7
‘Come to the bike shed when you are ready,’ said Tallulah. ‘I need to fetch our method of transportation.’
Pippa’s eyes went as round as a couple of spacehoppers (although not as orange) when she saw what Tallulah was talking about. ‘Is – is that really yours?’ she stammered, pointing.
‘Oh, this old jalopy?’ said Tallulah casually. ‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’
Pippa gasped. The vehicle her friend had brought out of the back of the bike shed was not the sort of thing a child normally goes to school on. It was a brightly painted, bubble-gum-pink sort of scooter-mobile, the like of which Pippa had never seen before (and I’m sure you won’t have done either). It looked as though it had been made out of old car and bicycle and aeroplane parts, all stuck together. And, to make it extra-special, it had a tiny pink sidecar attached.
And even more wonderfully extra-special was the sight of what was in the sidecar: for quick as a flash, Smug had found his way in and was now sitting upright, his little face scrunched inside a particularly fetching bright pink helmet! He was so adorably cute: his pudgy soft face with folds of fur looked even more wrinkly than usual because of the helmet, which seemed to scrunch up his jowls. You would have just wanted to scoop him up there and then and snuggle him tight, I can assure you.
Pippa hugged herself with excitement. If this scooter-mobile was even a hint of things to come at Tallulah’s house, she could not wait to get there. ‘Come on then!’ she said. ‘Let’s not waste a second. Show me the way to your grandfather’s.’
She hopped on to her skateboard and leaned forward, ready to push off. Tallulah put on her own pink helmet, climbed into the scooter-mobile and revved up the engine.
‘I don’t mean to be a spoilsport,’ Smug shouted to Pippa above the racket, ‘but will you be able to keep up with us?’ Tallulah turned out of the school gate and took off down the road at speed.
Pippa set her jaw. ‘Just you watch!’ she cried, and she kicked off with a zoom! She caught up with the scooter-mobile in five seconds flat, a cloud of dust rising from the road behind her.
‘My, my!’ shouted Tallulah as Pippa drew level with her. ‘Your exceptionally intriguing method of transport certainly results in your travelling at quite a velocity.’
‘What are you on about?’ cried Pippa.
‘You go fast on that thing!’ explained Smug.
‘Yeeeehah!’ Pippa punched the air with her fist and the friends tore through Crumbly-under-Edge, attracting some very hostile stares from the townsfolk as they went.
The professor’s house was on the outskirts of the other side of town and was even bigger and more rambling than Mrs Fudge’s place. Pippa did not take in many details, as she was so eager to get inside and see the Inventionary. Smug had run on ahead.
‘I told him to put the kettle on,’ said Tallulah.
‘Really?’ Pippa was puzzled. Surely he was not as clever as all that, she thought.
But it seemed he was even cleverer than she could have imagined. As the two girls walked down the long dark entrance hall, Smug reappeared from a back room. The little pug was carrying something in his mouth. Pippa saw that it was a small book, and that he also had a yellow pencil tucked behind one ear.
‘Smug, what is that book?’ Pippa asked. ‘And why have you got a pencil tucked behind your ear?’
The pug dropped the notebook so that he could answer. ‘Oh, I thought I might finish off a crossword while I waited for the kettle to boil. I do like a good crossword. This is my notebook where I do my workings-out and scribblings before I fill in the puzzles. Quite a fan of Sudoku too after my afternoon nap,’ he said carelessly. ‘Keeps the grey matter ticking over, don’t you know?’
‘I – don’t know, no,’ said Pippa.
‘Such a brain!’ Tallulah said affectionately. ‘Have you seen Grandfather?’ she added, nodding into the house.
‘I am afraid he seems to have gone out somewhere,’ said the pug vaguely. ‘He left this note.’ He flicked open the notebook with his paw to reveal a scrap of paper contained within its pages. ‘Here you are,’ he said, pushing the paper towards the girls.
Pippa peered over her friend’s shoulder at the message on the paper. She frowned. It looked like gobbledygook to her.
Tallulah read the note aloud. ‘A bit scant on information,’ she said. ‘Ah well. Sorry about this, Pippa. You’ll have to meet him another time.’
‘But – but – what language is that?’ Pippa asked.
Smug gave a little snort. ‘It’s not a language. It’s a code,’ he said.
Tallulah hushed him and said gently, ‘It’s a simple substitution cipher. It is quite easy to read once you know how: you merely take your original units of plain text and replace them with cipher text, according to a regular system—’
‘Well, if it’s so simple,’ interrupted Pippa impatiently, ‘then what is the point in using it?’
Smug put his head on one side. ‘You don’t understand it, do you?’
Pippa’s mouth twisted, but she said nothing.
‘Precisely,’ said Smug. ‘Therefore it has served its purpose as a code. Clearly Grandfather did not want anyone other than Tallulah and me to know what he had written.’
