Gone, all of it gone. The young captain from the ANR he had taken prisoner back in the spring and who was now part of his inner core of advisors had briefly served with that force on the Jersey Shore, facing Manhattan, a deadly island now quarantined with reports that bubonic plague and cholera were still endemic with the few thousand survivors still living there, scurrying and scrounging in the vast, abandoned concrete canyons.
No nuclear blast had leveled what was once said to be the pulsing heart of the Western world … just quietly turn off the switch, and in an instant, it was as uninhabitable as Antarctica or the searing Gobi Desert … its once fertile lands that had greeted Henry Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant long paved over—except for Central Park, where it was rumored that feral dogs, once tamed and loving golden retrievers and spaniels, had been wiped out, replaced by breeds of mongrels who again hunted in packs and would kill anything, including a man foolish enough to wander into that overgrown forest.
He closed the magazine and set it aside. It was too much to bear, feeding this sudden surge of depression. He again could hear the other four talking among themselves, a bit of a friendly argument that did have an edge to it as to why no one had thought to check on old computers and other electronic devices earlier.
He wiped the tears from his eyes and took a deep breath. “Galileo and the telescope,” he said.
The others fell silent and looked back at him.
“What?” Paul asked.
He forced himself to smile—at least there was still a touch of the college professor in him—and as he looked at Paul and Becka, there was a flashback to when they were students in his History of Technology class, more often than not paying slight attention to him as they gazed lovingly at each other in the back of the classroom.
“You remember our discussion about Galileo and the telescope?” he asked, taking a few steps back to join them.
“Not exactly,” Paul replied.
“It’s like this, and it applies to us now,” John said, taking a deep breath, feeling a bit of calmness coming back with this diversion. Grief was a luxury in this world, especially for him, the one that far too many looked to for strength. Later, if still troubled, he’d let it back out when alone with Makala, though even after their more than two years together, he still felt uncomfortable when memories of his long-departed first wife troubled him. He had loved Mary deeply, but it was different from what he now felt for Makala, where there was a more mature intensity and a sense that she was truly his equal partner in all things.
“I’m all ears for this history lesson,” Ernie interjected, and now he did smile. It was at least one area where Ernie really did defer to him, and there was no sarcasm in his voice.
“Think about it,” John continued. “It is an unanswered question I find to be fascinating. Modern eyeglasses were being manufactured by glassmakers in Italy as early as the fourteenth century. They could even grind them for each individual’s needs. They used to be given as a symbol of achievement to scholars at universities of that time, since most of them had gone half-blind after years of studying manuscripts in dark rooms like this illuminated only by candlelight.
“Across three hundred or so years, lens grinders were making glasses, and the question is, how come not one of them, even by accident, one day held up one lens in front of another and had the ‘oh my God’ moment that the two lenses, one in front of the other, were a telescope?”
He fell silent and now smiled inwardly, the grief of a moment before pushed aside. It was almost like being back in the classroom again—and this time, even Paul and Becka were listening.
“Then some guy in Holland, can’t remember his name, actually does that and does go ‘Oh my God!’ He put the lenses into opposite ends of a leather tube. Thus the first telescope.”
The four were silent for a moment, and he wondered if they were caught up as he had always been with the fascination of this question of why three hundred years had passed when the tools were there literally on any lens maker’s bench.
“So you’re saying that that stuff for telescopes lay around for three hundred years and nobody thought to do it?” Forrest asked.
“For starters, yes.”
“I remember this Italian girl in the dorm across the commons from my room when I was in college; we had a telescope aimed at her window 24-7,” Ernie interjected. “You’d think one of those Italian glassmakers would have figured that out.”
John sighed. There was always someone in a class to blow away a teaching moment, and even Becka laughed, commenting that was exactly why every girl in Anderson Hall always kept her blinds down.
“You’re losing the point,” John finally interjected, a bit exasperated.
“Please continue,” Becka replied, though there was still a touch of a smile as she looked over at Paul.
“So this guy in Holland makes the first telescope, and—typical then and now—the government gets wind of it and tries to clamp down a security lid on the whole thing.”
“Why?” Paul asked.
“Military secret,” Forrest said, and John nodded. “In Afghanistan, we were under strictest orders to smash our night-vision gear if we ever thought we were going to be overrun. They had stuff they had captured from the Russians years earlier, but nowhere near as good as ours. He who sees first or sees farthest wins.”
“Exactly what happened,” John continued. “Holland was fighting a bitter, decades-long war with Spain—actually, the Hapsburg Empire—for their independence. A ten-power telescope at sea gave them a huge advantage, when from miles away you could tell if that ship on the horizon was friend or enemy, to run or to fight. But like with all weapon systems, the secret doesn’t remain secret for long, and soon the word was out.”
“Same as today,” Ernie said softly. “I still want to get my hands on the damn idiots who allowed North Korea and Iran to get the bomb.”
“So do we all.” John sighed, and again the thought … surely someone knew before they were hit. Surely someone knew it was coming.
He let the thought drop for now, for it most certainly would take him back to his melancholia of but minutes ago.
“Anyhow, to finish this little class,” he said, clearing his throat. “And this is the really interesting part. Galileo receives a circular letter, sort of like the trade journal of his day, from a friend describing this new invention. Being Italian, in Renaissance Italy, he goes to a lens maker and shows him the design, and he now has his own telescope to fool around with and then starts making his own. But here is the fascinating part. He actually plays around with it for some time until one night he points it at Jupiter.”
“Checking out the girl bathing in the river down the street until then,” Forrest interjects.
John just sighed and pressed on. “That night changed everything. He was the first to observe what we now call the Galileo moons and in doing so presented proof that the universe is not geocentric.”