stretched so thin you could almost see through it. He got the horrible suspicion that, somehow, they were merely making solid a sketch that was hidden somewhere in the air.
Hex knew what it ought to be.
All that business about the electricity, for example. Hex had raised the subject one night, not long after it'd asked for the mouse.
Ponder prided himself that he knew pretty much all there was to know about electricity. But they'd tried rubbing balloons and glass rods until they'd been able to stick Adrian onto the ceiling, and it hadn't had any effect on Hex. Then they'd tried tying a lot of cats to a wheel which, when revolved against some beads of amber, caused any amount of electricity all over the place. The wretched stuff hung around for days, but there didn't seem any way of ladling it into Hex and anyway no one could stand the noise.
So far the Archchancellor had vetoed the lightning rod idea.
All this depressed Ponder. He was certain that the world ought to work in a more efficient way.
And now even the things that he thought were going right were going wrong.
He stared glumly at Hex's quill pen in its tangle of springs and wire.
The door was thrown open. Only one person could make a door bang on its hinges like that. Ponder didn't even turn round.
‘Hello again, Archchancellor.’
‘That thinking engine of yours working?’ said Ridcully. ‘Only there's an interesting little—’
‘It's not working,’ said Ponder.
‘It ain't. What's this, a half-holiday for Hogswatch?’
‘Look,’ said Ponder.
Hex wrote: +++ Whoops! Here Comes The Cheese! +++MELON MELON MELON +++ Error At Address: 14, Treacle Mine Road, Ankh-Morpork+++!!!!! +++Oneoneoneoneoneone +++ Redo From Start +++
‘What's going on?’ said Ridcully, as the others pushed in behind them.
‘I know it — sounds stupid, Archchancellor, but we think it might have caught something off the Bursar.’
‘Daftness, you mean?’
‘That's ridiculous, boy!’ said the Dean. ‘Idiocy is
Ridcully puffed his pipe.
‘I used to think that, too,’ he said. ‘Now I'm not so sure. Anyway, you can catch wisdom, can't you?’
‘No, you can't,’ snapped the Dean. ‘It's not like 'flu, Ridcully. Wisdom is… well, instilled.’
‘We bring students here and hope they catch wisdom off us, don't we?’ said Ridcully.
‘Well,
‘And if you hang around with a bunch of idiots you're bound to become pretty daft yourself,’ Ridcully went on.
‘I suppose in a manner of speaking…’
‘And you've only got to talk to the poor old Bursar for five minutes and you think you're going a bit potty yourself, am I right?’
The wizards nodded glumly. The Bursar's company, although quite harmless, had a habit of making one's brain squeak.
‘So Hex here has caught daftness off the Bursar,’ said Ridcully. ‘Simple. Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.’ He banged his pipe on the side of Hex's listening tube and shouted: ‘FEELING ALL RIGHT, OLD CHAP?’
Hex wrote: +++ Hi Mum Is Testing +++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out Of Cheese Error +++!!!!! +++ Mr Jelly! Mr Jelly! +++
‘Hex seems perfectly able to work out anything purely to do with numbers but when it tries anything else it does this,’ said Ponder.
‘See? Bursar Disease,’ said Ridcully. ‘The bee's knees when it comes to adding up, the pig's ear at everything else. Try giving him dried frog pills?’
‘Sorry, sir, but that is a very uninformed suggestion,’ said Ponder. ‘You can't give medicine to machines.’
‘Don't see why not,’ said Ridcully. He banged on the tube again and bellowed, ‘SOON HAVE YOU BACK ON YOUR… your… yes, indeed, old chap! Where's that board with all the letter and number buttons, Mr Stibbons? Ah, good.’ He sat down and typed, with one finger, as slowly as a company chairman:
D-R-Y-D-F-R-O-R-G-P-I–L-L-S
Hex's pipes jangled.
‘That can't possibly work sir,’ said Ponder.
‘It ought to,’ said Ridcully. ‘If he can get the idea of being ill, he can get the idea of being cured.’
He typed: L-O-T-S-O-F-D-R-Y-D-F-R-O-R-G-P-I-L–L-S
‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘that this thing believes what it's told, right?’
‘Well, it's true that Hex has, if you want to put it that way, no idea of an untruth.’
‘Right. Well, I've just told the thing it's had a lot of dried frog pills. It's not going to call me a liar, is it?’
There was some clickings and whirrings within the structure of Hex.
Then it wrote: +++ Good Evening, Archchancellor. I Am Fully Recovered And Enthusiastic About My Tasks +++
‘Not mad, then?’
+++ I Assure You I Am As Sane As The Next Man +++
‘Bursar, just move away from the machine, will you?’ said Ridcully. ‘Oh well, I expect it's the best we're going to get. Right, let's get all this sorted out. We want to find out what's going on.’
‘Anywhere specific or just everywhere?’ said Ponder, a shade sarcastically.
There was a scratching noise from Hex's pen. Ridcully glanced down at the paper.
‘Says here “Implied Creation Of Anthropomorphic Personification”,’ he said. ‘What's that mean?’
‘Er… I think Hex has tried to work out the answer,’ said Ponder.
‘Has it, bigods? I hadn't even worked out what the question was yet…’
‘It heard you talking, sir.’
