Will Adams - Newton’s Fire

‘We can cover up your exposed skin.’

‘We can cover up your exposed skin.’

‘That wasn’t a request,’ said Croke. ‘That was an order.’

‘Stuff it up your arse.’

‘Jesus!’ said Manfredo, arriving with Vig at that moment. ‘What happened?

‘They’re in there,’ said Croke, nodding at the door. ‘Go get them.’

‘No need,’ said Vig. ‘Easier just to lock them in, then depressurize. We’ll starve them of air in no time.’

Croke frowned. ‘We can do that from out here?’

Vig nodded. ‘Sure. It’s all controlled from the cockpit.’

‘What about breathing masks? Won’t they drop down?’

‘We stripped them out last year,’ said Vig. ‘It was too much grief having them deploy every time we depressurized. Anyone who wants air back there has to take it in themselves.’

‘And we have enough time before we land?’

Vig shrugged. ‘You don’t want to hurry something like this, not at thirty thousand. It risks all kinds of shit. But we can still make it nasty back there pretty damn quick. Ten minutes and they’ll be struggling. Fifteen and they’ll be unconscious. Twenty and they’ll be dead. Then we close the vents, pump some air back in, open the door and dump them during our approach. ’ He gave Walters a prod with his foot. ‘But we’ll need to start now.’

Croke nodded. ‘Then get busy,’ he said.

Compared to the main cabin, the cargo hold was all functionality. There were bench seats along either side, but they were folded up to make room for the Ark, the chests, assorted luggage and the pallets of supplies. Luke tried the chests first. The end panel of the largest had been removed, leaving its innards exposed; but there was nothing inside. He tried the two smaller ones next. The first contained vestments, including the robe Jay had held up earlier; the second contained some old bottles of liquid, some thin squares of wood and sheets of white linen along with dented and misshapen coils of some soft, grey metal, probably lead to judge from their weight.

A tarpaulin near the tail had been folded back over itself. The shape beneath was unmistakeable. Luke felt a mix of grief and anger as he pulled it back. He’d already braced himself to find Jay dead, but not for the blotching of his skin or the broken, torn fingernails, nor for the blue strapping around his throat. He couldn’t leave him with that grotesque garrotte, so he found a box-cutter by the pallets and cut it away before folding Jay back beneath his shroud. Then he rummaged fruitlessly through the suitcases and the overhead lockers, finding nothing but blankets and life-jackets.

‘Was that Jay?’ asked Rachel, when he rejoined her.

‘Yes.’

She touched his forearm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

Some kind of plan or chart was unrolled beside the Ark, its corners pinned down by bottles. Luke crouched to study it. It proved to be a schematic with a photograph of a Newton text clipped to a corner. Luke freed the photograph and took it to better light. There were ghostly lines beneath Newton’s handwriting, very similar to those in the larger schematic. The implication was clear. The great man had drawn the schematic himself, then he’d erased it and reused the paper for a religious text. Jay must have spotted the faint traces in Jerusalem, enhanced them with modern photographic techniques, then recreated this larger, cleaner version. It showed the Ark from front and side and top, and not as a religious relic, but as some kind of machine. No wonder Jay and his uncle had got so excited. No wonder they’d resolved to double-check every known Newton paper, and find all the missing ones too. He looked at Rachel. ‘Nikola Tesla,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘What about him?’

‘Jay had a picture of him on his wall. And I studied him as an undergraduate. Your archetypal crackpot inventor. Bankrupted himself trying to invent an electrical super-weapon. He claimed that it would make whole armies drop dead in their tracks.’ He put his hand on the Ark. ‘The thing is, it’s possible he got the idea from this. There’s this bizarre paper he wrote, claiming that the Ark wasn’t a religious artefact at all, but rather an incredibly powerful capacitor.’

‘A what?’

‘A capacitor. It’s a device that can hold a huge electrical charge. Like a battery, except designed to discharge in a single great jolt, like thunderclouds in a storm. That’s what would have made it so lethal.’

‘The ancients didn’t have that kind of technology,’ said Rachel. ‘We’d have found evidence if they had.’

‘What else are your Baghdad batteries?’ asked Luke. ‘It’s the same basic principle, only taken up a few notches. Anyway, I’m not saying he was right. All I’m saying is that maybe Newton came to the same conclusion: that the Ark was some kind of super-weapon, just as the Bible describes. An alchemical super-weapon. Because gold wasn’t merely a metal to people like Newton, remember. It wasn’t even primarily a metal. It was a symbol . It symbolized the sun. It symbolized light. It symbolized the sacred fire itself, which Newton believed was electricity. And what was alchemy, after all? At its simplest, what was its purpose?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘I guess to turn base metal into gold.’

‘Not quite,’ said Luke. ‘It was to turn base metal into gold by treating it with sulphuric acid . And if gold was really light , if gold was really electricity , doesn’t that pretty much describe a lead battery?’

Rachel stared at Luke as if he was crazy. ‘A lead battery? You’re not serious?’

‘Why not?’ said Luke. ‘Forget about what the Ark really was, or whether it even existed. That doesn’t matter, not for this. All that matters is what Newton believed it to be. And Newton believed that Moses had been a great alchemist, one with access to all kinds of lost knowledge. So of course Moses would have known the secret of sacred fire; of course he’d have harnessed it in his Ark. And Newton saw himself as Moses’ successor, so of course he’d have set himself to rediscover those secrets, of course he’d have wanted to create his own Ark. And then Ashmole and Wren showed him the panels of wood and the twelve stones for the high priest’s robes and maybe some crude instructions for a Baghdad battery that Tradescant had picked up on his travels. It must have felt like destiny.’

‘But electricity was a nineteenth century technology, wasn’t it?’ frowned Rachel. ‘I know Newton experimented with it, but surely a device like this was way beyond even him.’

‘Van Musschenbroek invented Leyden jars a couple of decades after Newton,’ said Luke. ‘He coated the inside and outside of a bottle with foil to create positive and negative plates, then he put a metal rod inside them and generated a charge by rubbing glass with silk. They could knock a man out cold. Benjamin Franklin recommended them for killing turkeys.’

‘Killing turkeys isn’t destroying armies.’

‘Van Musschenbroek wasn’t Newton.’ It hadn’t just been his intellectual prowess that had set Newton apart. He’d also been a fantastically talented craftsman. Sightseers had travelled miles to see his childhood contraptions; and it had been his reflecting telescope, rather than his theories, that had first won him election to the Royal Society. ‘All that effort working out the length of the sacred cubit. Who cares if the Temple’s out by a foot or two? But the Ark was measured in cubits too. Electrical equipment has to be perfect.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Think about it: the greatest mind in scientific history working flat out on a single problem for twenty years. Would you honestly bet against him having come up with something of enormous power and originality?’