Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

He looked, and looked again. “I thought to see essays concerning the traditional studies. But here you appear to be working with the new fluxions.”

“Yes!” The dead voice suddenly came to life and gray eyes, clear and sparkling, met Darwin’s for the first time. “You know those methods?”

“I will claim familiarity, but not mastery. In my day here, a knowledge of the calculus was considered to be at the outer limit of human understanding. Yet I assume that it is the same as every area of human effort; there must have been progress in the past twenty years.”

“Enormous progress.” Thomas Selfridge so far forgot his nervousness as to come over to stand at Darwin’s side. “There is the Swiss genius, Monsieur Euler. I have written to him, and he to me. His new symbols, notation, and inspired analyses clarify the previously obscure and make possible vast new advances.”

“Beyond those of the immortal Isaac?”

“Beyond even Newton.” Selfridge went to the desk and picked up four sheets of paper. “Pray do not misunderstand me, Dr. Darwin. Sir Isaac remains the supreme scientific genius of this or any other era, and it is a mark of his unparalleled abilities that he was able to accomplish his feats without either the science of infinitesimals, or an easy or flexible notation. He made use of geometric tools so unwieldy that no other man could lift them, and still he accomplished miracles. But see here. This is Newton’s analysis of cometary motion, just as he developed it by geometric methods. And here — less than one-third the length — is my own proof of the same results, carried out with the aid of the calculus.”

“Impressive indeed.” Darwin examined both sets of pages carefully. “This first sheet appears to be very old. May I ask where you obtained what appear to be Sir Isaac Newton’s own notes?”

It was as though he had struck Selfridge in the face. The other flinched, turned pale, and took a step backward. He said nothing, until Darwin was at last forced to repeat, “Come, now, where? I have no thought to trick or trap you. You are a student, and clearly a most talented and dedicated one. But it is unusual for an undergraduate to be able to acquire such a page, even if it is only a fair copy, written in Sir Isaac’s own hand.”

Selfridge walked to the chair in front of his desk and sank down onto it as though his legs refused to support him. “I obtained it, and many others, from Dr. Barton,” he said in a weak, husky voice.

“I believe you. He was your tutor; it is entirely reasonable that he should assist you in your studies.”

“But I swear that I know nothing about his death.”

“It is about his life that I would like to ask you.”

“I know little.”

“More, perhaps, than you realize. For instance, you tell me that you obtained the Newton papers from Dr. Barton. Did he tell you how he came by them?”

“It was in a sense at my request. When first I came to St. John’s, close to two years ago, I knew no one. However, Dr. Barton was named as my tutor. I was assigned this room, just above his, and we spoke every week or two of the usual assignments of the undergraduate curriculum. In truth, those studies interested me little, and I performed indifferently well. But one day as I was leaving his tutorial he asked me what, given complete freedom, I would choose to study. I told him of my ambition, which I had formed when I was just sixteen years old; I wished to learn the most modern mathematical methods of analysis, now under development on the Continent, and make them a standard part of the English arsenal of analytical weapons. I am afraid that I was so presumptuous as to suggest that Cambridge, which I perceived as locked into the notation and notions of Newton, was in danger of becoming a backwater of mathematics.”

“Presumptuous indeed, to criticize Newton here, of all places, where he developed his great System of the World and wrote the Principia. But all advances begin life as some form of heresy. How did Elias Barton respond to you?”

“He laughed. He asked me if I had studied Newton’s works as Newton himself wrote them, and not in the contaminations and abridgements of lesser minds. And I was forced to concede that I had not. Such source materials were unavailable to me back home in Devon. I thought that was the end of the matter. But some months later, perhaps a year ago, Dr. Barton stopped me as I ascended to my room and said that he had something to show me. What you are holding formed a small part of it. It was works of Newton, written in the master’s own hand. Great as Newton was, Dr. Barton informed me, he was in the habit of making fair copies of his own and other people’s works.”

“Do you know how they were obtained?”