by Poppy Harris
PUFFIN BOOKS
HAMMY
THE WONDER HAMSTER
‘Goodnight now, Hammy,’ Bethany said presently, putting him in the cage. Then she went to switch off her phone. But when she picked it up, she saw a text message on the screen that made her hand shake and her mouth drop open.
The text message would change her life. It read:
MY NAME IS HAMILTON. APPLE, PLEASE? THANKS.
Look out for more of Hammy’s adventures…
POPPY HARRIS
HAMMY
THE
WONDER
HAMSTER
PUFFIN
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2008
Text copyright © Poppy Harris, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re‐sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-91051-2
To Kayleigh
chapter 1
‘That one,’ said Bethany, ‘please. The little golden and white one.’
Dolittle’s Pet Shop smelt of sawdust and animals. On the crammed shelves were rows of packets of pet food, from little brown paper bags of budgie seed at one end to enormous cartons of biscuits for Great Danes at the other. Dog leads hung from the walls and a basket of squeaky toys lay on the counter. Everywhere was a steady whirr‐whirr‐whirr as hamsters ran and ran on their wheels.
Bethany had been watching the hamsters for nearly half an hour, while her dad tried not to look bored and her younger brother, Sam, worked his way along the rows of rabbit cages. (He already had a rabbit, so he needed to make sure that none of the shop rabbits was as nice as his Bobby.) Bethany had observed every single hamster very carefully, couldn’t make up her mind about which was her favourite and was about to start all over again when, in the cage nearest to her, something rustled.
There were two young hamsters in there, one pattering round on the wheel and the other standing up on its hind legs to drink from the water bottle, but Bethany could hear more rustling noises from the nest box. As she watched, a pink nose appeared. It twitched. Soon, she could see a small hamster face.
Bethany watched the hamster. There was something different about this one. She’ never seen such a bright, inquisitive look on an animal’s face. The hamster darted to the feeding dish, picked up a sunflower seed and nibbled it. Then it stopped eating and put its head on one side, as if it had something to think about. Its eyes were bright, and in its soft, fluffed‐up fur were patches as golden as honey.
‘Hello,’ said Bethany.
The hamster looked directly at her, twitching its nose. It was as if he smiled at her, and Bethany loved him.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘That one.’
Dad stooped to peer into the cage. ‘Isn’t it a bit small?’ he said. ‘It’s smaller than the others. It might not be very strong.’
‘He’s a young one, that’s all,’ said the woman behind the counter. ‘That’s why he’s in there. If he were older, he’d be by himself. You can’t put male hamsters in together like that when they start growing up, or they fight. He’s already used to being handled, so he’s very tame. A nice little hamster, that one. He has a bright face.’
‘He’s the right one,’ said Bethany quietly. ‘He’s been waiting for me. He’s meant to be mine. And it’s my own money.’
‘But, Bethany love, it looks as if it might be a runt,’ said Dad. ‘You can still think again.’
So Bethany did what she always did. She didn’t argue, plead, sulk, cry or make a fuss. She just stood still, very calmly and quietly. If she had to stay there until closing time, she would. She would leave the shop with this hamster, or no hamster at all.
‘It’s just that you’d be so upset if it died,’ said Dad. Bethany gave him a wide‐eyed look, then put her hands behind her back and turned her steady gaze back to the hamster.
Half an hour later, she was in her bedroom. She had cleared the top of a little white chest of drawers so there was just enough room for a cage and boxes of hamster food. Beside her, a small cardboard box jiggled and rocked as the hamster inside scuffled about and poked his inquisitive, twitching nose through the holes. When Bethany was sure that the cage door would stay shut, the water bottle wouldn’t fall off, and there was everything in there that a small hamster would need to make him feel at home, she opened the box very carefully, afraid that he might run away.
He didn’t run away at all. He jumped straight into the cage and climbed up the bars, exploring. Bethany sat on her bed to watch him. The more she watched him the more she was surprised, and the more she was surprised, the more she was absolutely fascinated.
She had never owned a hamster before, but she knew a bit about them. Her friend Chloe had a hamster called Toffee, which was why Bethany had wanted one in the first place. Her mum and dad had said that she could have one if she proved how much she cared about it by paying for it herself, so she had saved up for a hamster, a cage, bowls and everything else needed to keep her pet happy. She had made sure to learn all she could about hamsters, too. This meant that she had a pretty good idea of how hamsters normally behaved, and this hamster wasn’t normal at all.
