"Eminently," Timonides assured him. "Once I have a prototype machine built to full scale and have worked out the minutiae of maneuvering, you can have a fleet of them."
"You speak as if this maneuvering business will be simple to perfect."
The Greek shrugged eloquently. "We shall see. But I believe the principles must be quite simple. After all, who would have believed that vessels could travel underwater under human guidance? Yet the philosophers of this school proved that it could be done and you put them to work defending the city, which they did to great effect."
"Quite true. Very well, I shall tell the queen that your project merits full support. Make up your request for funding, supplies and personnel and I shall present it to Her Majesty at the next planning conference."
Timonides went to a table and took a scroll from a chest. "Already done," he said, handing over the scroll with a smile. "Among other things, I shall need some intelligent slaves to test the first full-sized prototypes. At least a dozen. Attrition may be high at first."
"That should be no problem. We have plenty of prisoners taken in the recent fighting. They should be brave enough for the task and they needn't be purchased."
Marcus left the young Greek and continued with his inspection. From all directions he could hear the sounds of new construction. This part of the Museum was his personal project and he was expanding it enormously. He had moved out many of the philosophical schools to temporary housing around Alexandria in order to make room for the expanding School of Archimedes.
Philosophers throughout the Greek world were scandalized. The Archimedeans had been held in lowest esteem, scarcely to be considered philosophers at all, because they did things. They took matter and, often with their own hands, transformed it into articles of utility. This, to orthodox philosophers, lowered them to the status of mere workmen. Philosophers were not supposed to do anything. They were supposed only to think.
Marcus had no patience with such sophistry. Rome had arrived, and Rome had no use for men who did nothing. Romans were not philosophers but they were engineers. Archimedes, the mathematician of Syracuse, was nearly a god in the pantheon of engineers. Marcus had set the despised school to designing war machines, and they had delivered handsomely.
At first he had wanted them to devise improved war machines of the sort Archimedes had invented for the defense of Syracuse against the Carthaginians more than a hundred years before: catapults and ship-killing cranes and so forth. Instead, they had come up with machines he had never dreamed of, yet which had proven invaluable in the war with Hamilcar. They had made boats that could travel beneath the surface of the water and sink enemy ships in the harbor. There was a device of mirrors that could see around corners and over walls. There were chemicals that generated dense smoke or choking fumes and one compound that burned with such furious violence that the inventor insisted it must have some military application, if only it could be harnessed.
And now: a flying machine. It made his head whirl.
He walked down a broad corridor where artisans were still busy painting the walls and inlaying the mosaic floor with scenes from the life of Alexander and the early Ptolemies. He was still uncomfortable in the spectacular parade uniform Selene had had made for him and insisted that he wear, even when not engaged in military duties. The muscle-sculpted cuirass was overlaid with gold and silver leaf, its leatherwork studded with amber and coral. His helmet was embossed on the temples with curling ram's horns, the significance of which he could not guess. He knew he'd be laughed out of Rome should he ever show up there in such a rig, but the Alexandrians lacked all restraint when it came to display.
Thought of Rome darkened his mood. He knew that he had many enemies there. His family protected him, but to some his actions of late smacked of treason. If only he could make them understand that he held the key to Rome's future greatness! Romans were for the most part conservatives and traditionalists. The scions of the great old families like his own wanted only to reestablish Rome as it had been in the time of their ancestors. He knew this to be folly. The world was very different than it had been in the day of Fabius Cunctator.
Besides, he thought, their vaunted traditions and system hadn't done them much good when it came to dealing with Hannibal, had it? This new world would call for new methods and new ideas, as much as that might pain the ancestor worshippers of the Senate.
He went into a huge courtyard where men were erecting, employing or tearing down structures of wood and metal.
Some were catapults, some scaling devices and some objects of no function he could guess at. Once in a while a timber or rope would break under too much stress and there were shouts or laughter or the screams of injured men. Never before had Marcus seen men so frantically employed, yet seeming exhilarated at the task, strenuous, frustrating and dangerous though it might be. These "active philosophers," as someone had dubbed them, were a new breed of men.
He went to an especially strange structure that consisted of a platform between uprights, the platform suspended by a complicated armature of ropes, pulleys, gears and what appeared to be large boxes full of metal bars. "What might this be?" he asked the sweating supervisor.
"We aren't sure yet what to call it," said Chilo. He was the head of the Archimedean school, but he was as dusty and ill kempt as the slaves who assisted with the work. "The new falling-weight catapults got us thinking about the possibilities of falling weights. It seems such a simple thing, something we all tend to take for granted, yet there is a whole unknown field of study here: the dynamics of falling weights."
" 'Dynamics'?" Marcus said.
"It's an old word we've revived. It means the study of how matter moves. Remember when you first came here and I told you that we seek out fundamental principles? Well, this is one of them. Matter does not move about, at random and free from obedience to natural law. There are rules, and we intend to discover them. Watch this."
At Chilo's direction, a dozen slaves crowded onto the platform. A single slave seized a rope and began to haul back on it. There was a clacking of gear wheels and the platform began to rise, a few inches with each pull. At the same time, the boxes of metal bars descended at the same rate.
"You see?" Chilo said. "The strength of a single man is sufficient to raise many men. This can be used to raise soldiers above an enemy rampart, but more important to us is the demonstration of the properties of the counterweight."
He looked around and indicated a man who sat on the edge of a fountain, staring at the machine. "You see that sour-faced fellow observing over there?"
Marcus looked at him. "Isn't that the mathematician who just arrived from Crete? Nikolaus, is it?"
"The very one. He seeks to penetrate to the very essence of this question: the principle of why objects fall as they do."
"Why?" Marcus said. "Self-evident, isn't it? Things have always fallen."
"That's just it. It isn't self-evident at all. We just take it for granted. Why doesn't smoke fall? What holds clouds up? They may not have much mass, but they have some. Some of us think that Archimedes' principle of buoyancy is involved, but Nikolaus thinks that there is a fundamental, universal force involved and he wants to understand it."
"Too deep for me," Marcus admitted. "But I like this machine. It could have all sorts of uses. Can you make one high enough to take people all the way to the top of the lighthouse?" The lighthouse of Pharos, tallest structure in the world, stood only about a mile from them.
"It would require a lot of rope and wood," Chilo said, "but the principle will work no matter how tall the machine might be."