“There was simply no room for me there-my bed took up space that could have been used for another furnace.”
“To conspire? To plot?”
“The mercury fumes were making me jumpy.”
“To burn? To torch?”
Daniel now gripped the arms of his chair, threatening to get up and leave. Roger held up a hand. “I’m President of the Royal Society-it is my duty to be curious.”
“I’m Secretary, and it is my duty to hold it all together when the President is being a fool.”
“Better a fool in London than fuel in Cambridge. You will forgive me for wondering what went on.”
“Since you’re pretending to be a Catholic now, you may expect cheap grace from your French priests, but not from me.”
“You are showing the self-righteousness I associated with upright men who’ve secretly done something very wrong-which is not to assert that you have any dark secrets, Daniel, only that you act that way.”
“Does this conversation have any purpose other than to make me want to kill you, Roger?”
“I simply want to know what the hell Newton is doing.”
“Then why harry me with these questions about what happened in ’77?”
Roger shrugged. “You won’t talk about now, so I thought I would try my luck with then. ”
“Why the sudden interest in Isaac?”
“Because of De Motu Corporum in Gyrum. Halley says it is stupendous.”
“No doubt.”
“He says that it is only a sketch for a vast work that is consuming all of Newton’s energies now.”
“I am pleased that Halley has an explanation for the orbit of his comet, and even more pleased that he has taken over responsibility for the care and feeding of Isaac. What do you want of me?”
“Halley is blinded by comet-light,” Roger scoffed. “If Newton decides to work out the mysteries of gravity and of planetary motion then Halley cares not why-he is a happy astronomer! And with Flamsteed around to depress the statistics, we need more happiness in the astronomical profession.”
In anno domini 1674, the Sieur de St. Pierre (a French courtier, never mind the details) had been at some excellent Royal soiree when Louise de Keroualle and her cleavage had hove into view above the rim of his goblet. Like most men who found themselves in her presence, the Sieur had been seized by an unaccountable need to impress her, somehow, some way. Knowing that Natural Philosophy was a big deal at the Court of Charles II, he had employed the following gambit: he had remarked that one could solve the problem of finding the Longitude by plotting the motions of the moon against the stars and using the heavens as a big clock. Keroualle had relayed this to the King during some sort of Natural-Philosophic pillow talk, and his majesty had commissioned four Fellows of the Royal Society (the Duke of Gunfleet, Roger Comstock, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren) to find out if such a thing were really possible. They had asked one John Flamsteed. Flamsteed was the same age as Daniel. Too sickly to attend school, he had stayed home and taught himself astronomy. Later his health had improved to the point where he’d been able to attend Cambridge and learn what could be taught there, which was not much, at the time. When he had received this inquiry from the aforementioned four Fellows of the Royal Society, he had been just finishing up his studies, and looking for something to do. He had shrewdly written back saying that the proposal of the Sieur de St. Pierre, though it might be possible in theory, was perfectly absurd in practice, owing to a want of reliable astronomical data- which could only be remedied by a lengthy and expensive research program.It was the first and the last politic thing that Flamsteed had ever done. Without delay Charles II had appointed him Astronomer Royal and founded the Royal Observatory.
Flamsteed’s temporary quarters, for the first couple of years, were in the Tower of London, atop the round turret of the White Tower. He made his first observations there while a permanent facility was being constructed on a patch of disused royal property at Greenwich.
Henry VIII, not satisfied with six wives, had maintained any number of mistresses, storing them, when not in use, in a sort of bolt-hole on the top of a hill above Greenwich Palace. His successors had not shared his appetites, and so the royal fuck-house had largely fallen into ruin. The foundations, however, were still sound. Atop them, Wren and Hooke, working in a hurry, and on a tiny budget, had built some apartments, which served as plinth for an octagonal salt-box. Atop that was a turret, an allusion in miniature to the Norman turrets of the Tower of London. The apartments were for Flamsteed to live in. The octagon above was constructed essentially so that the court-fop contingent of the Royal Society would have a place to go and peer learnedly through telescopes. But because it had been built on the foundations of Henry VIII’s hilltop love shack, the whole building was oriented the wrong way. To make real observations, it had been necessary to construct an alienated limestone wall in the garden out back, oriented north-south. This was partly sheltered by a sort of roofless shack. Bolted to it were a pair of Hooke-designed quadrants, one looking north and the other looking south, each equipped with a sighting-tube. Flamsteed’s life, thereafter, consisted of sleeping all day, then going out at night, leaning against this wall, peering through the sighting-tubes at stars swinging past, and noting their positions. Every few years, the work was enlivened by the appearance of a comet.
“What was Newton doing one year ago, Daniel?”
“Sources tell me he was calculating the precise date and hour of the Apocalypse, based upon occult shreds of data from the Bible.”
“We must have the same sources,” Roger said agreeably. “How much do you pay them?”
“I say things to them in return. It is called having conversations, and for some it is payment enough.”
“You must be right, Daniel. For, several months ago, Halley shows up and has a conversation with Newton: ‘Say, old chap, what about comets?’ And Newton drops the Apocalypse and turns to Euclid. Within a few months he’s got De Motu out.”
“He worked out most of it in ’79, during his last feud with Hooke,” Daniel said, “and mislaid it, and had to work it out a second time.”
“What-Doctor Waterhouse-do alchemy, the Apocalypse, and the elliptical orbits of heavenly bodies have in common? Other than that Newton is obsessed with all of them.”
Daniel said nothing.
“Anything? Everything? Nothing?”Roger demanded, and slapped the edge of the table. “Is Newton a billiard ball or a comet?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, come here, Daniel,” Roger clucked, going into sudden motion. Rather than standing up first, then walking, he lowered his wig, raised his hindquarters, and lunged off into the crowd like a bull, and in spite of bulk, middle age, gout, and drink, forged a path through the coffee-house faster than Daniel could follow. When Daniel next caught sight of Roger, the Marquis was shouldering his way past a fop. The fop was gripping a wooden implement shaped vaguely like a long-handled flour-scoop, and taking aim at a painted wooden sphere at rest on a green baize firmament. “Behold!” Roger exclaimed, and shoved at the ball with his bare hand. It rolled into another ball and stopped; the second ball rolled away. The fop was gripping his stick with both hands and winding up to break it over Roger’s head, when Roger adroitly turned his back on the table, giving the fop a clear view of his face. The stick fell from the fop’s hands. “Excellent shot, m’Lord,” he began, “though not wholly in line with the spirit or the letter of the rules…”
“I am a Natural Philosopher, and my Rules are the God-given Rules of the Universe, not the arbitrary ones of your insipid sport!” Roger thundered. “The ball transfers its vis viva into another ball, the quantity of motion is conserved, all is more or less orderly.” Roger now opened one hand to reveal that he had snatched another ball. “Or, I may toss it into the air thus-” he did so “-and it describes a Galilean trajectory, a parabola.” The ball plonked down squarely into a mug of chocolate, halfway across the room; its owner recovered quickly, raising the mug to Roger’s health. “But comets adhere to no laws, they come from God only knows where, at unpredictable times, and streak through the cosmos on their own unfathomable trajectories. So, I ask you, Danieclass="underline" Is Newton like a comet? Or, like a billiard ball, is he following some rational trajectory I have not the wit to understand?”