Bringing Galileo forward to 1979 was an experiment, a trial run for the much bigger project which would take him to the Galilean moons of our own time, the 3020s. Before he saw the reality, we thought to test his reaction to the first detailed images of the planet and its moons which humanity acquired, without (as we thought) any risk of altering history before and after.
How wrong we proved to be! We thought we could stop Galileo carrying any memory of the experience back to his own time, but we reckoned without the strength of his will. Now we have remedied the consequences sufficiently for the altered timeline to converge with our own, we leave this record of what happened in 1979 at the 2079 exhibition, as a warning to our future selves. The second experiment, which would have brought Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Huygens together in conversazione at the High Frontier, to see and discuss the results of the great decade of planetary exploration, must remain untried—at least by us. Legend says Copernicus never saw Mercury, hidden throughout his life by mists over the River Vistula. Had he seen the images from Mariner 10, learned of its 2:1 locked rotation and thence the true shape of its orbit, would he have anticipated Kepler—or would he have recoiled from the demonstration that the heavens are not laid out in divinely perfect circles? If he, too, carried memory of the shock back to his own time, the consequences might be severe.
We brought Galileo from 1611, when his discoveries were controversial, but not yet thought heretical. We said we would take him to a place and a time where he could see Jupiter’s moons as they truly are—as he had sarcastically wished Libri might see them, on his way to Heaven. He had announced their existence briefly at the end of The Starry Messenger, after the mountains of the Moon and the star fields of the Milky Way; and he had yet to publish the keys to his anagrams announcing the phases of Venus, and the supposed triple nature of Saturn. If he had questions about those, we thought, his guides could answer.
He knew he was in Scotland, though Glasgow had only eight streets in his time and meant nothing to him. We explained how, through our machines, he could speak and hear, understand and be understood. As guides, we enlisted the creators of the exhibition, not telling them they would lose memory of the event. (In that, at least, we were successful.) They were a motley trio, not dressed like the patrons nor the artisans of an artistic event in Galileo’s time. The black-haired, bearded Lunan and the clean-shaven but otherwise ragged Roberts appeared to be wearing tent-cloth from Genoa, Lunan’s new and pressed, the other’s faded and patched, but both died blue; Braithwaite’s corduroy trousers also looked Genoese, but his padded jacket looked like the undercoat for some futuristic armour, except for its shiny yellow colour. He spoke first, with formal politeness.
“Domino Signor Galilei, it is an honour to welcome you to our exhibition. As a maker of telescopes myself, I have long been in awe of what you have accomplished.”
“I have no time for imitators,” snapped Galileo. “I am the sole creator of the optic tube and the sole master of its use. Tell me about this exhibition that surrounds us. Does it commemorate some great man’s achievement?”
“You could say that,” Lunan replied, “though like your most distinguished successor, he stood upon the shoulders of giants…” and as he paused, Roberts added, “It’s ten years since a man first walked upon the Moon—the exhibition portrays what has happened since.”
“Walked upon the Moon?” Galileo was taken aback. “That fool Kepler, with his harmonies and invisible perfect solids—what was it he wrote to me… ?”
“Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes,” Lunan quoted. “In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the bold sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies—I shall do it for the Moon, you, Galileo, for Jupiter. I’ve used it in my next book.”
“I wish him well in that attempt,” said Galileo, “for I have yet to send him a ‘telescope’, as you call it, and I do not intend to do so. Do you have proof of this ‘Moon-walking’?”
“Come and see this.” Roberts led them across the great, white-painted hall to a display of images on a pillar, next to a glass case. Within it lay strange devices, the only recognisable features being the lenses. “These are Hasselblad cameras, and these are the images Neil Armstrong took with them on the Moon. They’re all pictures of his companion, except for this one where Armstrong is reflected in his visor.”
With no idea what was meant—camera? hidden things?—Galileo looked from the white suits of armour to Braithwaite’s yellow padding, wondering if he, too, had walked on that rocky surface. But Roberts was in full flow, pointing out the highlights of the exhibition he had created. “That’s a Lunar Orbiter image of the Moon—and over here, the Viking photographs of Mars…”
“And ‘Moons of Mars’!” Galileo exclaimed. “Kepler mis-translated my Saturn anagram as Hail, burning twins, offspring of Mars…”
“He was right,” Lunan replied, “and that wasn’t the only time! You’d better come to see Jupiter.”
