The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [43]
he stopped by a particularly ornate tapestry and pulled it back from the wall. There was a metal door set into the bricks behind it, and he keyed his personal code into the security lock in its centre. The door slid back into the wall and he walked down the revealed steps into the new watertight room that the Jamarians had built beneath the house.
The room was essentially a white metal box with a path around the edge of a pool of water. A small control panel was set into one wall. The pool was at the same level as the canal outside, and in its centre floated an ambassadorial skiff, smooth and ovoid, like a rather fat metal egg. Braxiatel glanced back, checking that the security door had closed behind him, then walked to the edge of the pool.
"Open," he muttered. An opening appeared in the side of the skiff.
He stepped into the cool, dark interior. "Shut." A constellation of multi-coloured lights sprang to life around the circumference of the skiff as the door closed. Braxiatel sat in the form-fitting central seat and ran his hands across the lights: adjusting course, speed and power. Laputa and the Armageddon Convention were waiting for him.
Galileo's hand began to ache - a deep-seated grinding pain in the bone that he was all too familiar with - so he switched the paddle from one side of the Doctor's strange boat to the other. "I still say we should have paid a gondolier to take us," he grumbled.
"I didn't want to involve anyone else in this business," the Doctor said, shading his eyes from the rays of the early morning sun which slanted across the flat surface of the lagoon. In his other hand he held a long tube capped with glass lenses - a spyglass, but one larger and better finished than Galileo's.
The island with the blue box from which the Doctor had retrieved the spyglass had vanished into the mists behind the Doctor, and Galileo had his back to Venice as he rowed. He felt as if they were cocooned in a white shroud. "You mean that you don't trust anybody," he said.
"That too."
"Then what about your friend - Steven? He's built like an ox.
Couldn't he have rowed us?"
The Doctor squinted and peered ahead, over Galileo's shoulder.
"No sign of Venice yet, my boy," he said. "No, I asked Steven to take a look around for Vicki. I don't hold out much hope that she's still there, but I prefer not to make unwarranted assumptions. Best to rule the city out of our consideration. I'm far more certain that if we can trace that spaceship you saw to this place Laputa that Albrellian talked about, we'll find Vicki."
"Ships that travel through the void of space, beings from other worlds, boxes that are barely larger than a coffin and yet can swallow you up for ten minutes while you look for your spyglass..."
Galileo shook his head in bewilderment. "You ask a lot of a man's imagination, Doctor. By rights I should call you a heretic, if not a lunatic, but I find you strangely convincing, and your words strike chords in my own thoughts."
"You are a man of unusual breadth of vision, Galileo." The Doctor gazed into his eyes. "If anybody in this time is prepared to believe in life on other worlds, it is you."
"Twenty years ago," Galileo grumbled, "in the Academy of Florence, I gave a learned discourse on the exact location, size and shape of Dante's Inferno and, using pure logic, I proved that the Devil himself was two thousand arm-lengths in height." He gazed levelly at the Doctor. "That doesn't mean that I actually believe that the Devil is two thousand arm-lengths in height. I apply logic to everything and I believe nothing."
"An admirable, if somewhat narrow, outlook." The Doctor's gaze switched over Galileo's shoulder again. "I think we're bearing a little to port. You'd best switch back to your other hand."
"I get arthritis in my other hand," Galileo snapped. "Besides, I'm an astronomer, not a sailor. Perhaps