What was he doing in this carriage having this conversation, besides going out on a limb, and making a fool of himself? The real answer was known only to John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, Author of both the Cryptonomicon and the Philosophical Language, who encrypted with his left hand and made things known to all possible worlds with his right. Who'd gotten Daniel into Trinity College – invited him out to Epsom during the Plague – nominated him for the Royal Society – and now, it seemed, had something else in mind for him. Was Daniel here as an apprentice, sitting at the master's knee? It was shockingly prideful, and radically non-Puritan, for him to think so – but he could come up with no other hypothesis.