Newton’s Fire

FORTY-NINE
I

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?’

‘He’d have told someone,’ she protested.

‘No,’ insisted Luke. ‘He hated sharing his ideas. Every time he did, it inevitably kicked off some new controversy. With Hooke, with Flamsteed, with Leibniz. Besides, he was head of the Royal Mint, remember? And he believed he’d discovered the philosopher’s stone. Imagine the panic there’d have been if word had got out that the man in that job had discovered how to turn base metals into gold. And when he was dying, he went through everything he’d ever written and made a great bonfire of all the papers he didn’t want outliving him. No one knows what they were, but I’ll bet they were about the Ark, about electricity. He’d have been terrified of people using them to trash his reputation and denounce him as a sorcerer and a heretic.’

‘But he missed two sets of the papers,’ murmured Rachel, finally coming around. ‘And Jay found the first in Jerusalem.’

‘And I found the second in your aunt’s attic.’ He checked the Ark. Its lid looked like solid gold, but it wasn’t heavy enough for that, so it was presumably wood covered by gold leaf. Rachel helped him remove it and set it down on the floor. Then they both looked inside.

‘What the hell?’ muttered Rachel.

But Luke only nodded. It was much as the schematic depicted: a honeycomb of cells separated by wooden panels and fibreglass mats. A lead coil stood on its side in each compartment. He picked one up. Not pure lead but an alloy formed into a thin grid then stuffed with metallic paste and covered with cloth before being rolled. He peered down into the vacant bay. A sheet of wood riven by filaments of gold lay a few inches down, hinting at a second and maybe even a third layer of cells beneath.

‘How does it work?’ asked Rachel.

Luke returned the coil to its berth. He put his finger and thumb on it and its neighbour. ‘Each of these pairs form a single electric cell,’ he said. ‘Combine them with other cells and you have a battery.’ It was actually how batteries had got their name, because they worked so much more effectively in parallel, like cannon. ‘Twenty cells on top. At least twenty more beneath. That’s forty minimum, maybe sixty.’

‘Enough to kill a turkey?’

‘God, yes. And see these mats? Fibreglass is porous enough to allow liquid to seep through.’

A wry smile. ‘So Newton had fibreglass now?’

Luke nodded at the oak chests. ‘There are lots of linen sheets in there. They’d have worked fine. But acid degrades linen pretty quickly, so Jay must have used Newton’s specs to create modern versions of everything. New coils, new dividers, fresh chemicals. But the wiring is all Newton’s.’

‘Wiring?’ frowned Rachel.

‘Wood doesn’t conduct electricity. Gold is about the best conductor there is. Put the two together and you’ve got wiring.’ He patted the sides of the Ark. ‘I’ll bet there’s more inside these walls.’

‘What does it do?’

‘I don’t know. I’d have to strip it down.’

Rachel touched her forehead, as if she had a headache coming on. ‘You must have some idea.’

‘I know how to start it,’ he said. ‘Just pour in sulphuric acid and distilled water and then turn on this electric motor.’ He kicked it with his foot.

‘The Ark won’t generate its own power?’

‘Capacitors and batteries are typically storage devices, not generators. Newton would have used some kind of friction machine. He had this saying as an old man: if you want to keep your legs, you have to use your legs. So maybe he invented the treadmill or the exercise bike; I wouldn’t have put it past him.’ He frowned, developing a headache of his own now. And each breath was taking more effort. ‘Oh, hell,’ he said, when he realized the implication. ‘They’ve turned off our air.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They can depressurize back here. They must be doing it now.’

‘No!’ cried Rachel. ‘What’ll happen?’

‘I don’t know. Altitude sickness, I guess. Headaches. Nausea. Unconsciousness.’

She gave him a fierce look. ‘Death?’

He felt wretched. He wanted to comfort her. But she deserved the truth. ‘Eventually,’ he said.

‘We have to fight back,’ she said grimly. ‘How can we fight back, Luke?’

He placed his hand on the Ark. ‘This is a weapon, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I think it’s time we found out what it can do.’