KEPLER TOOK TO THE ROAD once again, but this time there was no Tycho Brahe waiting at the other end to welcome him. Where would he find a home this time? How would he live? How would he raise his children? Where would he find a place to work in peace? All of Europe was at war it seemed, and wherever he tried to run, the war was already there. Kepler’s greatest joy was in the ecstasy of perfect order, in the astonishing beauty of God’s mind, and that is where he preferred to stay; and yet, as if by some irresistible force of gravity, he was forever pulled back to the mud and the blood of the earth, to live out his life in the battlefield that was Germany. The most immediate task before him was to find a publisher for the Rudolphine Tables, and the best place to do that was in Ulm, on the Danube River, a few days’ walk from Tübingen. He had many connections there, old friends and acquaintances, correspondents of many years standing, even relatives. Ulm was the home of his distant cousins the Ficklers, the city where the great Benigna Fickler, a woman of learning, had once held court.
