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morning he woke, a delicate vessel lined with glass, and saw through an angle of window above him small clouds sailing in a patch of blue sky, and he was well.
    Like a refining fire the fever had rinsed him clean. He went back to his book with new eyes. How could he have imagined it was finished? Squatting in a tangle of sheets he attacked the manuscript, scoring, cutting, splicing, taking the theory apart and reassembling it plane by plane until it seemed to him miraculous in its newfound elegance and strength. The window above him boomed, buffeted by gales, and when he raised himself on an elbow he could see the trees shuddering in the college yard. He imagined washes of that eminent exhilarated air sweeping through him also. Mästlin brought him his food, boiled fish, soups, stewed lights, but otherwise left him alone now; he was nervous of this excitable phenomenon, twenty years his junior, perched on the couch in a soiled nightshirt, like an animated doll, day after day, scribbling. He warned him that the sickness might not be gone, that the feeling of clarity he boasted of might be another phase of it. Johannes agreed, for what was this rage to work, this rapture of second thoughts, if not an ailment of a kind?
    But he recovered from that too, and at the end of a week the old doubts and fears were back. He looked at his remade manuscript. Was it so much better than before? Had he not merely replaced the old flaws with new ones? He turned to Mästlin for reassurance. The Professor, shying under this intensity of need, frowned into a middle distance, as if surreptitiously spying out a hole down which to bolt. "Yes," he said, coughing, "yes, the idea is, ah, ingenious, certainly."
    "But do you think it is
true?"
    Mästlin's frown deepened. It was a Sunday morning. They walked on the common behind the main hall of the university. The elms thrashed under a violent sky. The Professor had a grizzled beard and a drinker's nose. He weighed matters carefully before committing them to words. Europe considered him a great astronomer. "I am, "he announced, "of the opinion that the mathematician has achieved his goal when he advances hypotheses to which the phenomena correspond as closely as possible. You yourself would also withdraw, I believe, if someone could offer still better principles than yours. It by no means follows that the reality immediately conforms to the detailed hypotheses of every master."
    Johannes, debilitated and ill-tempered, scowled. This was the first time he had ventured out since the fever had abated. He felt transparent. There was a whirring high in the air, and then suddenly a crash of bells that made his nerves vibrate. "Why waste words?" he said, yelled, bells,
damn.
"Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God,
is
God himself..
."
    Bang.
    "O!" Mästlin stared at him.
    "… For what," smoothly, "exists in God that is not God himself?" A grey wind swarmed through the grass to meet him; he shivered. "But we are mouthing quotations merely: tell me what you truly think. "
    "I have said what I think," Mästlin snapped.
    "But that, forgive me, magister, is scholastic shilly-shally."
    "Well then, I am a schoolman!"
    "You, who teaches his students-who taught
me
-the heliocentric doctrine of Copernicus,
you
a schoolman?" but turned on the professor all the same a thoughtful sidelong glance.
    Mästlin pounced. "Aha, but that was also a schoolman,
anda.
saver of the phenomena!"
    "He only-"
    "A schoolman, sir! Copernicus respected the ancients."
    "Well then; but I do not?"
    "It seems to me, young man, that you have not much respect for anything!"
    "I respect the past, "Johannes said mildly. "But I wonder if it is the business of philosophers to follow slavishly the teaching of former masters?"
    He did: he wondered: was it? Raindrops like conjured coins spattered the pavestones. They gained the porch of the Aula Maxima. The doors were shut and bolted within, but there was room enough for