The great Napoleon Solo, spy extraordinaire, the best agent in the best agency in the world, was in trouble. Trapped it a THRUSH cellar with an unconscious partner he was bone-cold and dog-tired and worst of all he could not remember a single poem.

Like all truly important things it had seemed like nothing when it started. All agents quickly learnt the importance of having something to do while your partner was recuperating in hospital. Keeping silent vigil at their bedside, while touching, tended to pall after the first few hours and if you were to avoid driving yourself and the hospital staff mad an occupation had to be found, Many played solitaire, some did origami, one Dutch agent taught himself rope tricks with pieces of string. April Dancer sketched and her partner Mark Slate knitted. If he was to be believed he broke his leg the summer he was 8 and his grandmother had taught him to knit in a desperate and only partially successful attempt to occupy him. Once he had made April a hat, but usually he just made a long strip of garter stitch, whatever that was, which was discarded or unravelled when April recovered.

Napoleon and Illya read aloud. Early in their partnership Napoleon had broken his wrist escaping from a THRUSH fortress and coming round from the anaesthetic he had heard Illya's voice quietly reciting something in Russian. Too tired to translate he had let the sounds wash over him and draw him back into full consciousness. When the roles were reversed he found that it calmed his restless mind and enabled him to tolerate the necessary inactivity if not with equanimity then at least with more patience. After that it was just what they did. Over the years they had covered a wide range of reading material from the classics, through trashy novels all the way down to some old fishing magazines in a small hospital just outside Calgary. There was just one unspoken rule: they could not repeat anything they had already read. It did not seem to spoil any of the books for them, the euphoria of recovery far outweighing the preceding anxiety. There was only one exception; for Napoleon Oliver Twist was always tainted by the click of the ventilator, the smell of antiseptic and the gnawing emptiness of a partner who had been too still for too long.

He knew it would not be long before they were rescued: he could already hear the flurry of noise that indicated an attack on the base. Chaffing against inactivity and desperately missing the familiar banter, he wanted, no, needed, the comfort of familiar words, a lifeline to link him and Illya together, anchoring them both so neither could slip away. But today his exhausted brain could come up with nothing. Then suddenly it came to him: loved from childhood, never formally learnt but known beyond all possibility of forgetting. All he had to do was say the first two words and the rest would follow effortlessly. ''Twas brillig…'.

Napoleon shifted in his chair. The cavalry had burst in just as he was finishing the poem and he was now reading from a rather battered copy of The Blue Castle which he was finding surprisingly enjoyable. Illya was starting to stir, but Napoleon was still worried. If this were a film it would be a foregone conclusion that Illya would come round bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with no ill effects from a vicious blow with the butt of a rifle, but Napoleon knew to his cost that in real life heads were delicate things and even without bleeding to the brain or a fractured skull at best Illya would be waking to nausea and a blinding headache and at worst to confusion, disorientation and permanent disability. The heroine had just left home when a faint croak from the bed attracted his attention. As he leant forward the bewilderment in his partner's eyes sent a flick of concern through him, rapidly followed by a laugh of unadulterated joy as he heard the tetchy question, 'Napoleon, what IS a momerath?'