Terry Pratchett - The Globe

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.'

The wizards have been trying to find some 'psyence' in Roundworld, but it is proving even more elusive than the correct spelling. They are having problems because they are tackling a difficult question. There isn't a simple definition of 'science' that really captures what it is. And it's not the sort of thing that comes into existence at a single place and time. The development of science was a process in which non-science slowly became science. The two ends of the process are easily distinguished, but there's no special place in between where science suddenly came into being.

These difficulties are more common than you might expect. It is almost impossible to define a concept precisely -think of 'chair', for example. Is a large beanbag a chair? It is if the designer says it's a chair and someone uses it to sit on; it's not if a bunch of kids are throwing it at each other. The meaning of 'chair' does not just depend on the thing to which it is being applied: it also depends on the associated context. And as for processes in which something gradually changes into something else ... well, we're never comfortable with those. At what stage in its life does a developing embryo become a human being, for instance? Where do you draw the line?