The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [55]
As the Doctor scrambled up the ladder and onto the platform, Galileo set to work placing the telescope upon its stand and aiming it towards the moon's cratered surface. By the time the old man was standing beside him, he was gazing through the eyepiece.
"Well?" the Doctor queried. "What do you see?"
Galileo didn't reply for a moment. The skull-like contours of the moon's surface filled his eyes, its shadows lengthening as he watched. As always, he felt humbled and elated seeing something that nobody else had ever seen. The resolution of the Doctor's lenses was incredible: far better than anything his glassmaker at Padua could fashion. Even the glassmakers of Venice - the very Empire of glass - would be hard-pressed to surpass them for clarity. He could make out features that he had never seen before -
radial lines splaying out from the circular features and smaller pock marks all over the surface. There was so much to catalogue, so much to think about!
The Doctor tapped him on the shoulder. "This is no time for dilly-dallying, young man. Kindly tell me what you can see."
"Quiet!" Galileo muttered. "I'm concentrating." He shifted the telescope slightly, tracing across the harsh yet serene surface until he found a feature that he recognized: a tall, jagged range of mountains that put him in mind of the teeth of one of the lecturers at the University of Padua. Through the Doctor's lenses they seemed almost close enough to walk to. From the mountains he scanned downwards until a large elliptical area jumped into view.
"There," he said. "That's what I was looking at when I saw the moving object."
The Doctor pushed him out of the way. "Let me see," he said. After a few moments, and a little nudge of the telescope tube, his tense shoulders relaxed. "Yes... " he murmured, "yes, it all becomes clear now."
The Doctor stood to one side and let Galileo take another look. He had centred the telescope's field of view on a plain area of ground.
Galileo had never bothered with it before - it was the features that interested him, not the stretches of ground between them. He had been wrong. Through the Doctor's lenses he could see large geometric shapes scattered across the surface: squares and rectangles, cones and cylinders, spheres and trapezoids. From the way their shadows were cast it seemed as though they stood proud of the surface, as if they were on legs. "Are they houses?"
he whispered. "Houses for moon-men?"
"No," the Doctor said darkly, "they are ships that sail through space as a galleon sails through the oceans."
"But they are all different in design."
"I suspect that they belong to a number of different races."
Galileo would have pursued the point further, but suddenly a smaller object detached itself from a diamond-shaped edifice and rose away from the surface of the moon. It was circular in shape, like a flattened egg. "Doctor, there's something moving."
The Doctor pushed Galileo out of the way and took a look himself.
"Excellent," he said. "As I suspected, it is some form of shuttle craft. Now if we can only keep it in sight, we should be able to determine where it comes to Earth."
"And where it comes to Earth," Galileo said, "there we may find your companion Vicki."
"I took you for a guard of the house," Chigi confided to Steven. He took a long drink from the tankard in front of him. "Or a demon."
"A demon?" Steven glanced around the bar with the picturesque name of the Tavern of the Love of Friends, or of the Gypsies, wondering if anybody was close enough to overhear their conversation. As far as he knew, both he and Chigi had got out of the strange house without anybody noticing, but if there was one thing he had learned from the past twenty-four hours it was not to take anything in Venice at face