Newton’s Fire

III

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?’