“But you still will need to be able to see Jupiter and his wives from a ship at sea,” Mazzoleni said. “Bouncing on the billowing waves, dodging whales and enemy cannonballs and who knows what. Who’s going to have their hands free to do the looking?”
“Good point.”
The solution to that problem was so complex that he went over to Pisa to get some technical advice from his old associates in its little Arsenale. But in the end, as so often in the past, most of his real help came from the ingenious Mazzoleni. Together they built Galileo’s most complicated contraption to date, an object he called a “celatone.” Every time Mazzoleni looked at it, he cackled. It was a bronze and copper helmet, with several telescopes attached to it, each of which could be rotated on armatures until it was in front of the eyes of the person wearing the helmet, giving sharp views of sights at various distances. One looked where one wanted by turning one’s head, and one’s hands therefore remained free, to steer a ship or do anything else.
Galileo showed this beauty off to the court in Florence, and one of his old enemies there, Giovanni de Medici, was so impressed he declared it a more important invention than the telescope itself. It could be of crucial help in battles at sea, he declared.
With these new devices perfected, Galileo went to Genoa to speak to the Spanish officials. Whether he was aware that Pope Paul at that moment was trying more and more desperately to stay neutral in the growing crisis between Spain and France, no one could tell. Sometimes Galileo ignored things on purpose; other times he was simply oblivious.
He met with the officials in the great hall of the Genovan palazzo that the Spanish had rented, under north windows that provided excellent light. Galileo unrolled the large sheets of parchment on which he had drawn more of his characteristic diagrams, their elegant circles only slightly marred by malfunctions of his compass-quill, their converging lines drawn straight with the help of a rule or a plumb, the page inscribed everywhere with his neatest script, with all its incomprehensible abbreviations and capital letters. The Spanish officers crowded around the table.
“The principle is very simple,” Galileo began, always a bad sign. “So far, one of the only reliable ways that people have had to determine longitude is to observe an eclipse of the moon predicted in an almanac. In most ephemerides, the times listed in the tables are Roman times. One can then determine how far east or west of Rome one is, by seeing the difference in time between when the eclipse is predicted for the Roman sky, as opposed to when it is actually seen from one’s ship at sea. The relationship is clear, the method simple—but unfortunately, eclipses of the moon are fairly rare. Nor is it easy to determine the precise minute when an eclipse has begun, or when it has completely ended. So this theoretically good method is rendered impractical.
“However!” he declared triumphantly, raising a finger. “We have now, with the power of a good telescope, which I can manufacture better than anyone, a newly discovered reality that includes several eclipses every night! These are, of course, the passing of the four moons of Jupiter behind their great planet, or into its shadow. Either the planet itself, or else its shadow behind it, cuts off our sight of the moons as sharply as snuffing a candle. And that moment can be very simply calculated in advance. It’s completely simple if the moon goes behind Jupiter. And if it moves into Jupiter’s shadow, that is almost as easy, as Jupiter’s shadow always extends straight away from the sun in a cylinder behind Jupiter.”
The Spanish officers were beginning to glance at each other; and then, worse, not to glance at each other. Some perused the diagrams more closely, putting their faces close to the parchment, as if the secrets eluding them were to be spied deeper in the ink.
“And who would make these observations?” one asked.
“Any officer free to make them, using—the celatone!” Galileo replied, indicating the elaborated helmet. “Indeed, whoever you have already designated as responsible for navigation could take this on, and they would be thankful for it. They would merely have to consult my jovilabe and ephemerides, to find out when that night’s eclipse of one or more Jovian moons was to take place, and then observe Jupiter at around that time. Mark the very moment you see the predicted eclipse, and then check the ephemerides and see how much difference there is between the predicted time and the time you marked. Enter that figure into a simple equation, for which I could provide complete tables, and one would then know, to within a degree’s precision of longitude, where on the Earth one was!”
His finger was pointed to the ceiling in his characteristic professorial gesture. But looking around the table he saw that all the Spanish officers were looking at him like haddock in a fish market, eyes round and appalled.
“What if Jupiter were not in the sky?”
“Then you couldn’t do it. But Jupiter is visible nine months of every year.”
“What if it were a cloudy night.”
“Then you couldn’t do it.”
They considered the diagrams, the jovilabe, the bizarre telescope-studded celatone.
“How does it work again?”
THE SPANIARDS DIDN’T BUY IT. At one point Galileo even offered his own services, at two thousand crowns a year—only twice what the Medicis were paying him—but they didn’t go for that either. Probably this was just as well, as he would not have sustained the travel. And the pope would have been annoyed to have his effort to stay neutral compromised in such a way; he would have had to answer for Galileo’s move to the French.
Nevertheless Galileo was cast down. He fell ill again. He spent a lot of time in his garden. He shifted his interests elsewhere. He visited Sagredo in Venice, feasted as of old, got drunk as of old; but he was older too, and angrier, and he ate and drank more than he used to, if indeed that was possible.
Once one of these dyspeptic saturnalia made him violently ill. At first when he returned home, helped there by Sagredo, he seemed totally blocked inside. Then he spent all the next day in the jakes, moaning with what some of the household guessed was food poisoning. Late in the afternoon he began to shriek with pain and fear. Sagredo, who had stuck around to make sure he was all right, ran down to the jakes to check on him, and after a while he sent a messenger for Ac-quapendente. When the physician arrived, Sagredo led him to the jakes, and Galileo groaned up to them, supine on the malodorous floor, both hands at his crotch: “I can’t believe it—it could only happen to me. I got the runs so bad I’ve shitted myself a second asshole.”
And he wasn’t just repeating the old joke. Right in the peritoneum, about halfway between his anus and his balls, the bottom of his guts actually had burst through all but the outermost layer of skin. Sagredo took a squinting glance and looked away, his mouth pursed tight. “It kind of looks like you have four balls now,” he admitted.
Acquapendente deftly shoved the guts back into place, through the wall of muscles and back into the abdomen. “You’ll have to stay lying down a day or two, at the least.”
“A day or two! I’ll never be able to stand again!”
“Don’t despair. You’ve healed from worse things before.”
“Have I? Have I ever healed from anything, God damn it?” In the end they got him back to the house on a shutter, and after that he had to be very careful in the jakes, with many a setback to his condition any time he had a more than usually difficult evacuation. After weeks of pain and fear, he devised and manufactured a mechanical restraint to hold his guts up and in—a kind of iron codpiece, or really something more like a woman’s chastity belt, about which naturally everyone in the house joked, saying that he had finally found a method to check his sensual urges. But they spoke only behind his back and when he was well out of earshot, for he had no sense of humor about it at all. He groaned around the villa, limping badly, usually balanced on a staff, and unable to sit; he could only stand or lie down.