Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next 2)

odliness 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 came to.

'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 often 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 colours 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, its 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.

'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 discs, not quite believing what I had just seen.

'How—?'

'Clever, isn't it?' He chuckled. 'But quite, quite simple, really. A baked-bean tin is circular, wouldn't you say?'

I nodded.

'But viewed from the side it looks like an oblong. What Nextian geometry does – in very simple terms – is bring the plane of a solid from the horizontal to the vertical but without altering the vertices of the solid in space 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, 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?'