For a start, there was the way his mouth twitched just as if he were about to sneeze, but he didn’t. Then he made a face that was almost a smile, and another that was a sort of pout. It looked exactly as if he were trying to talk but couldn’t quite manage it. Then he climbed into the wheel, took a little run, stopped, and turned round to see if it would go the other way. It didn’t, so he stood on his hind legs, stretched up to the screw holding the wheel to the cage, and wiggled it with his forepaws. Bethany giggled. Of course, he was only exploring, but he looked like a mechanic checking a car.
The feeling that she was being watched made Bethany turn round. Sam was peeping round the door.
‘You’re supposed to knock,’ said Bethany. Sam knocked, then came straight in without waiting for an answer and bent to look into the cage.
‘Can I see Hammy?’ he asked.
‘He’s not called Hammy,’ said Bethany, though she wasn’t sure yet what he was called. Chloe’s hamster was Toffee,
so she’d thought of calling hers Choccie, or Caramel, or even Peanut, but none of these suited him. It seemed unkind to call him after something to eat. Sam had become strangely quiet. ‘But all hamsters are called Hammy, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Even if they’re called something else as well.’
He stuffed his hand into his pocket, drew out a very battered home‐made card, and gave it to her. Under a drawing of a hamster, he had written with coloured felt pens: Welcome home, Hammy.
‘Oh!’ said Bethany. ‘Thank you!’ It was surprisingly sweet of him, and she hoped she hadn’t hurt his feelings.
‘Hammy could be short for something,’ she said, propping up the card against one side of the cage.
‘Ham sandwich?’ suggested Sam, but at that moment Mum called them both for tea.
‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ shouted Bethany.
Sam ran down the stairs, but Bethany stopped to have one more minute with her hamster. When he’d finished playing with the wheel the hamster took a good look at the fastening on the door, inspecting it from above, below and each side as if he were determined to know how it worked. Then he turned his attention to the scraps of newspaper on the cage floor, scratching at them with his claws and picking up fragments in his teeth.
‘Are you making yourself a nest?’ Bethany said. That was what Toffee would have done, dragging torn shreds of paper to the nest box, and for a moment it looked as if this hamster would do the same – only he didn’t. She leant forward to watch more closely. The hamster rearranged the pieces on the floor of the cage, lining them up, running round them to see what they looked like and moving them about. By the time Mum called again, he had put together half a crossword and most of the Sudoku.
Bethany was still thinking about her hamster as she washed and went downstairs.
‘How’s your hamster settling in?’ asked Mum as she spooned spaghetti Bolognese on to plates.
‘He’s brilliant!’ said Bethany, and felt the smile spreading across her face when she thought about him. ‘He’s really clever. I mean, really. He tried out the wheel and I think he wanted it to go the other way, because he stood on his hind legs and twiddled the screw. And he looks at everything very carefully, as if he wants to see how it works.’
‘He’s making an escape plan,’ said Sam.
‘Don’t give him a screwdriver, whatever you do,’ said Dad.
Bethany ignored the teasing. ‘His mouth twitches,’ she said. ‘Not just ordinary twitches – it looks as if he wants to talk, he sort of smiles, and –’
There was a snort and a splutter from Sam.
‘Sam!’ said Mum.
‘Smiley hamster!’ gasped Sam. He put on a beaming wide‐eyed smile, tucked his lower lip under his front teeth, crossed his eyes, and folded over, braying with laughter. ‘Smiley Hammy!’
‘But he –’ said Bethany.
‘Talking ha‐ham‐ham–’ began Sam, and was laughing too much to say anything else.
‘That’s enough,’ said Mum, and Bethany, with a glance at Sam’s shaking shoulders, decided Mum was right. That was more than enough. She’d be very careful what she said about her hamster now, especially if Sam were there.
‘Has he got a name yet?’ asked Dad.
Bethany put down her knife and fork and glared at Sam before he could say ‘Ham Sandwich’. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I’m still thinking.’
Upstairs in his cage, Hammy the Hamster was thinking about his name too. At the same time, he’d worked out all the crossword answers in his head and started on the Sudoku.
Bethany was right about her hamster. He was completely unlike any other hamster ever, and there was a reason for that, but not even he fully understood what it was. To find that out, you need to know what had happened about a week earlier in a scientific lab at the nearest university. And you need to know about a young man – thin, with messy hair that wouldn’t lie flat, square glasses and clothes that always looked too big for him – called Tim Taverner.
chapter 2
Tim Taverner had been the most brilliant science student at the university. He was so brilliant that while still a young man he had passed the difficult exams, the even more difficult exams and the almost impossible exams, so that the university was running out of letters to put after his name. He had stayed at the university, teaching other students while working on more projects of his own. He was particularly interested in two things – computers and artificial intelligence.
