The Eyre Affair

read: Haben sie meinen dodo gesehen?

‘The Mayan Codex version was trickier but I can’t manage Esperanto at all. Can’t think why.’

‘This will have dozens of applications!’ I exclaimed as I pulled off the last sheet to read, slightly disappointingly: Man aardvark n’a pas de nez.

‘Wait a moment, Uncle. My aardvark has no nose? ’

Mycroft looked over my shoulder and grunted.

‘You probably weren’t pressing hard enough. You’re police, aren’t you?’

‘SpecOps, really.’

‘Then this might interest you,’ he announced, leading me off past more wondrous gadgets, the use of which I could only guess at. ‘I’m demonstrating this particular machine to the police technical advancement committee on Wednesday.’

He stopped next to a device that had a huge horn on it like an old gramophone. He cleared his throat.

‘I call it my “Olfactograph”. It’s very simple. Since any bloodhound worth its salt will tell you that each person’s smell is unique like a thumbprint, then it follows that a machine that can recognise a felon’s individual smell must be of use where other forms of identification fail. A thief may wear gloves and a mask, but he can’t hide his scent.’

He pointed at the horn.

‘The odours are sucked up here and split into their individual parts using an “Olfactroscope” of my own invention. The component parts are then analysed to give a “pongprint” of the criminal. It can separate out ten different people’s odours in a single room and isolate the newest or the oldest. It can detect burned toast up to six months after the event and differentiate between thirty different brands of cigar.’

‘Could be handy,’ I said, slightly doubtfully. ‘What’s this over here?’

I was pointing to what looked like a trilby hat made from brass and covered in wires and lights.

‘Oh yes,’ said my uncle, ‘this I think you will like.’

He placed the brass hat on my head and flicked a large switch. There was a humming noise.

‘Is something meant to happen?’ I asked.

‘Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Try to empty your mind of any thoughts.’

I closed my eyes and waited patiently.

‘Is it working?’ asked Mycroft.

‘No,’ I replied, then added: ‘Wait!’ as a stickleback swam past. ‘I can see a fish. Here, in front of my eyes. Wait, there’s another!’

And so there was. Pretty soon I was staring at a whole host of brightly coloured fish all swimming in front of my closed eyes. They were on about a five-second loop; every now and then they jumped back to the starting place and repeated their action.

‘Remarkable!’

‘Stay relaxed or it will go,’ said Mycroft in a soothing voice. ‘Try this one.’

There was a blur of movement and the scene shifted to an inky-black starfield; it seemed as though I were travelling through space.

‘Or how about this?’ asked Mycroft, changing the scene to a parade of flying toasters. I opened my eyes and the image evaporated. Mycroft was looking at me earnestly.

‘Any good?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out of the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!— you’re back in the real world again.’

I handed back the hat.

‘Should sell well at SmileyBurger. When do you hope to market it?’

‘It’s not really ready yet; there are a few problems I haven’t quite fixed.’

‘Such as what?’ I asked, slightly suspiciously.

‘Close your eyes and you’ll see.’

I did as he asked and a fish swam by. I blinked again and could see a toaster. Clearly, this needed some work.

‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me. ‘They will have gone in a few hours.’

‘I preferred the Olfactroscope.’

‘You haven’t seen anything yet!’ said Mycroft, skipping nimbly up to a large work desk covered by tools and bits of machinery. ‘This device is probably my most amazing discovery ever. It is the culmination of thirty years’ work and incorporates biotechnology at the very cutting edge of science. When you find out what this is, I promise you, you’ll flip!’

He pulled a tea towel off a goldfish bowl with a flourish and showed me what appeared to be a large quantity of fruitfly larvae.

‘Maggots?’

Mycroft smiled.

‘Not maggots, Thursday, bookworms!’

He said the word with such a bold and proud flourish that I thought I must have missed something.

‘Is that good?’

‘It’s very good, Thursday. These worms might look like a tempting snack for Mr Trout, but each one of these little fellows has enough new genetic sequencing to make the code embedded in your pet dodo look like a note to the milkman!’

‘Hold on a sec, Uncle,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you have your Splicence revoked after that incident with the prawns?’

‘A small misunderstanding,’ he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Those fools at SpecOps 11 have no idea of the value of my work.’

‘Which is—?’ I asked, ever curious.

‘Ever smaller methods of storing information. I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm’s small body. I call them “HyperBookworms”. I think you’ll agree that it’s a remarkable achievement.’

‘I agree. But how would you access this information?’

Mycroft’s face fell.

‘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 encyclopaedic, 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 taster 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 realised it wasn’t him speaking.

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