They crossed back over the hall to the entrance, turning to show Galileo the full sweep of the central display board. “This picture is only seven months old,” said Lunan. “It was taken by a spacecraft called Voyager 1. South is at the top, as you would see in your telescope. The moons in front are…”
“Damnation to the moons!” shouted Galileo, pointing in fury at the Great Red Spot, dominating the picture with Io silhouetted against it. “What in the name of God is that?”
“It’s a circular storm on Jupiter, three times the size of Earth. It’s been there for at least three hundred years—”
“Kepler knew of it! He decoded my Venus anagram to read, There is a red spot in Jupiter which rotates mathematically!”
“Coincidence,” said Roberts. “It couldn’t be anything else—”
“Have I been brought here only to see how many times Kepler was right? Right about the Moon, right about Mars, right about Jupiter! I build the instruments, I damage my back and my eyesight conducting detailed research, and he comes along with his mystical numbers and his witch of a mother, to make greater discoveries by decoding my anagrams wrongly?” He swung an arm at the blowup of Io and the panels of the Jovian satellites beyond. “My moons! My discoveries, whose reality you brought me here to see. Has he annexed them too? Are they Kepler’s Stars, or do they still honour the Medici as I specified?”
“Political dedications seldom last,” said Lunan. “Herschel tried to name Uranus after George the Third—”
“Not the point,” Braithwaite interrupted. “They have individual names, after the classical companions of Jupiter, but collectively, almost from the outset, they’ve been called the Galilean moons. History has named them after you!”
“After me!” Galileo’s mood changed, but not to anything more cordial. The word braggadocio might have been coined for him. “Ha! Do you hear that?” he shouted to the people in the hallway, “the Galilean moons!” Who knows what they made of it, since they were outside the translation field. “I’ve been too modest, too circumspect! I must confront my critics directly, especially those fools who surround the Pope. A Dialogue, that’s the answer! I’ll highlight their folly, I’ll put their arguments into the mouths of a simpleton. Simplicius! That’s the name for them! Simplicius!” The experiment was going badly awry, and we pulled him from the scene, still mouthing boastful threats as he vanished.
“That didn’t go very well,” said Lunan. “I wanted him to meet Edwin Morgan—to hear Galileo would have been proud of Ganymede, at least.”
“I wanted to show him the six-inch reflector in the annexe,” said Braithwaite. “To discuss optics with Galileo…”
“I wanted to get a picture of him, before he popped off,” said Roberts.
“Your disappointment will pass.” Coming from the shadows, we took their memories, left them staring at nothing, and were gone.
The rest is history. Not the history they knew, where Galileo died the most honoured man in Europe, and not the history that replaced it, where he burned at the stake for his presumption, but the one you know, where we have repaired the damage as best we could. When you come near to our time, when you discover the power to change the past, be warned and do not meddle further.
Inspired by, and perhaps a prequel to, Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager, 2009). For the rest of the background see The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler (Hutchinson, 1959).
Notes
In 1978-79 I was the Manager of the Glasgow Parks Astronomy Project, with the late John Braithwaite (afterwards the last maker of telescopes in Scotland) as Technical Supervisor, and Gavin Roberts (now Principal Teacher of Art at Airdrie Academy) as Art and Photographic Spervisor. Our initial brief in 1978 was to build an astronomical monument in one of the city’s parks, as a Jobs Creation project, and that became the first astronomically aligned stone circle for over 3000 years. Its story up to mid-2012 is told in my book “The Stones and the Stars” (Springer, 2012), and the subsequent campaign to save it from redevelopment is on my website, www.duncanlunan.com.
