“C’mon then, m’girl,” he muttered, shooing the dodos from around the back door where they had been mustering in hope of a snack, and strode toward his workshop.
“You might repair that garden gate, Uncle—it’s worse than ever!”
“Not at all,” he replied with a wink. “Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour. I haven’t seen you about recently. Have you been away?”
“Well, yes; ten years.”
He looked over his spectacles at me with some surprise.
“Really?”
“Yes. Is Owens still with you?”
Owens was Mycroft’s assistant. He was an old boy who had been with Rutherford when he split the atom; Mycroft and he had been at school together.
“A bit tragic, Thursday. We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired. Polly helps me now.”
We had arrived at his work
shop. A log with an ax stuck in it was all that was keeping the door shut. Mycroft fumbled for the switch and the striplights flickered on, filling the workshop with a harsh fluorescent glow. The laboratory looked similar to the last time I had seen it in terms of untidiness and the general bric-à-brac, but the contraptions were different. I had learned from my mother’s many letters that Mycroft had invented a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker, but what he was currently working on, I had no idea.
“Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?”
“The what?”
“The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, dear girl. What do you make of this?”
A large white Rolls-Royce was sitting in the center of the room. I walked over to the vehicle as Mycroft tapped a fluorescent tube to stop it flickering.
“New car, Uncle?”
“No, no,” said Mycroft hurriedly. “I don’t drive. A friend of mine who hires these out was lamenting about the cost of keeping two, one black for funerals and the other white for weddings—so I came up with this.”
He reached in and turned a large knob on the dashboard. There was a low hum and the car turned slowly off-white, gray, dark gray and then finally to black.
“That’s very impressive, Uncle.”
“Do you think so? It uses liquid crystal technology. But I took the idea one step farther. Watch.”
He turned the dial several more notches to the right and the car changed to blue, then mauve, and finally green with yellow dots.
“One-color cars a thing of the past! But that’s not all. If I switch on the car’s Pigmentizer like so, the car should . . . yes, yes, look at that!”
I watched with growing astonishment as the car started to fade in front of my eyes; the liquid crystal coating was emulating the background grays and browns of Mycroft’s workshop. Within a few seconds the car had blended itself perfectly into the background. I thought of the fun you could have with traffic wardens.
“I call it the ChameleoCar; quite fun, don’t you think?”
“Very.”
I put out my hand and touched the warm surface of the camouflaged Rolls-Royce. I was going to ask Mycroft if I could have the cloaking device fitted to my Speedster but I was too late; enthused by my interest he had trotted off to a large rolltop bureau and was beckoning me over excitedly.
“Translating carbon paper,” he announced breathlessly, pointing to several piles of brightly colored metallic film. “I call it Rosettionery. Allow me to demonstrate. We’ll start with a plain piece of paper, then put in a Spanish carbon, a second slip of paper—must get them the right way up!—then a Polish carbon, more paper, German and another sheet and finally French and the last sheet . . . there.”
He shuffled the bundle and laid it on the desk as I pulled up a chair.
“Write something on the first sheet. Anything you want.”