1In the days when the Church of the west had broken in two, and the followers of Luther and the followers of Rome each called the other lost, there was a young teacher of numbers in Luther's own town of Wittenberg. He was called Rheticus. It was not the name he was born with.
2His father had been a physician in a mountain town, and had been found guilty of cheating the sick, and had lost his head for it in the market square. The boy was fourteen. The law said the father's name must not be used again. So the son named himself for the mountains he came from, and went away to study the stars, where no one is ashamed.
3At twenty-five he had read all that was written of the sky, and it did not satisfy him. The old books said the earth stood still at the middle of all things, and the sun and moon and the five wandering stars went round it on wheels. But to make the wanderers keep their times, the wheels had to carry smaller wheels, and those carried others. It worked, near enough. It was ugly as a cart mended by nine men.
4Then he heard a rumour. Far in the north-east, at the edge of the Polish king's lands, an old churchman was said to have made the sky simple again. He had done it by one bold stroke. No one in Wittenberg had seen his proofs. Some laughed at the story. The old man had printed nothing, and it was said he never would.
5Rheticus asked leave of his school, and packed a bag, and went to find him.
6It was a journey of many weeks, by cart and on foot, and he carried gifts heavy enough to break a mule: three great printed books in white pigskin, Euclid in Greek and Ptolemy and others, the best the new presses had made.
7And there was this. The land he was walking into belonged to a Catholic bishop. That same spring the bishop had put out an order that every follower of Luther must leave his country, and their books be burned. Rheticus was a professor of Luther's university. He walked in past the order, where it was nailed on the church doors.
8He came in May to a small town called Frauenburg, on a grey lagoon of the Baltic. A red cathedral stood on the hill inside a wall, and in a corner of the wall was a tower, and near the tower a house. He knocked, with his knees shaking from the road and from more than the road.
9The man who opened was sixty-six years old, in the plain gown of a canon of the cathedral. He had a long, careful face. He looked at the young stranger, and at the books in his arms, and at the cut of his coat, which was a Wittenberg coat.
10"You have come a long way to be arrested," he said. Then he stood aside from the door. "Come in before someone sees you."
11This was Nicolaus Copernicus. Hear what kind of man he was, for he was not what the young man had pictured.
12He was no wild dreamer. He had served that cathedral for forty years. He kept its accounts and collected its rents. When the knights of the black cross came burning through the country, he had held a castle against them and seen to the powder himself. He was a physician too, and the poor of the town came to his door, and he did not charge them. He was a quiet son of his Church to his last day.
13And for thirty years and more, on clear nights, he had gone out to a paved place in his garden with instruments of plain wood that he had made with his own hands, and measured where the wanderers stood.
14He put bread and smoked fish before Rheticus. He asked after the road. For three days he spoke of everything but the sky.
15On the fourth evening the old man went to a chest and unlocked it. He lifted out a stack of written leaves as thick as a man's hand is long.
16"I have kept this by me four times nine years," he said. "I have shown it to few. You may read it. You may not laugh until you reach the end."
17Rheticus read all night, and the next day, and the next night.
18Here is what was in it, said as simply as it can be said.
19Watch the red wanderer, Mars, from month to month against the fixed stars. It creeps eastward. Then it slows, and stops, and goes backward for some weeks, and stops again, and goes on. All the wanderers do this. The old books needed their wheels upon wheels to explain it.
20But you have seen this thing on a road. You are in a fast cart, and you overtake a slow one. As you pass it, look at the slow cart against the far trees. It seems to slide backward. It is not going backward. You are passing it.
21Put the sun in the middle. Let the earth be one of the wanderers, the third out, going round the sun in a year, and turning on itself once a day like a spit before a fire. Then Mars goes backward in the sky when we overtake it, and for no other reason. The sun does not climb the sky each morning. We roll toward it. The stars do not wheel overhead. We turn beneath them.
22One motion of the earth, and half the wheels fell out of heaven. Each wanderer took its place in order: the swift ones near the sun, the slow ones far.
23Rheticus came out to the garden at dawn of the third day with his eyes red. The old man was there, looking at his beans.
24"It is true," Rheticus said. "It must be. Why is this in a chest?"
25The old man did not answer for a while.
26"Stand here," he said. "Do you feel the ground move? No. Do you feel the great wind there ought to be, if we were flying round? No. Every man who was ever born has stood on the earth and felt it stand still. I am to tell them their own feet lie. And I am to tell them with numbers that not twenty men alive can follow." "I am not afraid of the fire, young man. No one will burn me for arithmetic. I am afraid of being laughed off the stage. I have seen what laughter does to a true thing. It is quicker than fire."
27Now Rheticus had meant to stay a few weeks. He stayed two years.
