The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

“As I said, a remarkable achievement with one small drawback. However, events ran ahead of themselves; some of my worms escaped and bred with others that had been encoded with a complete set of encyclopedic, historical and biographical reference manuals; the result was a new strain I named HyperBookwormDoublePlusGood. These chaps are the real stars of the show.”

He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer, tore off a corner and wrote the word “remarkable” on the small scrap.

“This is just to give you a taste of what these creatures can do.”

So saying, he dropped the piece of paper into the goldfish bowl. The worms wasted no time and quickly surrounded the small scrap. But instead of eating it they merely conglomerated around it, squirmed excitedly and explored the interloper with apparent great interest.

“I had a wormery back in London, Uncle, and they didn’t like paper either—”

“Shh!” murmured my uncle, and beckoned me closer to the worms.

Amazing!

“What is?” I asked, somewhat perplexed; but as soon as I looked at Mycroft’s smiling face I realized it wasn’t him speaking.

Astonishing! said the voice again in a low murmur. Incredible! Astounding! Stunning!

I frowned and looked at the worms, which had gathered themselves into a small ball around the scrap of paper and were pulsating gently.

Wonderful! mumbled the bookworms. Extraordinary! Fantastic!

“What do you think?” asked Mycroft.

“Thesaurean maggots—Uncle, you never cease to amaze me!”

But Mycroft was suddenly a lot more serious.

“It’s more than just a bio-thesaurus, Thursday. These little chaps can do things that you will scarce believe.”

He opened a cupboard and pulled out a large leather book with PP embossed on the spine in gold letters. The casing was richly decorated and featured heavy brass securing straps. On the front were several dials and knobs, valves and knife switches. It certainly looked impressive, but not all Mycroft’s devices had a usefulness mutually compatible with their looks. In the early seventies he had developed an extraordinarily beautiful machine that did nothing more exciting than predict with staggering accuracy the number of pips in an unopened orange.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This,” began Mycroft, smiling all over and puffing out his chest with pride, “is a—”

But he never got to finish. At that precise moment Polly announced “Supper!” from the door and Mycroft quickly ran out, muttering something about how he hoped it was snorkers and telling me to switch off the lights on my way out. I was left alone in his empty workshop. Truly, Mycroft had surpassed himself.

Dazzling! agreed the bookworms.

Supper was a friendly affair. We all had a lot of catching up to do, and my mother had a great deal to tell me about the Women’s Federation.

“We raised almost seven thousand pounds last year for ChronoGuard orphans,” she said.

“That’s very good,” I replied. “SpecOps is always grateful for the contributions, although to be fair there are other divisions worse off than the ChronoGuard.”

“Well, I know,” replied my mother, “but it’s all so secret. What do all of them do?”

“Believe me, I have no more idea than you. Can you pass the fish?”

“There isn’t any fish,” observed my aunt. “You haven’t been using your niece as a guinea pig have you, Crofty?”

My uncle pretended not to hear; I blinked and the fish vanished.

“The only other one I know under SO-20 is SO-6,” added Polly. “That was National Security. We only know that because they all looked after Mycroft so well.”

She nudged him in the ribs but he didn’t notice; he was busy figuring out a recipe for unscrambled eggs on a napkin.

“I don’t suppose a week went by in the sixties when he wasn’t being kidnapped by one foreign power or another,” she sighed wistfully, thinking of the exciting old days with a whiff of nostalgia.