The Outsorcerer's Apprentice by Tom Holt Page A

some dead-end boring job, like accountancy or management consulting, you’ll be unhappy and miserable, and I’ll have let you down. But if you pull yourself together, get stuck in and get a good degree, you can carry on and dowhat you want to do, and everything will be just fine. And when you’re a professor somewhere, and people will actually listen to what you’ve got to say,
then
you can go blowing up the foundations of modern science and they’ll probably give you the Nobel Prize for it. You go shooting your mouth off now, they’ll think you’re just some wacko kid and you’ll be finished, you hear me? So, you do the exam, you finish your course, you don’t drop out, you don’t go disproving
anything
until
I
tell you it’s the right time. Got that? Well?”
    For a split second, Benny wondered if he ought to tell Uncle Gordon about the YouSpace thing. Because maybe there are such things as coincidences, but if so, this was a pretty monumentally, visible-from-orbit huge one, so it could well have a bearing on the situation, so Uncle ought to know about it so he could factor it into his advice. But the thought of what Uncle would say if Benny confessed he’d been skipping in and out of alternate realities when he should’ve been revising simply didn’t bear thinking about. “Yes, Uncle,” he said.
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.”
    “Good boy.” Quite unexpectedly, Uncle Gordon smiled. It wasn’t something that happened very often, roughly on a par with a total solar eclipse; unlike an eclipse, it made the world a very bright place. “I don’t know, you’re a bright kid, Benny, really,
really
bright, but there are times when you can be really,
really
stupid.”
    Benny grinned back. “I know,” he said. “Sorry.”
    Uncle Gordon sighed deeply and glanced at his watch. “Hellfire,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got sixteen South Korean venture capitalists sitting round a table drumming their fingers waiting for me. I told them I was just nipping out for a piss. See you later, all right?”
    Uncle departed in a flurry of clomping feet and mislaid car keys, leaving the usual empty silence behind him; whenhe left a room, it tended to be far emptier than it had been before he arrived, as if his exit had drained all the energy from it. But stillness, peace and quiet are what you need when you’re revising, and Benny was (he noticed with a degree of mild surprise) doing just that. At least, he was reading the notes and uploading data into his medium-term memory; but it was coming in hermetically sealed and labelled WARNING–UNRELIABLE, with one of those toxic-waste symbols stencilled on each package. He really wasn’t sure he wanted stuff like that in his head, in case it leaked out and got into something important. So he sealed off the bit of his brain he thought with from the warehouse space, and occupied it with thoughts like—

    Well, he was very good about it, really.
    Yes, except—
    What?
    I’m still not entirely sure what he was being very good
about
.
    Excuse me?
    I mean, it’s not like I’d done anything wrong—
    Whoa there, cowboy. You disproved the laws of thermodynamics, for crying out loud.
    Yes? So? I mean, if they’re wrong, they’re wrong.
    Sure. That’s like saying, Stoke-on-Trent is a pretty horrible place, so let’s burn it to the ground. You can’t do that. People
live
there. At the very least, you’ve got to give them time to get their things and move out. Same with trashing the foundations of accepted knowledge. You can’t just light the fuse and run away. Well, can you?
    Actually, I quite like Stoke-on-Trent.
    Bull. You’ve never even been there.
    I so have. On a train.
    Passing through. Looking out the window. That doesn’t count.
    All right, fine. But he wasn’t just being nice about that, he was being nice about me wanting to drop out of Uni.
    Didn’t let you, though.
    No, because it wasn’t the right thing for me to do. He explained that.
    You agreed