“Twenty-two minutes,” said the astronomer, peering into his telescope, according to Leibniz. “It is getting darker and darker.” And he picked up his quill and wrote something down.

TWELVE FEET, FOURTEEN FEET, seventeen, nineteen—then an astral tube no less than twenty-two feet long, borne with care from the capital on the backs of half as many men. Having long since dismissed his assistants, whose clock and quadrant measurements he could never wholly trust, the astronomer now wielded the clock and quadrant himself, in addition to the tube, and although as a consequence his stellar data were a great deal slower and more laborious to record they were more perfect, too; and so here in this observatory far away from the social as well as the visual distractions of Prague, from the people in other words and the lanterns, he saw farther and clearer than ever before, his increasingly long tubes were piercing through the cosmos, and sooner or later one tube or another would pierce through the cosmos in its entirety and his star catalogue would be complete. One day, however, when a dozen men hauled to his observatory a new tube twenty-four feet in length, there came with them a thirteenth man who instead of helping with the hauling identified himself as an imperial envoy and handed the astronomer a letter from Rudolf sealed with the two-headed eagle. It said, I paraphrase, Leibniz quotes the astronomer as saying, that the Emperor now found himself in a perilous situation, the Holy Father and the Estates of Bohemia having abandoned him at the very moment when he most needed the subsidies of the former and the tributes of the latter in order to pay the soldiers of fortune he had hired to protect Prague from his disloyal brother and who no doubt would plunder the city if their salaries were not paid. The astronomer would be doing the Empire a service if for the time being he would conduct his valuable investigations with the present tube and not request a new one until the current crisis with God’s help has passed. The astronomer, indignant, wrote back straightaway. Even if what the Emperor wrote was true and not simply a sly attempt to evade his responsibilities, these affairs of state and of man were nevertheless not the astronomer’s concern; his own empire lay on another plane. Pursuant to the terms of the Edict of the Tubes, and here he quoted it in full, tube funding without reason if Heinrich learns about triangles, he demanded a tube thirty feet in length, with a magnifying power of forty. Three weeks later an astral tube of those specifications was delivered to his observatory with a warm note wishing the astronomer well in his researches, signed by Matthias, Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary and Croatia, King of Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor.

“Twenty minutes,” declared the astronomer, Leibniz reported. “Darker and darker.”