Leibniz ambled out into the center of the room, where it was a geometric impossibility for the tip of the blade to reach him. "The only sense in which it requires an infinite amount of money," he said with great dignity, "is that it requires some money every year, and I hope it shall go on forever. Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines—that didn’t work because of sabotage , and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million livres tournoises . They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words—not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines."