"MAY I ASSIST YOU carrying one of those tomes, Mr. Halley?"

"Daniel! An unexpected pleasure! I can manage, thank you, but you may assist by telling me in which of these rooms I might find Mr. Pepys."

"Follow me. He is meeting with one Cabal or other at the end of the opposite wing."

"Ah, then wait with me while I rest my arms."

"Are these for his book collection?"

"These are money."

"On the pages I see numbers. Rumor has had it, Mr. Halley, that you have hired up every computer on this island, and set them to a great work. Now I see the rumors were true."

"These are only the first fruits of their lucubrations—I have brought them up, at the request of Mr. Pepys, to show them as a sort of demo'."

"Why do you say that they are money? To me they could be sines and cosines."

"These are actuarial tables, a sort of extract or distillation from the records of births and deaths of every parish in England. Supplied with these data the Exchequer can raise capital by selling annuities to the general public; and if they sell enough of them, why, the law of averages dictates that they will make a profit without fail!"

"What, by gambling that their customers will die?"

"That is no gamble, Dr. Waterhouse."

"SAFE JOURNEY TO OATES; I shall see you there on the morrow, Mr. Locke."

"You may expect nothing but the warmest hospitality from the Mashams. From Newton you may expect—"

"You forget I have known him for thirty years."

"Right."

"…"

"I can only guess what machinations you are about, Mr. Waterhouse. But I admit that I shall look forward to your arrival and that I shall feel a weight lifted when you arrive."

"Why, Mr. Locke, what weighs 'pon you?"

"Newton is unwell."

"Love-sick?"

"That is the least of his ailments."

"I shall be there soon, Mr. Locke, with what feeble medicine I may proffer."

"MR. WATERHOUSE, MY SCHEDULE IS a monolith, seamless and unbroken. Except for piss-breaks. Shall we?"

"As I need hardly explain to you of all men, Mr. Pepys, nothing now gives me greater satisfaction than pissing—but to piss with you, sir, would be to compound honor with pleasure."

"Let us then leave the company of these fellows who know not what it signifies, and go piss in each other's company."

"If it would please you to turn to your right out this door, Mr. Pepys, you shall come in view of a garden wall that, earlier, I was sizing up as—"

"Say no more, Mr. Waterhouse, 'tis a magnificent wall, well-proportioned, secluded, admirably made for our usage."

"…"

"I say, Mr. Waterhouse, have you been buying your breeches from Turks?"

"I am a man of almost fifty, sir, and am permitted a small repertoire of eccentricities. As pissing gives me so much pleasure I will brook no interference from my clothing—I'll have my yard out smartly and be finished with my work while you are still fumbling with buttons and clasps."

"Not so, sir, I am only moments behind you."

"…"

"Makes you want to sing hymns, eh?"

"I do, sometimes."

"Word has reached me that you are off to visit Newton tomorrow. I wonder if he has an answer for me on my lottery question."

"Another way of raising money?"

"Think of it rather as a way for ordinary men to enrich themselves at the (trifling) expense of vast numbers of other ordinary men. Of course the Exchequer will have to collect a small rake-off for overhead."

"Of course. Mr. Pepys, when we got the Royal Society going, never did I dream you would find such uses for the knowledge it would generate."

"That is the rub—the lottery is a game of chance, and will founder unless we get the mathematicks just so. I have brought in Newton as a consultant."

"No harm in going straight to the top."

"But he seems to be up to too many other things, Mr. Waterhouse, for he rarely answers my letters, and when he does, he does not discourse on probability but rather accuses me of being in league with Jesuits, or of setting fire to his laboratory…"

"Stay. Everyone who has spoken to me concerning Newton in the last few days has employed euphemisms and circumlocutions meant to suggest that he has gone clean out of his mind."

"I always thought Hooke was our Lunatick in Residence, but lately Newton…"

"Enough. I shall try to get to the bottom of it."

"Right. Now, on your knees, Mr. Waterhouse!"

"I beg your pardon!?"

"Never fear, I shall be joining you in moments…my knees being older work slower…er…ah!…owf. There. Now, let us pray."

"You always say a prayer after you piss?"

"Only after a really first-rate one, or when communing with a fellow sufferer, as now. Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that You shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to Your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun's radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobby stones hidden in our coat-pockets remind us that we are all earth, and that we are sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr. Waterhouse?"

"Only, Amen!"

"Amen. Damn me, I am late for my next conspiracy! Godspeed, Daniel."

For the understanding is by the flame of the passions, never enlightened, but dazzled.

—HOBBES Leviathan

Daniel's first emotion, unexpectedly, was a pang of sympathy for young Dominic Masham. Daniel, too, would have been amazed by what John Locke, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and Isaac Newton were up to at Oates, if he had not been at Epsom during the Plague Year. As it was, the laboratory that those three lonely hereticks had set up on the Masham estate seemed a masque of what Wilkins and Hooke had done as guests of John Comstock.

He had to admit it was a good deal more civilized, though. No dogs were being disembowelled in Lady Masham's out-buildings. Epsom (in retrospect) had grown up, as if by spontaneous generation, out of earth saturated with blood and manured with gunpowder; it had been dominated by elements of earth and water. Oates was like a potted lily brought over from France; it was made of fire and air. And it was all about the search for the fifth element, the quintessence, star-stuff, God's presence on earth. When Dominic Masham took Daniel round the place, the sun was shining on the white-plastered Barock buildings, the roses of late summer were still a-bloom, windows flung open to let fresh air infiltrate the galleries and drawing-rooms, and Daniel could very easily comprehend why a young fellow who knew no better might convince himself that there was a quintessence, that it was everywhere, and especially here, and that men as brilliant as these might reach out and take some of it.

They encountered Fatio posed in the middle of a windowed library, surrounded by Bibles in diverse languages and alphabets. Protogaea had been quarantined on a table in the corner. Fatio was putting on a great show of thinking very hard on something and of not noticing that Daniel had entered the room—in effect daring Daniel to interrupt him, so that he could put on a further show of not minding at all. Daniel had no stomach for the game and so with a silent gesture to Masham he ducked out of the room. For about Fatio was a queer aura of fragility; he seemed stiff and scared as a glass figurine perched too close to an edge.