Lost in a good book (11 page)

Her anger was directed at a small Tasmanian tiger that had been nosing the remains of some chicken on the table edge.

“Bad boy!” she added in a scolding tone. The Tastiger looked crestfallen, sat on its blanket by the Aga and stared down at its paws.

“Rescue Thylacine,” explained my mother. “Used to be a lab animal. He smoked forty a day until his escape. It’s costing me a fortune in nicotine patches. Isn’t it, DH-82?”

The small reengineered native of Tasmania looked up and shook his head. Despite being vaguely dog-shaped, this species was more closely related to a kangaroo than a Labrador. You always expected one to wag its tail, bark or fetch a stick, but they never did. The closest behavioral similarities were a propensity to steal food and an almost fanatical devotion to tail chasing.

“I miss your dad a lot, you know,” said my mother wistfully. “How—”

There was a loud explosion, the lights flickered, and something shot past the kitchen window.

“What was that?” said my mother.

“I think,” replied Landen soberly, “it was Aunt Polly.”

We found her in the vegetable patch dressed in a deflating rubber suit that was meant to break her fall but obviously hadn’t—she was holding a handkerchief to a bloodied nose.

“My goodness!” exclaimed my mother. “Are you okay?”

“Never been better!” she replied, looking at a stake in the ground and then yelling: “Seventy-five yards!”

“Righty-oh!” said a distant voice from the other end of the garden. We turned to see Uncle Mycroft, who was consulting a clipboard next to a smoking Volkswagen convertible.

“Car seat ejection devices in case of road accidents,” explained Polly, “with a self-inflating rubber suit to cushion the fall. Pull on a toggle and
bang
—out you go. Prototype, of course.”

“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 Gravitube, antimatter, Prose Portals, thermos flasks—”

“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 a vacuum. Remove the partition and the gas will expand into the other side of the box—yes?”

I nodded.

“And you wouldn’t expect the gas to cramp itself up in the left-hand side again, would you?”

“No.”

“Ah!” replied Mycroft with a knowing smile. “Not
quite
right. You see, since every interaction of gas atom is reversible, sometime, sooner or later, the gas
must
cramp itself back into the left-hand side!”

“It must?”

“Yes; the key here is
how much later.
Since even a small box of gas might contain 10
²⁰
atoms, the time taken for them to try all
possible
combinations would take far longer than the age of the universe; a decrease in entropy strong enough to allow gas to separate, a shattered glass to re-form or the statue of St. Zvlkx outside to get down and walk to the pub is not, I think, against any physical laws but just fantastically unlikely.”

“So,” I said slowly, “what you are saying is that really
really
weird coincidences are caused by a drop in entropy?”

“Exactly so. But it’s only a theory. As to why entropy might spontaneously decrease and how one might conduct experiments into localized entropic field decreasement, I have only a few untried notions that I won’t trouble you with here, but look, take this—it could save your life.”

He picked up a jam jar from one of the many worktops and passed it to me. It seemed the contents were half rice and half lentils.

“I’m not hungry, thanks,” I told him.

“No, no. I call this device an entroposcope. Shake it for me.”

I shook the jam jar and the rice and lentils settled together in that sort of random clumping way that chance usually dictates.

“So?” I asked.

“Entirely usual,” replied Mycroft. “Standard clumping, entropy levels normal. Shake it every now and then. You’ll know when a decrease in entropy occurs as the rice and lentils will separate out into more ordered patterns—and
that’s
the time to watch out for ludicrously unlikely coincidences.”

Polly entered the workshop and gave her husband a hug.

“Hello, you two,” she said. “Having fun?”

“I’m showing Thursday what I’ve been up to, my dear,” replied Mycroft graciously.

“Did you show her your memory erasure device, Crofty?”

“No, he didn’t,” I said.

“Yes, I
did,
” replied Mycroft with a smile, adding: “You’re going to have to leave me, pet—I’ve work to do. I retire in fifty-six minutes precisely.”

My father didn’t turn up that evening, much to my mother’s disappointment. At five minutes to ten, Mycroft, true to his word and with Polly behind him, emerged from his laboratory to join us for dinner.

Next family dinners are always noisy affairs, and tonight was no different. Landen sat next to Orville and did a very good impression of someone who was trying not to be bored. Joffy, who was next to Wilbur, thought his new job was utter crap, and Wilbur, who had been needled by Joffy for at least three decades, replied that he thought the Global Standard Deity Faith was the biggest load of phony codswallop he had ever come across.

“Ah,” replied Joffy loftily, “wait until you meet the Brotherhood of Unconstrained Verbosity.”

Gloria and Charlotte always sat next to each other, Gloria to talk about something trivial—such as buttons—and Charlotte to agree with her. Mum and Polly talked about the Women’s Federation and I sat next to Mycroft.

“What will you do in your retirement, Uncle?”

“I don’t know, pet. I have some books I’ve been wanting to write for some time.”