He didn’t talk much about the work he was doing. That was because he wasn’t supposed to be doing it at all. artificial intelligence was a dangerous thing. Tim should have had twenty different licences to do those projects. He only had three, and two of those were out of date. Also, he should have had two supervisors to observe what he was doing and, if necessary, tell him to stop it. Tim had no supervisors at all, and a lot of his work was strictly against the law.
For about half of each week, Tim taught students how to teach computers to speak two hundred different languages, compose music, design aeroplanes and solve puzzles. For the other half, he worked in a lab trying to get the most possible information and intelligence into the tiniest possible microchip – or, as he called it, a microspeck.
The microspeck project was all going very well, and Tim was more and more excited about it. He would go into the lab as early as he could and stay as late as he could. Usually, he would give his morning lectures first, then hurry to the canteen to buy soup or a sandwich for lunch. On this particular Friday, he chose an apple and a salad baguette with sesame seeds on the top, and rushed back to his desk to eat them while he worked. All afternoon he made notes, scribbled down figures, programmed and reprogrammed, processed information and calculated, darting from the screen to the safe and from the safe to the electron microscope. Occasionally, he remembered to take a bite out of his sandwich. This meant that there were smears of margarine and tomato‐coloured splodges on his notes but, as most of them ended up in the bin, it didn’t matter. Finally, when he had worked so long and so frantically that the words and figures were mixed up in his mind, he swept the remaining sandwich crumbs into the bin, put on his jacket and locked up the lab. He spent the weekend at a conference about how to teach computers to make weather forecasts, then gave lectures all Monday, so it was Tuesday when he went back to the lab. Full of new ideas, he unlocked the safe and took out the vacuum bag where he kept the microspeck.
It was empty.
He stared, peered into the bag, shook it upside down and turned it inside out. He inspected the corners, hoping that the microspeck might have fallen into one and got stuck. It was no good.
He tried to remember all he had done on Friday evening. He had put the microspeck into the vacuum bag as he always did, hadn’t he? Or had he, in a careless moment, put the bag away without checking and double‐checking to make sure the microspeck was really in there? Had he put the bag away empty? The more he thought of it, the more he realized, with sweat breaking out on his forehead and his hands trembling, that this was exactly what he had done. He dashed to his desk – it might still be on there – but the desk was neat and clean.
Think, Tim, he told himself. Take a deep breath. What did you do last thing on Friday?
He remembered tidying away the rubbish on Friday night. Then he covered his face with his hands, made a sound that was half a groan and half a growl, and dashed to the waste‐paper basket. He knew he’d swept the sandwich crumbs into it, along with some notes, his apple core, the newspaper and a paper aeroplane he’d been making because it helped him to think. There was no doubt about it. The microspeck had been cleared away with the rubbish and swept into the waste‐paper basket. It had, of course, been emptied twice since Friday. All the same, he tipped it up, shook it, smacked it and shook it again, just in case anything dropped out, and looked into its corners with a magnifying lens to see if anything had got stuck to the side. But the cleaners did their work very thoroughly, and there wasn’t a trace of anything at all.
&nbs
p; He examined the surface of his desk and moved the computer in case the microspeck had rolled underneath, but nothing lay there, not even a speck of dust. On his hands and knees, he examined the carpet through the magnifying lens. It was clean and speckless.
There was still hope. Tim often worked late, and knew what time the cleaners would arrive. He settled down for a long wait.
The time dragged. The hands on the clock scarcely moved. Eventually, at seven o’clock, he heard the welcome sound of mops rattling in buckets and vacuum cleaners purring in the corridors. The door opened, and before him stood a short, curly‐haired, kind‐faced woman in a pink overall. The vacuum cleaner sat beside her like a well‐trained dog, and she carried a basket of dusters and polish.
‘I’ll not get in your way, Dr Taverner,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Oh – Mary –’ said Tim, out of breath with anxiety – ‘I need to ask you about something – er – important. Very important. Did you do the cleaning in here on Friday?’
‘Yes, I did, Dr Taverner,’ she said, looking worried. ‘I hope there’s nothing the matter?’
‘Oh, no – nothing, nothing at all,’ he said quickly. ‘Only, I was wondering – can you tell me –’ the next words came out in a rush – ‘can you tell me what happens to the rubbish from the waste‐paper baskets?’
‘What a question!’ she said. Now she came to look at him, Dr Taverner didn’t seem at all well. She felt sorry for him and spoke reassuringly, as if he were a small boy. ‘All the paper has to be shredded, then most of the cleaners put all the rubbish out for the binmen. But not me.’ She lowered her voice as if letting him in on a guilty secret. ‘I hate waste. I take the shredded paper to my daughter. She works in a pet shop and the paper comes in very useful for putting in cages, for bedding and that. For the hamsters.’
Tim leapt to his feet, flung his arms round Mary, and hugged her so hard that she squeaked.
