For when his father placed the Head of Phalaris on the banquet table before the Emperor, the astronomer saw that the clouds had parted just enough to permit a glimpse, for the first time in sixteen days, of the new twinkling thing. It shimmered and burned in the heavens behind the Emperor’s head. His father lay his hand upon the crank, the laughter, if not the silence, reached its peak, the place shook with laughter or silence, and at that moment, before his father could impart life to the head, the astronomer bellowed from the back of the Great Hall: “My Lord, I have invented an instrument that brings far things near, and with it I can yank that twinkling thing down from the firmament into this very room!”

And he flew across the Great Hall, and seized his father’s mechanical head, and dug his fingers into its eye sockets, and tore out the two convex lenses.

And he held one lens in front of the Emperor’s eye and the other an arm’s length away toward the luminous object.

And the Emperor peered through both and muttered, “My God.” And then: “It is a new star.”

With that, the astronomer told Leibniz, the Great Hall erupted so to speak in pandemonium. Mathematicians and theologians thronged him to shake his hand and examine the New Star through his instrument, and he was thankful that his view of his father and in particular of his father’s face was, consequently, occluded. “That it would be eternally occluded”—that his father would, on his way home, heave the now mutilated Head of Phalaris onto the frozen Vltava from the midpoint of the Old Stone Bridge, and then hurl himself into the hole the head made—“I of course did not know.”

He learned what his father had done only the next morning, by which time he had already been appointed the Emperor’s Imperial Astronomer.

The astronomer was silent for several minutes.

Then he said: “I am tempted, on occasion, to describe the astral tube as an apparatus that allows pressure to escape from this little head of ours into which a whole world has summarily been stuffed.” He added: “Though strictly speaking of course that is nonsense.”