GENTLEMEN: PLEASE NOTE

BY RANDALL GARRETT

Illustrated by Freas

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction October 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

18 June 1957 Trinity College Cambridge

Sir James Trowbridge No. 14 Berkeley Mews London

My dear James,

I'm sorry to have lost touch with you over the past few years; we haven't seen each other since the French War, back in 1948. Nine years! It doesn't seem it.

I'll tell you right off I want a favour of you. (No, I do not want to borrow another five shillings! I haven't had my pocket picked again, thank you.) This has to do with a little historical research I'm doing here. I stumbled across something rather queer, and I'm hoping you can help me with it.

I am enclosing copies of some old letters received by Isaac Newton nearly three hundred years ago. As you will notice, they are addressed to "Mr. Isaac Newton, A.B."; it rings oddly on the ear to hear the great man addressed as anything but "your Grace," but of course he was only a young man at the time. He hadn't written his famous Principia yet—and wouldn't for twenty years.

Reading these letters is somewhat like listening to a conversation when only one of the speakers is audible, but they seem to indicate another side to the man, one which has not heretofore been brought to light.

Dr. Henry Blake, the mathematician, has looked them over, and he feels that it is possible that Newton stumbled on something that modern thought has only recently come up with—the gravitational and light theories of the Swiss mathematician, Albert Einstein.

I know it's fantastic to think that a man of even Newton's acknowledged genius could have conceived of such things three centuries before their proper place in history, but Blake says it's possible. And if it is, Blake himself will probably do to Newton's correspondents the same thing that was done to Oliver Cromwell at the beginning of the Restoration—disinter the bodies and have them publicly hanged 

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