The author uses a fictional setting to tell the stories of Galileo Galilei - his science, his writings, and his 17th century trial by the Catholic Inquisition. The fictional characters are reporters in Rome researching the pardon of Galileo (10/31/1992) by Pope John Paul II on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of his death. A French priest began the campaign for pardoning in the early 1960s. It took until the 1980s to gather all lost papers and to work through them to find the story surrounding the trial.