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'Bookworms do the same job down here. "Without them, words would have one meaning, and meanings would have one word. They live in thesauri but their benefit is felt throughout fiction.'
'So why are they considered a pest?'
'Useful, but not without their drawbacks. Get too many bookworms in your novel and the language becomes almost u
nbearably flowery.'
'I've read books like that,' I confessed.
He turned the page and I recognised the grammasites that had swarmed through the Well earlier.
'Verbisoid,' he said with a sigh, 'to be destroyed without mercy. Once the Verbisoid extracts the verb from a sentence it generally collapses; do that once too often and the whole narrative falls apart like a bread roll in a rainstorm.'
'Why do they wear waistcoats and stripy socks?'
'To keep warm, I should imagine.'
'What's this?' I asked as he turned the page again. 'Another verbinator?'
'Well, kind of,' replied Perkins. 'This is a Converbilator. It actually creates verbs out of nouns and other words. Mostly by appending ize or ise but sometimes just by a direct conversion, such as knife, lunch and question. During a drought they have been known to even create compound verbs such as air-condition, and signpost. Like the bookworms they are necessary – but can't be allowed to get out of hand.'
'Some would say there are too many verbs already,' I commented.
'Those that do,' replied Perkins testily, 'should come and work for Jurisfiction for a bit and try and stop them.'
'What about the mispeling vyrus?' I asked.
'Speltificarious Molesworthian,' murmured Perkins, moving to where a pile of dictionaries were stacked up around a small glass jar. He picked out the container and showed it to me. A thin purple haze seemed to wisp around inside; it reminded me of one of Spike's SEBs.
'This is the larst of the vyrus,' explained Perkins. 'We had to distroy the wrist. It's very powarfull – can u feel it, even through the glas?'
'Unnessary,' I said, testing it out, 'undoutadly, professor, diarhea, nakijima. You're right, it's prety strong, isn't it?'
He replaced the jar bak in the dictosafe.
'Rampant before Agent Johnson's Dictionary in 1744,' commented Perkins. 'Lavinia-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary keep it all in check but we have to be careful. We used to contain any outbreak and offload it in the Molesworth series where no one ever notices. These days we destroy any new vyrus with a battery of dictionaries we keep on the seventeenth floor of the Great Library. But we can't be too careful. Every mispeling you come across has to be reported to the Cat on form S-I2.'
'There was the raucous blast of a car horn from outside.
'Time's up!' Perkins smiled. 'That will be Miss Havisham.'
Miss Havisham was not on her own. She was sitting in a vast automobile the bonnet of which stretched ten feet in front of her. The large spoked and unguarded wheels carried tyres that looked woefully skinny and inadequate; eight huge exhaust pipes sprouted from either side of the bonnet, joined into one and stretched the length of the body. The tail of the car was pointed, like a boat, and just forward of the rear wheels two huge drive sprockets carried the power to the rear axle on large chains. It was a fearsome beast. It was the twenty-seven-litre Higham Special.
8
Ton sixty on the A419
* * *
'The wealthy son of a Polish count and an American mother, Louis Zborowski lived at Higham Place near Canterbury, where he built three aero-engined cars, all called Chitty Bang Bang, and a fourth monster, the Higham Special, a car he and Clive Gallop had engineered by squeezing a 27-litre aero engine into a Rubery Owen chassis and mating it with a Benz gearbox. At the time of Zborowski's death at Monza behind the wheel of a Mercedes, the Special had been lapping Brooklands at 116 mph – but her potential was as yet unproved. After a brief stint with a lady owner whose identity has not been revealed, the Special was sold to Parry Thomas, who with careful modifications of his own pushed the land speed record up to 170.624 mph at Pendine Sands, South Wales, in 1926.'
THE VERY REV. TOREDLYNE – The Land Speed Record
'Has she been boring you, Mr Perkins?' called out Havisham.
'Not at all,' replied Perkins, giving me a wink. 'She has been a most attentive student.'
'Humph,' muttered Havisham. 'Hope springs eternal. Get in, girl, we're off!'
