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 Splicense revoked after that incident with the prawns?”

“A small misunderstanding,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Those fools at SpecOps-13 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 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.