Daniel stood by Newton while Leibniz—who because of gout moved in an awkward shrugging-and-rolling gait even on a good day—went off to find their carriage. Its team must have fled screaming when the top of the hill had gone off. The place had not precisely exploded—though embedded in the event had been many small explosions. It had, rather, caught fire and burned to cinders very rapidly, as if a fire that ought to have extended over some hours had been compressed into as many seconds. The place had been a kind of slum, growing and running without plan—senseless. But unlike a normal slum, which about itself created middens of bones, gristle, shit, and ash, this one had become filthy with chymical wastes and by-products, many of them highly inflammable. The fire kindled by the Mohawk’s pistol-shot had hopped and rushed across the phosphorus-pocked soil until it had struck a vein: a rivulet of waste trickling from one of the boilers. It had raced up this fuse and ignited, then exploded, one or more of the giant copper retorts, and this blast, like the firing of powder in a musket’s pan, had ignited the main conflagration: some large store of red phosphorus in what had been a barn. The barn had been erased. Not even wreckage remained. The boilers were strewn scraps of copper, some of which was still molten. The dog, horse, and rider were steaming, intertangled bone-piles; they’d been incinerated by the roasting heat of the burning barn—a sort of action at a distance whereby heat was transmitted across space like gravity. It traveled, like light, in straight lines. This explained why Leibniz, Newton, and Waterhouse still lived, for in tumbling over the hedgerow they had fallen into its shadow, and so intercepted none of the fire’s radiance. The side of the hedgerow facing the barn was now a sterile stone spine with a few stalagmites of charcoal reaching out of it. The opposite side, a few inches away, was unchanged.