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status of their father, Vice-Admiral Sir James Haroldsen, was seen officially as appropriate.
It was expected there would also be a small number of political dignitaries, but in a strictly
private capacity which it was hoped would escape the attention of the media. To no avail,
however, for in mid-January the Russians suddenly announced that they would be sending a
delegation, so highly was the matter rated in the Soviet Union, where Politburo members
had staged a seemingly miraculous recovery from the mad itch, dating, it was noticed, from
the moment of Isaac Newton's presentation to the international assembly in Versailles.
The Russian intervention put the occasion immediately into a very different light, for if the
Soviets were to be represented, so must other nations, especially nations in Europe and
North America. In effect, events concerning Comet Halley were beginning already to
assume a legendary quality. From a small family event, the wedding had thus escalated
almost into a state occasion, with the concept of the naval guard now being changed from a
boisterous contribution to a stiff formality in which higher-ranking officers became involved.
The day of the wedding dawned soft and misty with, it seemed, rainbows everywhere.
Arriving early at the church, Isaac Newton and his best man found it to have been decorated
with birch boughs, and of course with large bouquets of the short-stemmed daffodils.
Kurt Waldheim's memories rushed back to his own marriage, not so long ago. This church
at Outerthwaite had been standing just the way it was now for many years. Generation after
generation of the local population had been christened here, had been married and had
died, accompanied by ceremonies of very different kinds, generation after generation going
back in time more than half-way to the days when his own people had emigrated from the
German plain and its northerly borders. The way the media viewed time - down to the last
minute and second - that was ages distant, but viewed in comparison to the years
themselves, measured by the movement of the Earth around the Sun, it was really very
recent.
Isaac Newton's thoughts were on his parents, sitting immediately
behind him in the front row of the assembled congregation. It was a different world for them,
this green Lakeland valley, rising in its length from pastures to rocky, snow-covered heights.
Yet it was not so difficult to exchange the tilled red soil of Devon for the stockman's grassy
hillsides as it would have been to transport themselves into city life. They were work-worn
now, as all farming people become in their sixties, but with the quiet triumph over life of
those who live dose to planet Earth itself. Isaac Newton had often wondered why his parents
had chosen to christen him the way they did. Probably it was to do with something they had
seen or read. For really, you couldn't christen a child Isaac Newton any more than you could
christen a child William Shakespeare.
The bride arrived on her father's arm. As they walked up the aisle, Frances Margaret
wondered why the ceremony had come to seem important to her, when to be frank about it
she'd already been living as married for the past two years. It had to do with being born with
twelve toes, she decided, with solving quadratic equations or whatever at the age of ten or
eleven. People who were born with twelve toes were forced out into the world to join other
people with twelve toes. They formed a community which overcame local prejudices, that
crossed races and creeds, a powerful community which had ultimately accumulated
sufficient knowledge to flash out from the Earth itself to join a still larger universe. Yet it
wasn't a community that was properly self-maintaining. It did not reproduce itself from
generation to generation. Without its roots in the green valleys and the red soils it would
soon decay and be gone. It was because of those roots that the ceremony was important.
The ceremony itself was brief. As Frances Margaret and Isaac Newton walked the short
distance from the altar to the church door they were at last aware of the congregation itself.
Besides their respective families there was the Project Halley Board and members of the
Cavendish Laboratory staff. But there were others they had not expected. Frances Margaret
could see the dark American woman with the dimples who could never refrain from laughing
whenever Frances Margaret appeared. There was Dave Eckstein, who had played a
significant role at a critical juncture, and his wife. There was the same Russian who had
headed the Soviet delegation at the Palace of Versailles, a man with an enormous bellow of
a laugh who had apparently been moved up in the Politburo ranking to the position of
Number Seven.
Isaac Newton picked out John Jocelyn Scuby. Another surprise was Alan Bristow from
Nature. Eriksson was also there. Because of his
height he could hardly have been missed the way John Jocelyn Scuby might have been
missed. Isaac Newton caught Eriksson's eye as he passed him in the aisle, and the memory
of how Eriksson had returned the code flooded back to him.
As they came out of the church there was a formal naval guard, sharp and precise to the last
detail. Isaac Newton remembered how at one stage a guard had been greatly needed at the
Lab, only it had been provided by the army on that occasion not the navy. So long as there
was esprit de corps it really was the same thing, he decided.
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