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'Better have a few nuts before I finish them. Once I start eating nuts it's impossible to stop
me. Primeval instinct from ancient days in the forest, I suppose. What action have you in
mind?'
'We need the heavies taken off our backs. Otherwise, they'll become a serious nuisance, or
worse. Somebody has been pressuring both the Research Council and the police. I've had
lawyers waving documents, trying to seize the tapes and disks carrying the signals, and my
office has been gone through by the itchy fingers of some agency or other, an agency under
your own ultimate control, Prime Minister.'
'Why would Intelligence be interested in comets?'
'Why wouldn't they? Anything unusual and you always have
Intelligence sniffing around,' observed the Chancellor, still without bothering to look up from
his reading.
'If, as a member of an intelligence agency, you happen to think the signals come from a
satellite instead of from the comet, consider the conclusions you reach, Prime Minister,'
Isaac Newton began. 'If you're American, you think the Russians have made a breakthrough,
and you want to know about it. If you're Russian, you think the Americans have made a
breakthrough and you want to know about it. If you're British, you think somebody or other
has made a breakthrough and you still want to know about it. It's like a pot of honey to bees,
or to bears, or to whatever. As it happens, I'm serious about it, to the extent that over the
past fortnight I haven't slept twice in the same place. My movements have had a sort of
random pattern, because I happen to know that intelligence agents don't like that sort of
thing. A bit like the thrush to the sparrowhawk.'
'I don't see the connection.'
'When a sparrowhawk hovers overhead, birds panic and those that fly away desperately
looking for shelter often get picked off in midair. But the thrush stays on the ground out in the
open, running a random pattern, daring the hawk to dive. Which it doesn't because it would
bash itself into the ground if it did. The tactic is good, but after a while it gets a bit
wearisome.'
'So you want me to do some leaning?'
'If we're to have a chance of deciphering the signals, yes.'
'For my money you can put all the heavies in a big black bag and drop the lot of them into
the sea,' observed the Chancellor, still without looking up from his reading.
'You do have the money, Godfrey,' the Prime Minister returned immediately.
'I may have the money at the moment, but I won't have it for long, not after all the suppliant
hands have reached into the till.'
'We're haggling over the budget,' the Prime Minister explained, taking another fistful of nuts.
'The big spenders are all coming in tomorrow morning. We're going to have a big-spenders
evening and dinner tomorrow night. You'll be staying?'
'I'd like to leave Sunday morning and I'd like to ask for a car to Heathrow. If possible, I want
to leave mine here, you see, because it would be harder to tamper with.'
'Seriously?'
'Yes, seriously.'
'Give me a week and I'll nail the lot of them, from the Research Council upwards,' the Prime
Minister said firmly, adding, 'How's the
reading coming on, Godfrey?'
'Fascinating. Could I have another drink please? It needs strong medicine to read your stuff,
Professor Newton.'
The following morning, the Chancellor suggested a walk, the 'Aldbury Round' he called it. He
and Isaac Newton drove through the small town of Wendover.
'Your family came from here?' Isaac Newton asked.
'Yes, back in the eleventh century, although it's pretty scattered by now, of course. And
yours?'
'Oh, I'm a creature of geology,' was Isaac Newton's reply.
'Sounds very mysterious.'
'It's not really. You see about four hundred million years ago, when most of the British Isles
was under the sea and Western Europe was somewhere near the equator, the sediments
laid down in the sea happened to be coloured bright red. The grains of sediment then
hardened into a richly-coloured sandstone rock which geologists call Devonian sandstone.'
'I see. So to cut the cackle, you come from Devonshire. I thought you'd a bit of an accent
from that direction.'
'Then, about three hundred million years ago, a spike of granite rocks pushed its way up
through the red sandstone, and that's the place we call Dartmoor today. Well, if you come
down off Dartmoor on its south-western side, and if you notice the first few miles after you
reach the red rocks, that's where I come from - the country near Tavistock. My family have
been farmers there for a long time, centuries, I suppose.'
'What does your family think about it? Your being a scientist, I mean.'
'They think it's madness, and that no good at all will come of it.'
'Do you ever go back there?'
'Sometimes. I'm still enough of a Devon man to fight anybody who won't admit it to be the
best county in England, and I'll fight anybody there who won't admit Tavistock to be the best
town in Devon.'
They parked in Aldbury village, with the Chancellor saying, 'We can pick up a beer and a
sandwich at the pub here when we get back from the walk. It's about four miles. By the way,
you may have saved me a lot of money.'
'How's that?' asked Isaac Newton.
As they began to climb a little through woods the Chancellor continued:
'Your memorandum on those cometary signals set me thinking.
Let's begin by supposing that you're wrong. Suppose the signals didn't come from the
comet. Suppose they came from a military satellite. Then we're at the beginning of a new
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