“So it is that any book that tells the truth about the telescope is regarded as nonsense, including my own On the True Nature of the Astral Tube, which I had printed in Frankfurt at my own expense, and distributed for free at the fair there, one thousand copies, all of which vanished immediately and without a trace,” said the astronomer.

His words were not even admitted as evidence, let alone taken as proof.

“And so I resigned myself to vanishing, likewise, without a trace.”

After all, most people simply vanish without a trace when they die, and so, he thought, would he.

Then, lifting a crooked forefinger and issuing a crooked grin, he said:

“Until, that is, I foresaw the solar eclipse.

“I,” he added, “and no one else!”

An eclipse was actually better than words. The same words mean different things to different people, but a solar eclipse looks the same to everyone standing in the same place at the same time.

“And so, Herr Leibniz, as long as you see the eclipse, too…”

If Leibniz saw the eclipse, too, the astronomer “would not vanish after all!”

The astronomer pulled a pocket watch out of his rags, either glanced at it or perhaps felt the angle of its hands with his fingers, rammed it back in his rags, and turned again to Leibniz.

“But you are still wondering, But how in the world did this crazy old fool lose his eyes? Who plucked them out, and why? For I am revealing nothing you haven’t intuited already when I tell you that they did not simply fall out on their own…”