Tallulah smiled at Pippa. ‘I’ll show you how it works. Look.’ She pointed at the letters. ‘For a start there are repeated letters, so that is an instant clue.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Pippa sulked. ‘Just tell me what it says.’
Smug raised his eyebrow again at Tallulah, who said, ‘Grandfather’s written, “POPPED OUT. BACK SOON” – as I say, not a very informative note. He has simply used the alphabet backwards to write his note. The K is P, the L, O and so on. Look, I’ll show you.’
She took a pencil from behind her ear and turned over the note that her grandfather had written. Then she wrote out the whole alphabet from A to Z and then above it she wrote the whole alphabet from Z to A.
Then she pointed at the letters as she explained how the code worked. ‘If you want to write A in this code, you use Z instead. So that’s why P becomes K and O becomes L.’
Pippa’s face brightened as she understood. ‘That is brilliant!’ she cried. ‘We can write notes to each other in class now and no one will understand them!’
Smug rolled his eyes. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘From what I have seen of your classmates (and your teacher, come to that), I doubt any of them would understand a substitution cipher either. Now, are you going to show Pippa the Inventionary at least?’
‘Come and see,’ said Tallulah, linking arms with Pippa.
‘But no touching anything in there,’ Smug warned. ‘We are in the middle of a particularly tricky idea just at the minute.’
‘What do you mean, “we”?’ said Pippa.
‘He means “he”, as in my grandfather,’ said Tallulah hastily. ‘Grandfather is stuck on a project. Let’s take a look!’
‘Oh, come, come,’ said Smug. ‘I think we can tell her.’ He shot Tallulah a cryptic glance.
‘Tell me WHAT?’ cried Pippa.
Tallulah shrugged. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘Please tell me!’ Pippa begged.
Tallulah smiled. ‘All right. Smug helps Grandfather with his inventions. But you really mustn’t tell anyone,’ she insisted, ‘because there is no other dog in the world as clever as he is, and people might want to dognap him if they knew about his skills.’
Pippa shook her head in astonishment and skipped through the house with Tallulah, Smug trotting along at their heels. What a pair! she thought. And what a house!
It was chock-full to the rafters with stuff so that you had to squeeze between things to get from one room to the next. In fact it looked to Pippa more like a car-boot sale than a house. Every available space on the walls was covered in paintings and framed photographs (most of them of Tallulah and Smug, a few of an elderly gentleman who, apart from the bushy beard and moustache, looked spookily like an older male version of Tallulah, with the same green eyes and thick, black-rimmed specs and masses of whoofy, bushy, crazy hair, which was red, just like his granddaughter’s). Every spare centimetre of floor space was covered in furniture, and, Pippa noticed as she peered into rooms off the hallway, every piece of furniture had piles and piles of paper on its surface. Even the ceilings seemed to have objects hanging from them, including some very odd-looking devices held together with ropes and string and attached to wheels and cogs and levers. It all looked rather terrifying to Pippa, who was very careful not to touch a single thing.
What on earth are these inventions for? she wondered.
At last, after passing through the kitchen to collect huge mugs of tea, they came to the end of the tour and Tallulah flung open a door which was covered in pinned-on scraps of paper, each piece full of unintelligible scribblings, numbers and diagrams.
‘The Inventionary!’ she announced proudly.
If the rest of the house had made Pippa feel dizzy, this room made her feel as though someone had taken her to the highest roller coaster in the world and pushed her down without strapping her in.
‘Whoa!’ she cried, bedazzled by the blinking lights and whirring sounds and flashing screens. ‘What in the highest heavens—?’
‘We are in the middle of creating a device that does all the housework at once,’ announced Smug. ‘I thought I would call it the household helper.’
‘It’s a sort of cleaner-ironer-washer-upper,’ explained Tallulah, pointing to an ironing board which was sticking out of one side of the invention, and a dish rack on the other. ‘And, as Smug has said, it is not quite ready yet.’
‘We are still working on a few details,’ added Smug. He padded over to the machine and put a plate in the dish rack.
‘Smug, I don’t think you should . . .’ began Tallulah.
But the little dog had nudged a red button with his nose and the plate was suddenly catapulted into the air and landed on the ironing board. A lever came out of a small door, bringing with it an iron, which then dropped on to the plate and promptly smashed it.
‘Ahem, as you can see, just an infinitesimal amount of fine-tuning is needed,’ said Tallulah. She narrowed her eyes and held up her finger and thumb to emphasize that only the tiniest of changes were required.
Pippa giggled but then caught sight of Smug, who did not seem to find Tallulah’s teasing funny. ‘All right, all right,’ he muttered. ‘Won’t be hard to fix.’
He stood on his hind legs and reached up to a small lever that Pippa had not noticed before. As he gave it a quick tap with one of his front paws, a drawer opened just beneath it. Two mechanical hands appeared holding a dustpan and brush and proceeded to sweep up the broken shards of crockery.
