A Star Shall Fall

A STAR SHALL FALL

PROLOGUE

Gresham College, London: June 20, 1705

The room was a shabby one to contain the intellectual brilliance of England. Small and scant of windows, it was nearly unbearable in the warmth of an early summer day, and filled with gentlemen looking forward to the pleasanter air of their country estates, away from the stinks of London. Some listened with interest to the letters being read, an exchange between two of their fellows regarding the island of Formosa; others fanned themselves futilely with what ever papers came to hand, wishing they dared nod off. But the gimlet eye of their president was upon them, and though Sir Isaac Newton might be more than sixty years old, age had not slowed him in the least, nor dulled the sharp edge of his tongue.

They gave an impression of agreeable uniformity in their somber-colored coats, so very different from the young gallants of London’s beau monde who took every opportunity to quarrel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nullius in verba was their motto: on the words of no one. This was the temple of facts, of careful observation and even more careful reasoning; the men of the Royal Society of London, the premier scientific body of the Kingdom of En gland, were no respecters of ancient authority. They respected only Truth. And when they found themselves in disagreement as to what that Truth was, their arguments could grow very heated indeed.

But there was little to argue in the second piece of that day’s business, presented by Oxford’s new Savilian Professor of Astronomy. In all honesty, hardly any men there had the capacity to debate it; the proof hinged on Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which fewer of them understood than pretended to. Edmond Halley’s calculus therefore meant little to them. The fundamental point, however, was clear.

The orbit of a comet was not a parabola, but an ellipsis. And that meant that a comet, having departed from view, would in the fullness of time return.

A point that held rather a high degree of interest for two members of Halley’s audience.

“The measure ments made by Flamsteed at Greenwich in 1682 are exceptionally precise,” the professor said, with a nod that acknowledged the contributions of the absent Astronomer Royal. “They provide us with a basis for examining the less- precise accounts of cometary apparitions in the past— 1607, 1531, 1456, and so on.”

Back to the days of the Stuart kings, and the Tudors, and the
Lancastrians. Many here today remembered the comet twenty- three
years before, but a man’s beard would have to be gray indeed for him to have seen any of the others Halley named.

The one member of his audience who could claim that distinction had no beard at all.

From: A STAR SHALL FALL by Marie Brennan, copyright © 2010 by the author, and reprinted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.