The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [172]
“Wait!” I interrupted. “How does a thermos fit in with that little lot?”
“Because, my dear girl,” replied Mycroft, cleaning the blackboard and drawing a crude picture of a thermos with a question mark, “no one has the least idea why they work.” He stared at me for a moment and continued: “You will agree that a vacuum flask keeps hot things hot in the winter and cold things cold in the summer?”
“Yes—?”
“Well, how does it know? I’ve studied vacuum flasks for many years and not one of them gave any clues as to their inherent seasonal cognitive ability. It’s a mystery to me, I can tell you.”
“Okay, okay, Uncle—how about applications for Nextian geometry?”
“Hundreds. Packaging and space management will be revolutionized overnight. I can pack Ping-Pong balls in a cardboard box without any gaps, punch steel bottle tops with no waste, drill a square hole, tunnel to the moon, divide cake more efficiently and also—and this is the most exciting part—collapse matter.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not at all,” replied Mycroft airily. “You accept that all matter is mostly empty space? The gaps between the nucleus and the electrons? Well, by applying Nextian geometry to the subatomic level I can collapse matter to a fraction of its former size. I will be able to reduce almost anything to the microscopic!”
He stopped for a moment and regathered his thoughts.
“Miniaturization is a technology that needs to be utilized,” explained Mycroft. “Can you imagine tiny nanomachines barely bigger than a cell, building, say, food protein out of nothing more than garbage? Banoffee pie from landfills, ships from scrap iron—! It’s a fantastic notion. Consolidated Useful Stuff are financing some R&D with me as we speak.”
“At Mycro Tech Developments?”
“Yes,” he said sharply. “How did you know?”
“Wilbur said he had got a job there—by coincidence, of course.”
“Of course,” affirmed Mycroft, who never supported, or admitted to, any sort of nepotism.
“On the subject of coincidences, Uncle, any thoughts on what they are and how they come about?”
Mycroft fell silent for a moment as his huge brain clicked over the facts as he understood them.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “it is my considered opinion that most coincidences are simply quirks of chance—if you extrapolate the bell curve of probability you will find statistical abnormalities that seem unusual but are, in actual fact, quite likely, given the amount of people on the planet and the amount of different things we do in our lives.”
“I see,” I replied slowly. “That explains things on a minor coincidental level, but what about the bigger coincidences? How high would you rate seven people in a Skyrail shuttle all called Irma Cohen and the clues of a crossword reading out ‘ Meddlesome Thursday goodbye’ just before someone tried to kill me?”
Mycroft raised an eyebrow.
“That’s quite a coincidence. More than a coincidence, I think.” He took a deep breath. “Thursday, think for a moment about the fact that the universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back onto the table.”
“I accept that.”
“But why doesn’t it?”
“Search me.”
“Every atom of the glass that shattered would contravene no laws of physics if it were to rejoin—on a subatomic level all particle interactions are reversible. Down there we can’t tell which event precedes which. It’s only out here that we can see things age and define a strict direction in which time travels.”
“So what are you saying, Uncle?”
“That these things don’t happen is because of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder in the universe always increases; the amount of this disorder is a quantity known as entropy.”
“So how does this relate to coincidences?”
“I’m getting to that,” muttered Mycroft, gradually warming up to his explanation and becoming more and more animated each second. “Imagine a box with a partition—the left side is filled with gas, the right