On this day, Rincewind carried the buckets inside and tipped the coal on the heap in the corner.

Something behind him went 'gloink'.

It was a small, subtle and yet curiously intrusive sound, and it accompanied the appearance, on a shelf above Rincewind's desk, of a beer bottle where no beer bottle had hitherto been.

He took it down and stared at it. It had recently contained a pint of Winkle's Old Peculiar. There was absolutely nothing ethereal about it, except that it was blue. The label was the wrong colour and full of spelling mistakes but it was mostly there, right down to the warning in tiny, tiny print: May Contain Nuts.3

Now it contained a note.

He removed this with some care, and unrolled it, and read it.

Then he stared at the thing beside the beer bottle. It was a glass globe, about a foot across, and contained, floating within it, a smaller blue-and-fluffy-white globe.

The smaller globe was a world, and the space inside the globe was infinitely large. The world and indeed the whole universe of which it was part had been created by the wizards of Unseen University more or less by accident, and the fact that it had ended up on a shelf in Rincewind's tiny study was an accurate indication of how interested they were in it once the initial excitement had worn off.

Rincewind watched the world, sometimes, through an omniscope. It mostly had ice ages, and was less engrossing than an ant farm. Sometimes he shook it up to see if it would make it interesting, but this never seemed to have much of an effect.

Now he looked back at the note.

It was extremely puzzling. And the university had someone to deal with things like that.

Ponder Stibbons, like Rincewind, also had a number of jobs. However, instead of aspiring to seven, he perspired at three. He had long been the Reader in Invisible Writings, had drifted into the new post as Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and had walked in all innocence into the office of Praelector, which is a university title meaning 'person who gets given the nuisance jobs'.