28He lived in the canon's house, a heretic under a churchman's roof, and learned the book line by line. When he fell sick of a fever, the old man nursed him himself, and then took him away to the house of his oldest friend to mend. That friend was a bishop, Tiedemann Giese, a gentle man who had begged Copernicus for years to print. So now there were two of them asking, one of each church, at the same table.
29The old man would not give way. So Rheticus tried another door. "Let me write a small book," he said. "A first account, in my name, not yours. If they laugh, they laugh at me. I am young and have a borrowed name already. If they do not laugh, you will know it is safe."
30Copernicus thought on that for a week. Then he nodded.
31The little book was printed in Danzig. It went out to the learned men of Europe, and Rheticus waited through a winter with his stomach in knots.
32Letters began to come. Not laughter. Questions. Sharp ones, from men who had done the sums themselves and wanted the rest. Where is the whole work? When may we see it?
33Rheticus laid the letters on the table one by one in front of the old man, and said nothing. The bishop Giese sat beside him and said nothing either. It is told that Copernicus looked at them both, and then at the chest in the corner, and let out his breath like a man putting down a load he has carried up a long hill.
34"Take it, then," he said. "Before I change my mind. I am too old to guard it any longer."
35Rheticus copied the whole work with his own hand, every table, for the old man would not let the first writing leave his house. In the autumn he rode away with the copy in a saddlebag. At the turn of the road he looked back. The canon was standing at his door in his gown, with one hand raised. They did not meet again.
36The best printer of such books was in Nuremberg. Rheticus put the pages into his hands and watched over the first sheets as they came from the press. But he was a poor man, and he had been given a new post at a school in another city, and it would not wait for him. He had to go.
37He left the printing to be overseen by a man of the town, a preacher of his own church named Osiander, who knew numbers and was glad to help.
38Now hear what the helper did.
39Osiander was afraid for the book. He had written to the old man two years before and urged him to say that all this was only a way of reckoning, a handy trick for finding the planets, and not to say that the earth truly moved. Then no one would be offended. Copernicus had refused. He had not spent thirty years to say that he did not mean it.
40So Osiander, alone with the press, wrote a page of his own and had it set in front of all the rest. It told the reader that nothing in the book needed to be true, or even likely; it was enough that the sums came out. He put no name to it. Any reader would think the author himself had written it.
41He did it to shield the book. He believed he was doing a kindness. But it was a false door painted on the front of a true house, and the man who built the house had not been asked.
42Meanwhile, by the grey lagoon, the old canon was struck down in the winter. A bleeding in the brain took the use of his right side, and then his speech, and then, by little and little, his memory. He lay in his room by the cathedral wall for months, and the friends who came were not sure he knew them.
43The printed sheets came north slowly, a few at a time, by carrier. The last of them reached Frauenburg on a day near the end of May.
44His friend the bishop wrote down afterward what happened, and that letter still exists, so this much is known. The finished book was brought to the old man's bed on the very day he died. They put it in his hands. He saw it, the bishop says, at his last breath.
45No one can tell what he understood. Perhaps only the weight of it, and the smell of new ink. Perhaps that was enough. He had kept it in the dark for thirty-six years, and he held it in the light for one hour, and went through the Last Door with it lying on his blanket.
46He never read the false page.
47Rheticus read it, in the other city, when his copy came. He knew at once that the old man had never written it. They say he took a red crayon and struck the whole page through, in his own copy and in every copy he could lay hands on, and that he swore he would beat the man who did it.
48And Rheticus found a second wound when he turned the pages. The old man had thanked a cardinal by name, and the bishop, and had offered the whole work to the Pope himself in an open letter at the front. Of the young man from Wittenberg, who had walked in past the order on the church door, and stayed two years, and pulled the book out of the chest with his own hands, there was not one word.
49It is easy to see why. To name a professor of Luther's school in a book offered to the Pope would have sunk it. The old man was careful to the end. But it hurt, and he spoke little of Copernicus after that.
50Consider what he had done. He had gone alone into a country where his faith was forbidden, because he wanted to know a thing. He had found a frightened old man sitting on the truth like a hen on an egg, and he had not mocked him and had not left him. He had taken the first laughter on his own borrowed name. Because of that, the book was out of the chest. It was in five hundred places and could not be put back.
51As for the false page, it stood for more than sixty years. Many who opened the book read it and thought: good, the old canon did not mean it, the earth is safe. It let the book sleep in the libraries of both churches, undisturbed. Perhaps that sleep kept it from the fire. But a lie on a map does its work quietly. For sixty years men steered by that page who might have steered by the truth.
52At last a man named Kepler got hold of the proof of who had written it, and printed the name for all to see. You shall hear of him.
53But before him came one who did not need the proof. He was not yet born when the old canon died. Five years after, he came into the world in a small town under the burning mountain near Naples. He would put on the white robe of a friar, and read the old canon's book in his cell, and believe every word of it. And then he would ask the next question, the one the old canon had been too careful to ask. If the earth is not the middle of all things, what is?
54Now hear what came after.