Galileo's Dream Read Free

“Leave me.”
    Sometimes, when he got really angry, not just exploding like gunpowder but shaking like an earthquake, he would roar in such a way that everyone in the house knew to run. At those times he would stride cursing through the emptied rooms, knocking over furniture and calling for people to stay and be beaten as they deserved. All the servants and most of the students knew him well enough to hear the leading edge of that kind of anger, contained in a particular flat disgusted tone, at which point they would slip away before it came on in full. Now they hesitated, hearing not that tone, but rather the sound of the maestro on the hunt. In that mood there would be nothing to fear.
    He took a bottle of wine from the table, polished it off, then kicked one of the boys. “Mazzoleni!” he bellowed. “MAT! ZO! LEN! EEEEEEEEEE!”
    No earthquake tonight; this was one of the good sounds of the house, like the cock crowing at dawn. The old artisan, asleep on the bench by the oven, pushed his whiskery face off the wood. “Maestro?”
    Galileo stood over him. “We have a new problem.”
    â€œAh.” Mazzoleni shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond and looked around for a wine bottle. “We do?”
    â€œWe do. We need lenses. As many as you can find.”
    â€œLenses?”
    â€œSomeone told me today that if you look through a tube that holds two of them, you can see things at a distance as if they were nearby.”
    â€œHow would that work?”
    â€œThat’s what we have to find out.”
    Mazzoleni nodded. With arthritic care, he levered himself off the bench. “There’s a box of them in the workshop.”

    Galileo stood jiggling the box back and forth, watching the lamps’ light bounce on the shifting glasses. “A lens surface is either convex, concave, or flat.”
    â€œIf it isn’t defective.”
    â€œYes yes. Two lenses means four surfaces. So there are how many possible combinations?”
    â€œSounds like twelve, maestro.”
    â€œYes. But some are obviously not going to work.”
    â€œYou’re sure?”
    â€œFlat surfaces on all four sides are not going to work.”
    â€œGranted.”
    â€œAnd convex surfaces on all four sides would be like stacking two magnifying lenses. We already know that doesn’t work.”
    Mazzoleni drew himself up. “I concede nothing. Everything should be tried in the usual way.”
    This was Mazzoleni’s stock phrase for such situations. Galileo nodded absently, putting the box down on the workshop’s biggest table. He reached up to dust off the folios lying aslant on the shelf over it; they looked like guards who had died on watch. While Mazzoleni gathered lenses scattered in pigeonholes around the workshop, Galileo lifted down the current working folio, a big volume nearly filled with notes and sketches. He opened it to the first empty pages, ignoring the rest of the volumes above—the hundreds of pages, the twenty years of his life moldering away, never to be written up and given to the world, the great work as lost as if it were the scribblings of some poor mad alchemist. When he thought of the glorious hours they had spent working with the inclined planes they had built, a pain stuck him like a needle to the heart.
    He opened an ink bottle and dipped a quill into it, and began to sketch his thoughts about this device the stranger had described, figuring out as he did how to proceed. This was how he always worked when thinking over problems of motion or balance or the force of percussion, but light was peculiar. He did not sketch any pattern that looked immediately promising. Well, they would simply try every combination, as Mazzoleni had said, and see what they found.
    Quickly the ancient artisan knocked together some little woodenframes they could clamp different lenses into. These could then be attached to the ends of a lead tube Mazzoleni