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at them, too, shaking his head as they started up the stairs.
    “I don’t know as I should show out an‘ you’ve been doin’,” he said, more softly than his greeting. “These affrighted Catholics might pitch you up and make a torch from you an‘ them.”
    “Let ‘em try,” Ben replied, trying to smooth a wrinkle on his waistcoat with the palm of his hand. “They’ll learn a hard lesson in science from me and a harder one in politics from their emperor. Anyhow, suspicious as these folks are, they know who keeps the Turk from the gate and food in their bellies. Don’t worry about me.”

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    “Never that!” Robert assured him. “I worry about me. How would I explain to Sir Isaac that I, your s‘pposed bodyguard, let his little homunculus end up at the bottom of the Moldau?”
    “If I’m at the bottom of the Moldau, it’ll be to hunt mermaids,” Ben replied.
    They reached the top of the stairs, and Robert started to turn left and cross the bridge.
    “Let’s not go that way,” Ben suggested.
    “Ain’t we goin‘ back to Kleinseit, to Saint Thomas’?”
    “I thought to go to the Vulture,” Ben said.
    “Ain’t you meetin‘ his sirness in three hours?”
    “A few hours is plenty,” Ben replied. “It’ll—eh—give a certain fatherly sort time to calm and quit roaming the streets of Kleinseit.”
    “Indeed? The father of a certain golden-haired lass?”
    “Ockham’s razor,” Ben supplied. “The least complicated answer—”
    “Is the best,” Robert finished. “I saw ya throwin‘ sparks at each other in the square’t’other day.”
    “She has considerable spark,” Ben acknowledged.
    Robert shrugged. “Well, then, to the Vulture and a pint for your adventures.”
    “And to celebrate my new invention,” Ben added. “Then we’re back across the bridge.”
    “A pint,” Robert agreed, turned right onto Charles Way, and began to walk into the Old Town.

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    Ben loved the Old Town. Across the river in Kleinseit and Hradcany there were castles and palaces, pomp and splendor. In Old Town there was life. The streets
    —even Charles Way, a central thoroughfare—were narrow, darkened by several stories of buildings on each side. And such buildings! Medieval edifices like the tower of the bridge behind them, brooding and black. The strong heaven-seeking arches and spires of gothic cathedrals and state buildings, scrolled and ornamented baroque houses from the last century. It was like something from a fairy tale—from all fairy tales—and it was nothing at all like Boston, where he had been born and where nothing was even a hundred years old. Prague was a city with its foundations sunk nearer the creation, the memories of a thousand generations in its walls and streets. Even London had never struck him in this way, for the core of London had been gutted by fire and rebuilt according to scientific plan, a vast structure designed by a single architect, Sir Christopher Wren. It had been modern, not a hodgepodge from every human age.
    But, of course, London was dust. It was worse than dust, and with very few exceptions, everyone who had ever lived there was dead. Like the blotted sun, that too was his fault.
    London was gone, but Prague he would save.
    They went on, past the Italian Chapel, past the Golden Serpent and its fountain of red wine, out into the Old Town square. Just as they arrived, the clock began to toll, and Ben quickened his steps.
    “Now what’s your hurry?” Robert asked.
    Ben didn’t answer, instead skirting to the opposite side of the Old Town Hall, so he could see the clock.
    It was a magnificent creation. Dancing its minuet of brass and time, it displayed not only the hour and minute, but the movements of the spheres. As it tolled, Jesus and his apostles shuffled behind small windows, bowing to the watching square before receding into the mechanical labyrinth where they dwelt.
    “I should think such frippery would not impress