By nightfall he had returned to Benatek. He delivered his apology, and swore an oath of secrecy, and Tycho gave a banquet, music and manic revels and the fatted calf hissing on a spit. The noise in the dining hall was a steady roar punctuated by the crimson crash of a dropped platter or the shriek of a tickled serving girl. The spring storm that had threatened all day blundered suddenly against the windows, shivering the reflected candlelight. Tycho was in capital form, shouting and swilling and banging his tankard, nose aglitter and the tips of his straw-coloured moustaches dripping. To his left Tengnagel sat with a proprietory arm about the waist of the Dane's daughter Elizabeth, a rabbity girl with close-cropped ashen hair and pink nostrils. Her mother, Mistress Christine, was a fat fussy woman whose twenty years of concubinage to the Dane no longer outraged anyone save her. Young Tyge was there too, sneering, and the Dane's chief assistant Christian Longberg, a priestly pustular young person, haggard with ambition and self-abuse. Kepler was angry again. He wanted not this mindless carousing, but simply to get his hands on-right away, now, tonight-Tycho's treasure store of planet observations. "You set me the orbit of Mars, no let me speak, you set me this orbit, a most intractable problem, yet you give me no readings for the planet; how, I ask, let me speak please, how I ask am I to solve it, do you imagine?"
Tycho shrugged elaborately. "De Tydske Karle," he remarked to the table in general, "ere allesammen halv gale, " and Jeppe the dwarf, squatting at his master's feet under the table, tittered.
"My father," said Mistress Christine suddenly, "my father went blind, you know, from swilling all his life like a pig. Take another cup of wine, Brahe dear."
Christian Longberg clasped his hands as if about to pray. "You expect to solve the problem of Mars, do you, Herr Kepler?" smiling thinly at the idea. Kepler realised who it was this creature reminded him of: Stefan Speidel, another treacherous prig.
"You do not think me capable of it, sir? Will you take a wager-let us say, a hundred florins?"
"O splendid," cried young Tyge. "An hundred florins, by Laertes!"
"Hold hard, Longberg, " Tengnagel growled. "Best set him a certain time to do it in, or you'll wait forever for your winnings."
"Seven days!" said Kepler promptly, all swagger and smile without while his innards cringed. Seven days, my God. "Yes, give me seven days free of all other tasks, and I shall do it- provided, wait, " and nervously licked his lips, "provided I am guaranteed free and unhindered access to the observations, all of them, everything."
Tycho scowled, seeing the trick. He had let it go too far, all the table was watching him, and besides he was drunk. Yet he hesitated. Those observations were his immortality. Twenty years of painstaking labour had gone into the amassing of them. Posterity might forget his books, ridicule his world system, laugh at his outlandish life, but not even the most heartless future imaginable would fail to honour him as a genius of exactitude. And now must he hand over everything to this young upstart? He nodded, and then shrugged again, and called for more wine, making the best of it. Kepler pitied him, briefly.
"Well then, sir, " said Longberg, his look a blade, "we have a wager."
A troupe of itinerant acrobats tumbled into the hall, whizzing and bouncing and clapping their hands. Seven days! A hundred florins! Hoop la.
Seven days became seven weeks, and the enterprise exploded in his face. It had seemed so small a task, merely a matter of selecting three positions for Mars and from them defining by simple geometry the circle of the planet's orbit. He delved in Tycho's treasures, rolled in them, uttering little yelps of doggy joy. He selected three observations, taken by the Dane on the island of Hveen over a period of ten years, and went to work. Before he knew what had hit him he was staggering backwards out of a cloud of sulphurous smoke, coughing, his ears ringing, with bits of smashed calculations sticking in his hair.
All of Benatek was charmed. The castle hugged itself for glee at the spectacle of this irritating little man struck full in the face with his own boast. Even Barbara could not hide her satisfaction, wondering sweetly where they were to find the hundred florins, if you please, which Christian Longberg was howling for? Only Tycho Brahe said nothing. Kepler squirmed, asked Longberg for another week, pleaded penury and his poor health, denied that he had made any wager. Deep down he cared nothing for the insults and the laughter. He was busy.
Of course he had lied to himself, for the sake of that bet and the tricking of Tycho: Mars was not simple. It had kept its secret through millenniums, defeating finer minds than his. What was to be made of a planet, the plane of whose orbit, according to Copernicus, oscillates in space, the value for the oscillation to depend not on the sun, but on the position of the earth? a planet which, moving in a perfect circle at uniform speed, takes varying periods of time to complete identical portions of its journey? He had thought that these and other strangenesses were merely rough edges to be sheared away before he tackled the problem of defining the orbit itself; now he knew that, on the contrary, he was a blind man who must reconstruct a smooth and infinitely complex design out of a few scattered prominences that gave themselves up, with deceptive innocence, under his fingertips. And seven weeks became seven months.
Early in 1601, at the end of their first turbulent year in Bohemia, a message came from Graz that Jobst Müller was dying, and asking for his daughter. Kepler welcomed the excuse to interrupt his work. He detached its fangs carefully from his wrist-wait there, don't howl-and walked away from it calm in the illusion of that sleek tensed thing crouching in wait, ready at the turn of a key to leap forth with the solution to the riddle of Mars clasped in its claws. By the time they reached Graz, Jobst Müller was dead.
His death provoked in Barbara a queer melancholy lassitude. She shrank into herself, curled herself up in some secret inner chamber from which there issued now and then a querulous babbling, so that Kepler feared for her sanity. The question of the inheritance obsessed her. She harped on it with ghoulish insistence, as if it were the corpse itself she was nosing at. Not that there were not grounds for her worst fears. The Archduke's interdicts against Lutherans were still in force, and when Kepler moved to convert his wife's properties into cash the Catholic authorities threatened and cheated him. Yet it was with trumpetings of acclaim that these same authorities welcomed him as a mathematician and cosmologist. In May, when it seemed the entire inheritance might be confiscated, he was invited to set up in the city's market place an apparatus of his own making through which to view a solar eclipse which he had predicted. A numerous and respectful crowd gathered to gape at the magus and his machine. The occasion was a grand success. The burghers of Graz, lifting a puzzled and watering eye from the shimmering image in his camera obscura, bumped him indulgently with their big bellies and told him what a brilliant fellow he was, and only afterwards did he discover that a cutpurse, taking advantage of the ecliptic gloom at noonday, had relieved him of thirty florins. It was a paltry loss compared to what was thieved from him in Styrian taxes, but it seemed to sum up best the whole bad business of their leavetaking of Barbara's homeland.