Galileo's Dream Read Free Page B

size as a Venetian florin, say three fingers wide. “Would it stay straight enough?”
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œWould the inside surface be smooth?”
    â€œDoes it need to be?”
    â€œI don’t know, does it?”
    They stared at each other. Mazzoleni grinned again, his weathered face an entire topography of wrinkles, delta on delta, the white burn mark on his left temple raising that eyebrow in an impish expression. Galileo tousled the man’s hair as he would a child’s. This work they did together was unlike any other human bond he knew—unlike thatwith mistress or child, colleague or student, friend or confessor—unlike anyone—because they made new things together, they learned new things. Now once again they were on the hunt.
    Galileo said, “It looks like we’ll want to be able to move one lens back and forth.”
    â€œYou could fix one glass to the tube, and set the other one in a slightly smaller tube that fitted inside the main one, so you could move that one back and forth but keep it aligned vertically. You could rotate it too, if you wanted.”
    â€œThat’s good.” Galileo would have come to some such arrangement eventually, but Mazzoleni was especially quick concerning things he could see and touch. “Can you bang something like that together? By tomorrow morning?”
    Mazzoleni cackled. By now it was the middle of the night, the town was quiet. “Simple stuff, compared to your damned compass.”
    â€œWatch what you say. That thing has paid your salary for years.”
    â€œYours too!”
    Galileo swatted him. The compass had become a pain, there was no denying it. “You have the materials you need?”
    â€œNo. I think we’ll need more lead tubes, and thinner staves than what we’ve got around, and longer, if you want leather tubes. More cardboard too. And you’ll want more lenses.”
    â€œI’ll send an order to Florence. Meanwhile, let’s work with what we’ve got.”
    In the days that followed, every moment was given over to the new project. Galileo neglected his collegial obligations, made his in-house students teach each other, and ate his meals in the workshop while he worked. Nothing mattered but the project. At times like these it became obvious that the workshop was the center of the house. The maestro was about as irritable as always, but with his attention elsewhere it got a bit easier for the servants.
    While the various efforts of manufacture and assemblage and testing went on, Galileo also took time to write his Venetian friends and allies to set the stage for a presentation of the device. Here was where his career up until this point finally helped him. Known mostly as an eccentric if ingenious professor of mathematics, broke and frustratedat forty-five, he had also spent twenty years working and playing with many of the leading intellectuals of Venice—including, crucially, his great friend and mentor, Fra Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi was not currently running Venice for the doge, as he was still recovering from wounds suffered in an assault two years before, but he continued to advise both the doge and Venice’s senate, especially on technical and philosophical matters. He could not have been better positioned to help Galileo now.
    So Galileo wrote to him about what he was working on. What he read in Sarpi’s reply letter startled him, even frightened him. Apparently the stranger from the artisan’s market had gone to others as well. And his news of a successful spyglass, Sarpi wrote, was apparently already widespread in northern Europe. Sarpi himself had heard a rumor of such a thing nine months before, but had not considered it significant enough to tell Galileo about it.
    Galileo cursed as he read this. “Not significant? My God!” It was hard to believe. In fact, it suggested that his old friend had been damaged mentally as well as physically by the