Pippa breathed in sharply.
‘It is a relief to find the sweeping-up section is functioning at least,’ said Smug.
‘Which is what brings me to my idea,’ said Tallulah.
‘You have an idea on how to fix the household helper?’ said Pippa.
‘If it’s to do with the sub-coordinator in the lower ratchets of the carbonator, your grandfather and I have already tried that,’ said Smug sadly.
‘No, no. I was thinking of another invention entirely,’ said Tallulah. She wiggled her ears and her black-rimmed spectacles jumped up and down on her nose. ‘You were saying that you wanted to get back into the good books of your Mrs Fudge?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pippa. ‘I would love to show her that I can still be useful to her. ’
‘Well, luckily for you, we can design JUST the machine to help.’
‘Steady on, Tallulah. I don’t know if the professor would be willing to let any of his machines out of the house,’ said the pug sternly.
‘Oh, don’t be a killjoy,’ Tallulah said. ‘Don’t you see? This is the perfect opportunity to develop a machine and give it a thorough testing. It is a win-win situation.’
Smug washed one paw thoughtfully. ‘Hmm. I suppose so,’ he said.
‘He can’t resist a challenge!’ cried Tallulah. ‘Now, Smug, why don’t you show Pippa some of your other inventions?’
The pug clearly could not resist showing off either. Pippa watched in amazement as he hopped lightly down from the table to give a demonstration of a smaller invention, which was designed to vacuum the floor without the need for a human to push it around. It was very impressive.
He then leaped daintily into an old bathtub which had a series of buttons on it. He pushed one and a shower cap was popped neatly on to his head. Another button was pressed and the bath taps turned themselves on, and after pressing yet another button, sweet-smelling bubble bath was poured into the bath which then filled with warm water and mounds of big shiny bubbles.
‘Aaah, lovely!’ said Smug, closing his eyes. Then he leaped back out, flicked a switch and a pair of white-gloved hands emerged from the side of the bath. They removed the shower cap and produced a towel. The towel was wrapped around Smug and he was given a vigorous scrub.
‘What do you think?’ Smug asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘It’s one of my more recent projects.’
‘It’s – it’s awesome,’ said Pippa, in hushed tones.
Smug came back to sit with the girls. ‘Right. Down to work. Can you pass me some paper and a pencil, please? Oh, and my specs. Thank you.’
The dog lifted his head for Tallulah to place an oversized pair of thick-framed spectacles identical to her own on his flat little face. He wrinkled his nose to settle them into place, then, taking a pencil between his claws, he began to draw shapes and arrows and lots of squiggly things. Soon the page was covered.
‘What is he doing?’ Pippa hissed.
‘Shh,’ said Tallulah. ‘He’s concentrating. Don’t stop him in mid-flow.’
Smug muttered to himself and scribbled and scrawled and was soon writing on the table itself, since he had run out of space on the paper. Pippa wondered if she should say something, as he didn’t seem to have noticed. Then she took in her surroundings again and realized that, in a house such as this, a scribbled-on table was quite probably the least of anyone’s worries.
At last Smug cleared his throat noisily and said, ‘Let’s see now. If x equals y equals z and a quarter, then no one has any idea what they are talking about, but if I were to multiply the signs of the zodiac backwards while adding pi to the square root of a million and fifty-six, then – oh my goodness!’ he exclaimed, twitching his nose (which made the thick-rimmed spectacles dance around his funny little face). ‘Eureka!’
‘You reek o’ what?’ cried Pippa. She jumped up from her chair in alarm and looked around wildly.
Smug shook off his spectacles with a snigger. ‘I said, “Eureka!”’
‘It’s ancient Greek for “I have found it!”’ Tallulah explained.
‘Found what?’ said Pippa.
Tallulah scrambled to her feet and peered at Smug’s notes and jottings. ‘The solution to your problem.’
‘Indeed,’ said Smug. ‘How would your Mrs Fudge react, do you think, if we told her that she could have a machine that can help her with haircutting so that she can concentrate on the dog grooming?’
‘Brilliant!’ exclaimed Pippa. ‘That is exactly what she needs.’
‘Good, good. Well, leave it with us. We should have it knocked together in, ah, um, what do you think, Tally?’ The pug gestured to the sketches and notes.
‘I should say we could have it ready by tomorrow. If we work flat out through the night, that is,’ said Tallulah.
‘R-really?’ Pippa said, astounded. She looked at the scrawlings and suddenly felt overcome with doubt that such a complicated-looking invention could be built in such a short space of time.
‘Indubitably,’ said Tallulah.
‘She means “of course”,’ Smug translated with a smirk.
Pippa clapped her hands and shouted, ‘Hooray! If this doesn’t get me back into Mrs Fudge’s good books, I don’t know what will.’