In the second half of 1978 we found ourselves under increasing demand to provide talks and exhibitions for schools and public libraries, and in 1979 the project’s remit was broadened to ‘Astronomy and Space Education’, with a total staff of ten including illustrator Dave McClymont and draughtsman Richard Robertson, with the late Bill Braithwaite (John’s father) as model-maker. One of the major commitments was to create the exhibition ‘The High Frontier, a Decade of Space Research’, using the photo-archives of ASTRA, the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics, and the facilities of the Third Eye Centre on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow (now the Centre for Contemporary Arts), whose Director, Chris Carrel, had previously run the very successful ‘Beyond This Horizon’ space and science fiction festival at the Ceolfrith Arts Centre in Sunderland.
The High Frontier (taking its title from the book by the late Prof. Gerard K. O’Neill) was the largest event of its kind in the UK to date, and of three such events planned in the UK by various groups for the tenth anniversary of the Moon landing, it was the only one to reach fulfilment. It was supported by NASA, the European Space Agency, British Aerospace, Rockwell International Inc., British Telecom, Hasselblad, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and many other contributors. Its centrepieces were two large blowups of the new Voyager images of Jupiter and Io, sponsored by the Glasgow Herald. In the summer of 1979 I undertook a whirlwind tour of US space centres and contractors to gather exhibits, financed by the Scottish Arts Council, and I’ve described parts of that in Man and the Planets (Ashgrove Press, 1983) and in Waverider, A Spacecraft in Waiting in preparation).
As well as numerous talks the programme included seminars on astronomy, science fiction writing, applications satellites, Space & Scotland (an ongoing enquiry today), and nuclear waste disposal in space, reconsidered in my book Incoming Asteroid! (Springer, 2013). Two books were produced at the time, a collection of essays edited by Bob Low of the Daily Record, and Star Gate, the Science Fiction Poetry of Edwin Morgan. There was a programme of science fiction films at the Glasgow Film Theatre with accompanying documentaries, talks and an overspill exhibition.
From Glasgow the exhibition went on tour around the UK, and was estimated to have been seen by around 86,000 people. Elements of it continued to be shown at science fiction conventions and other exhibitions through to the 1990s, as the chipboard-mounted panels were systematically replaced with more portable ones by Chris O’Kane and Richard McKelvie of ASTRA, financed by the Glasgow SF conventions. Finally the Jupiter blowups were purchased by the Glasgow Museum of Transport and the whole exhibition was replaced in 1995 by Gordon Ross at Glasgow School of Art. Panels of Hannes Giger’s artwork for Alien were shown again at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, and original artwork by Sydney Jordan for the Jeff Hawke and Lance McLane comic strips was incorporated into the ‘Urban Spacemen’ exhibition of space art by Scots, which appeared at the 90s Gallery during Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990, later at other venues including the Orkney and Caithness Science Festivals, the Lantern Gallery in Stornoway and finally at the 1996 Edinburgh International Science Festival.
For the High Frontier Bill Braithwaite created a model of the Waverider re-entry vehicle, designed by the late Prof. Terence Nonweiler, and its showing at the High Frontier in Largs in 1981 led to the formation of ASTRA’s Waverider Aerodynamic Study Programme, whose story I hope to tell in Waverider, a Spacecraft in Waiting.
To sum up, the High Frontier was a major effort, whose echoes are still ringing today. I was therefore very pleased when I was asked to write a time-travel story, set at the exhibition, for To Arrive at Where We Started, edited by Laura Smith in 2012 for a retrospective CCA exhibition on its Third Eye Centre years. The year before I had reviewed Galileo’s Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson, for Concatenation, and that gave me part of my inspiration.
The other element was that over the years, John Braithwaite and I had talked about putting on a drama production at the High Frontier or its successors, as a conversazione in which actors playing Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Newton would discuss the exhibits with one another and with a live audience at the exhibition. Much of their dialogue would be drawn from The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. The idea was discussed with playwrights, producers and actors at various times, but never quite came off.
Putting it together with the ideas of Galileo’s Dream and the CCA commission, however, the story virtually wrote itself, and was a great opportunity to recall our younger selves as the Astronomy Project’s three main participants. My only regret is that John Braithwaite, who died suddenly and sadly in February 2012, did not live to see it.