Angels Demons Page 0,69

walked to the center of the vault where he found the customary glass-topped archival exam table. Although the central location was intended to minimize in-vault travel of documents, researchers appreciated the privacy the surrounding stacks afforded. Career-making discoveries were uncovered in the top vaults of the world, and most academics did not like rivals peering through the glass as they worked.

Langdon lay the pouch on the table and unbuttoned the opening. Vittoria stood by. Rummaging through a tray of archivist tools, Langdon found the felt-pad pincers archivists called finger cymbals - oversized tweezers with flattened disks on each arm. As his excitement mounted, Langdon feared at any moment he might awake back in Cambridge with a pile of test papers to grade. Inhaling deeply, he opened the bag. Fingers trembling in their cotton gloves, he reached in with his tongs.

"Relax," Vittoria said. "It's paper, not plutonium."

Langdon slid the tongs around the stack of documents inside and was careful to apply even pressure. Then, rather than pulling out the documents, he held them in place while he slid off the bag - an archivist's procedure for minimizing torque on the artifact. Not until the bag was removed and Langdon had turned on the exam darklight beneath the table did he begin breathing again.

Vittoria looked like a specter now, lit from below by the lamp beneath the glass. "Small sheets," she said, her voice reverent.

Langdon nodded. The stack of folios before them looked like loose pages from a small paperback novel. Langdon could see that the top sheet was an ornate pen and ink cover sheet with the title, the date, and Galileo's name in his own hand.

In that instant, Langdon forgot the cramped quarters, forgot his exhaustion, forgot the horrifying situation that had brought him here. He simply stared in wonder. Close encounters with history always left Langdon numbed with reverence... like seeing the brushstrokes on the Mona Lisa.

The muted, yellow papyrus left no doubt in Langdon's mind as to its age and authenticity, but excluding the inevitable fading, the document was in superb condition. Slight bleaching of the pigment. Minor sundering and cohesion of the papyrus. But all in all... in damn fine condition. He studied the ornate hand etching of the cover, his vision blurring in the lack of humidity. Vittoria was silent.

"Hand me a spatula, please." Langdon motioned beside Vittoria to a tray filled with stainless-steel archival tools. She handed it to him. Langdon took the tool in his hand. It was a good one. He ran his fingers across the face to remove any static charge and then, ever so carefully, slid the blade beneath the cover. Then, lifting the spatula, he turned over the cover sheet.

The first page was written in longhand, the tiny, stylized calligraphy almost impossible to read. Langdon immediately noticed that there were no diagrams or numbers on the page. It was an essay.

"Heliocentricity," Vittoria said, translating the heading on folio one. She scanned the text. "Looks like Galileo renouncing the geocentric model once and for all. Ancient Italian, though, so no promises on the translation."

"Forget it," Langdon said. "We're looking for math. The pure language." He used the spatula tool to flip the next page. Another essay. No math or diagrams. Langdon's hands began to sweat inside his gloves.

"Movement of the Planets," Vittoria said, translating the title.

Langdon frowned. On any other day, he would have been fascinated to read it; incredibly NASA's current model of planetary orbits, observed through high-powered telescopes, was supposedly almost identical to Galileo's original predictions.

"No math," Vittoria said. "He's talking about retrograde motions and elliptical orbits or something."

Elliptical orbits. Langdon recalled that much of Galileo's legal trouble had begun when he described planetary motion as elliptical. The Vatican exalted the perfection of the circle and insisted heavenly motion must be only circular. Galileo's Illuminati, however, saw perfection in the ellipse as well, revering the mathematical duality of its twin foci. The Illuminati's ellipse was prominent even today in modern Masonic tracing boards and footing inlays.

"Next," Vittoria said.

Langdon flipped.

"Lunar phases and tidal motion," she said. "No numbers. No diagrams."

Langdon flipped again. Nothing. He kept flipping through a dozen or so pages. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

"I thought this guy was a mathematician," Vittoria said. "This is all text."

Langdon felt the air in his lungs beginning to thin. His hopes were thinning too. The pile was waning.

"Nothing here," Vittoria said. "No math. A few dates, a few standard figures, but nothing that looks like it could be a clue."

Langdon flipped over the