The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [554]
“Still thinking about whether to put Smudger on defense?”
“I was thinking of Biffo, actually.”
“Smudger and Biffo would both be wasted on defense,” muttered Mycroft, making a fine adjustment on one face of the brass polyhedron with a file. “You ought to put Snake on defense. He’s untried, I admit, but he plays well and has youth on his side.”
“Well, I’m really leaving team strategy to Aubrey.”
“I hope he’s up to it. What do you make of this?”
He handed me the solid, and I turned the grapefruit-size object over in my hands. Some of the faces were odd-sided and some even-sided—and some, strangely enough, appeared to be both, and my eyes had trouble making sense of it.
“Very . . . pretty,” I replied. “What does it do?”
“Do?” Mycroft smiled. “Put it on the worktop, and you’ll see what it do!”
I placed it on the surface, but the oddly shaped solid, unstable on the face I had placed it upon, tipped onto another. Then, after a moment’s pause, it wobbled again and fell onto a third. It carried on in this jerky fashion across the worktop until it fell against a screwdriver, where it stopped.
“I call it a Nextahedron,” announced Mycroft, picking up the solid and placing it on the floor, where it continued its random perambulations, watched by Pickwick, who thought it might be chasing her and ran away to hide. “Most irregular solids are only unstable on one or two faces. The Nextahedron is unstable on all its faces—it will continue to fall and tip until a solid object impedes its progress.”
“Fascinating!” I murmured, always surprised by the ingenuity of Mycroft’s inventions. “But what’s the point?”
“Well,” explained Mycroft, warming to the subject, “you know those inertial-generator things that self-wind a wristwatch?”
“Yes?”
“If we have a larger one of those inside a Nextahedron weighing six hundred tons, I calculate we could generate as much as a hundred watts of power.”
“But . . . but that’s only enough for a lightbulb!”
“Considering the input is nil, I think it’s a remarkable achievement,” replied Mycroft somewhat sniffily. “To generate significant quantities of power, we’d have to carve something of considerable mass—Mars, say—into a huge Nextahedron with a flat plate falling around the exterior, held firm by gravity. The power could be transmitted to Earth using Tesla beams and . . .”
His voice trailed off as he started to sketch ideas and equations in a small notebook. I watched the Nextahedron fall and rock and jiggle across the floor until it fell against a roll of wire.
“On a more serious note,” confided Polly, putting down her tea, “you could help us identify some of the devices in the workshop. Since both Mycroft and I have taken the Big Blank, you might be able to help.”
“I’ll try,” I said, looking around the room at the bizarre devices. “That one over there guesses how many pips there are in an unopened orange, the one with the horn is an Olfactrograph for measuring smells, and the small box thing there can change gold into lead.”
“What’s the point in that?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
Polly made notes against her inventory, and I spent the next ten minutes trying to name as many of Mycroft’s inventions as I could. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t tell me everything.
“I’m not sure what this one is either,” I said, pointing at a small machine about the size of a telephone directory lying on a workbench.
“Oddly enough,” replied Polly, “this is one we do have a name for. It’s an Ovinator.”
“How do you know if you can’t remember?”
“Because,” said Mycroft, who had finished his notes and now rejoined us, “it has ‘Ovinator’ engraved on the case just there. We think it’s either a device for making eggs without the need of a chicken or for making chickens without the need of an egg. Or something else entirely. Here, I’ll switch it on.”
Mycroft flicked a switch and a small red light came on.
“Is that it?”
“Yes,” replied Polly, staring at the small and very unexciting metallic box thoughtfully.
“No sign of any eggs or chickens,” I observed.
“None at all,” sighed Mycroft. “It might just be a machine for