A Calculus of Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

they settled them back down, however, Robert looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think there is a king, anymore? Do you think he might have escaped?”
    Ben resisted frowning. He would rather discuss more pleasant things, but he had started it with his thoughtless toast. He shrugged, hoping Robert might think his blunder a sardonic jest. “It depends upon how convincing Heath and Voltaire were. I wouldn’t bet a single crown upon it.”
    “Well,” Robert said, “well… let’s just drink to England, for even without London there must be Englishmen, and as there are Englishmen, there is England.”
    “Hear, hear,” Ben agreed, but his heart wasn’t really in it. It always felt as if his chest were stuffed with thistles when the subject of London came up.
    “So what will you do with these magic shoes of yours?” Robert asked, probably to change the subject.
    “I will present several pair of them to the emperor and his daughters for their amusement. Perhaps he will not have my eyes put out.”
    Robert shrugged his shoulders and gestured with one hand, like a dandy indicating a painting. “If they did, ya would have only the challenge of inventing a new pair’t‘ see with.” He glanced again at the table, as if looking through it to Ben’s feet. “Is Sir Isaac pleased?”
    “Pleased? With the shoes? No, he thinks my continued experiments with affinity a useless divertissement. I must work on such things in my spare time.”
    “That provokes you,” Robert observed.
    “Dogs and damsels, yes, it provokes me!” Ben agreed, following his words with a substantial quaff of his beer. “He’s at work on some New System of his—biblical stuff with angels and such—while I’m left to keep the emperor happy.”
    He considered for a moment. “Not a bad job all in all—it keeps us in high style A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    —but it’s not practical. Who knows when another comet may be called upon our heads?”
    “Wouldn’t the airy shield around the city stop it?”
    Ben shook his head. “No, that’s just an aegis built large. We should have written a real countermeasure two years ago. The thing you have to know about Newton is that he does not care about the useful, only about philosophizing. His research is directed not by what might produce something good, but by impulses of—of I know not what. He seeks to understand God’s universe, to know its depths. Not for me or you or Prague or even England, but for himself. Because he thus believes to curry God’s favor.”
    He finished his beer and called for another.
    “And what make you of all of this, then?” Robert asked.
    Ben was silent for a moment, and then he smiled and lifted his mug. “I make I’m being too serious about it all. Let’s just drink and be merry.”
    Robert shook his head. “This is not the same lad I met just come from Boston.”
    “Nor is it the same world we live in,” Ben rejoined. “Our wonderful new age has come, and so let us enjoy it.”
    The two men emerged from the Vulture an hour and a half later, several pints heavier, their moods and feet much lighter.
    “We’d best walk this off,” Robert suggested, “else the emperor might notice that the apprentice has some sway in his stance.”
    “He will be so pleased by his new toy that he will not care if I vomit on his rug,”
    Ben scoffed. “Especially when he discovers that I’m having one of his boats fitted to operate thus. Can you imagine what speeds a seagoing craft might travel with no resisting friction from the water?”
    “With no ports he’d have little account to test such a craft. Best you build a rowboat, unless you can make such as the fairy tales tell of, that sails both land A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    and sea.”
    “That has more difficulties involved,” Ben said. “Water is simpler than soil.”
    He cocked his head. “But I shall think on it.”
    “What of the aerial ship by which we arrived here? Could you not combine the two?”
    Ben shrugged.