The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [171]
“Of course.”
We helped her to her feet and she trotted off, seemingly none the worse for her experience.
“Mycroft still inventing, then?” I said as we walked back inside to discover that DH-82 had eaten all the vol-au-vent, main course and the trifle for pudding.
“DH!” she said crossly to the guilty-looking and very bloated Tastiger. “That was very bad! What am I going to feed everybody on now?”
“How about thylacine cutlets?” suggested Landen.
I elbowed him in the ribs and Mum pretended not to hear.
Landen rolled up his sleeves and searched through the kitchen for something he could cook quickly and easily. It was going to be hard—all of the cupboards were full of tinned pears.
“Have you anything apart from canned fruit, Mrs.—I mean, Wednesday?”
Mum stopped trying to chastise DH-82, who, soporific through gluttony, had settled down for a long nap.
“No,” she admitted. “The man in the shop said there would be a shortage, so I bought his entire stock.”
I walked down to Mycroft’s laboratory, knocked and, when there was no reply, entered. Usually, the lab presented an Aladdin’s cave of inventive genius, the haphazard and eclectic mix of machines, papers, blackboards and bubbling retorts a shrine to disarray; an antidote to order. But today it was different: All his machines had been dismantled and now lay about the room, tagged and carefully stacked. Mycroft himself, having obviously finished testing the ejection system, was now tweaking a small bronze object. He was startled when I spoke his name but relaxed as soon as he saw it was me.
“Hello, love!” he said kindly.
“Hello, Uncle. How have you been?”
“Good. I’m off on retirement in—don’t touch that!—in one hour and nine minutes. You looked good on the telly last night.”
“Thank you. What are you up to, Uncle?”
He handed me a large book.
“Enhanced indexing. In a Nextian dictionary, godliness can be next to cleanliness—or anything else for that matter.”
I opened the book to look up “trout” and found it on the first page I opened.
“Saves time, eh?”
“Yes; but—”
Mycroft had moved on.
“Over here is a Lego filter for vacuum cleaners. Did you know that over a million pounds’ worth of Lego is hoovered up every year, and a total of ten thousand man-hours are wasted sorting through the dust bags?”
“I didn’t know that, no.”
“This device will sort any sucked-up bits of Lego into colors or shapes, according to how you set this knob here.”
“Very impressive.”
“This is just hobby stuff. Come and look at some real innovation.”
He beckoned me across to a blackboard, the surface covered with a jumbled mass of complicated algebraic functions.
“This is Polly’s hobby, really. It’s a new form of mathematical theory that makes Euclid’s work seem like little more than long division. We have called it Nextian geometry. I won’t bother you with the details, but watch this.”
Mycroft rolled up his shirtsleeves and placed a large ball of dough on the workbench and rolled it out into a flat ovoid with a rolling pin.
“Scone dough,” he explained. “I’ve left out the raisins for purposes of clarity. Using conventional geometry, a round scone cutter always leaves waste behind, agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Not with Nextian geometry! You see this pastry cutter? Circular, wouldn’t you say?”
“Perfectly circular, yes.”
“Well,” carried on Mycroft in an excited voice, “it isn’t. It appears circular but actually it’s a square. A Nextian square. Watch.”
And so saying he deftly cut the dough into twelve perfectly circular shapes with no waste. I frowned and stared at the small pile of disks, not quite believing what I had just seen.
“How—?”
“Clever, isn’t it?” he chuckled. “Admittedly it only works with Nextian dough, which doesn’t rise so well and tastes like denture paste, but we’re working on that.”
“It seems impossible, Uncle.”
“We didn’t know the nature of lightning or rainbows for three and a half million years, pet. Don’t reject it just because it seems impossible. If we closed our minds, there would never be the