here, I see,” Dee observed. Stephen Batman, chaplain to the Master of Corpus Christi, was Dee’s greatest rival as a book-collector, although his interest in the manuscripts he accumulated was more antiquarian than utilitarian.
“Who’s that boy beside him?” Thomas asked.
“That’s one of Nick Bacon’s sons,” Drake answered. “Young Francis—a prodigy, they say, likely to eclipse Master Dee himself, in time.”
“Not if the Queen Jane makes a successful ascent into the ether,” Thomas opined. “Whether it is able to go on to the moon or not, that achievement will not be eclipsed for a hundred years...and Master Dee is its architect.” He added the last remark lest Drake—or anyone else—thought that he was blowing his own trumpet.
“Here she comes!” Raleigh crowed, immediately joining in with the tumultuous cheering. Everyone else did likewise, in slightly less Stentorian tones—even John Field.
Queen Jane’ carriage, pulled by four black horses, rattled southeastwards along the Thames shore behind the vanguard of a company of cavalry, whose second cohort was bringing up the rear. Their scarlet coats were ablaze in the morning sun, while their polished sabers reflected random rays of dazzling light.
Foxe and Dee hurried forward to greet the monarch, while de Vere checked his doublet and hose and Raleigh reached reflexively for the ornamental hilt of the sword that he would normally have been wearing. Like his breakfast ale, it had been forbidden.
The queen was only a few months short of her fortieth birthday, but she looked radiant as well as regal. Thomas blushed at the sight of her, as he always did, and stumbled as Dee hurried him forward in order to present him to her.
“Your majesty,” the Master said. “Leonard Digges’ son shall make England proud this day.”
Queen Jane extended her hand for Thomas to kiss. “The captain will make us very proud indeed,” she said, “for there is nothing England admires more than courage—and the navigation of the heavens will require courage unparalleled.”
Thomas stammered his thanks. The cavalry had formed a protective cordon around the party, although it was more a show of discipline than anxiety; the Elizabethans were a spent force nowadays, and no agent of Spain could have got within five miles of Greenwich on a day like this. Drake, de Vere and Raleigh took the opportunity to form a cordon of their own, vying for the queen’s attention with effusive flatteries. For once, Thomas felt a pang of sympathy for the awkward and hesitant Field.
“Time is pressing, lads,” he said, when they had played their parts sufficiently. “We’d best be mounting the ladder.” Without any more fuss than that he set off for the ethership, knowing that the others would fall into line behind him. He left it to them to wave to the crowd, while he contented himself with a last glance in the direction of John Dee, the greatest man of science the world had ever produced—or, at least, the man whose reputation to that effect was about to be subjected to the ultimate proof.
CHAPTER TWO
The first and more unexpected agony was the sound of the rocket’s ignition. Thomas had known that it would be louder than any sound he had experienced before, and had suspected that its pressure might be oppressive, but he had not anticipated the seeming fury with which it pounded his eardrums, drowning out all other sensation and thought.
Then affinity took hold of him—or, more accurately, the rising ethership slammed into his back, while the affinity that bound him to the Earth fought against the force of the rocket’s explosive levitation, trying with all its might to hold him down. He had known that this sensation, too, would be bad, having experienced similar phenomena during the test launches. Those vessels had only ascended into the atmosphere, though, no higher that the summit of a mountain. His body had suffered no lingering ill-effects at all—but this pressure was twice as powerful, and he felt that it was crushing him.
Thomas heard a gasp as Field tried and failed to scream; the clergyman was the only crew member who had not taken any part in the testing program. The scientist could imagine the thought that must be possessing the Puritan’s brain: if God had made the affinity between man and Earth so strong, how could he possibly intend that men should ever attempt to break the bond? But the pressure passed, to be gradually replaced by a very different sensation: that of weightlessness. Thomas had a fine mathematical brain—near equal to his father’s, Dee said—and he had long applied his methods to the artillerist’s art of ballistics; he constructed a picture in his mind of the trajectory of the rocket as it curved away from the ground it had left behind, aiming for a circular orbit about its world.
Only a handful of men as yet, had circumnavigated the globe in ships, and none of them was an Englishman—although Drake had sworn that if he had not been invited to take his place on the Queen Jane he would have made the attempt in the Pelican. Now, five Englishmen were about to circle the world not once but several times, in a matter of hours rather than months.
“Make sure your tethers are secure, lads,” he said—for Field’s benefit rather than that of his experienced crewmen. “Cleave to your couches if you can, and take care not to release anything into the cabin.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said de Vere, with a slight hint of mockery—but Thomas ignored him.
“Ready, Sir Francis?” he said.
“Aye, Tom,” was Drake’s entirely sincere reply. Drake had to supervise the course of the ethership while Thomas deployed the sampling bottles mounted to collect the pure ether that would soon be surrounding the ship, using mechanical arms to maneuver them into double-doored lockers. From there, if all went well, they could be brought inside without breaching the integrity of the hull. Thomas worked unhurriedly, but not without urgency; Drake was equally concentrated on his work.
Raleigh was closest to a porthole; he was looking out with avid interest, watching the curve of the globe’s horizon.
“I can’t see England at all, curse the clouds!” he said, “but I can see a landmass that must be Africa, and more ocean than I ever hoped to see in a lifetime. The mystery of the Austral continent will soon be solved—or perhaps we’ll see Dante’s purgatory, towering above the ocean hemisphere in solitary splendor.”
“Papist nonsense,” muttered Field, who sounded as if he had spent a stint in Purgatory himself.
“Thank the Lord we have not collided with one of the Romanists’ crystal spheres,” Raleigh said, mischievously. “That would have been cause enough for protest.”
“Nor can I see Plato’s spindle of necessity,” de Vere put in, craning his neck to see through another porthole. “Does anyone hear the sirens intoning the music of the spheres?”
“We’re not as high as all that,” Thomas said, without breaking his concentration. “The planets are a great deal further away than the moon, which is still a long way off. The first of the Classic philosophers’ questions to be settled is the nature of space. If the void theorists are right, ours will have to be a brief excursion.”
“Now there,” observed de Vere, “Puritans and Papists are in rare accord. There’s not an atomist in either orthodox company—they’re plenarists all, save for the occasional rogue. Remind me, please, Reverend Field: is it still orthodox to believe that the ether marking the extent of space is the breath of God?” Whatever his faults, de Vere had been well-tutored in Classics by Arthur Golding; he knew that the notion of gods breathing ether as humans breathed air was a pagan idea, of which Christian theology was bound to disapprove, in spite of the
