Ship of Fools - Chapter 15
Over the Line
[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
[Go to the Table of Contents.]
Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science reporter grappling with conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and anti-science beliefs.
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In this chapter, Liz can’t resist the impulse to persuade Sarge away from his flat-earth beliefs, even as she tells herself it’s not what she’s doing. (And here’s one nice feature of Substack: I can include illustrations to give an idea of the diagrams Liz draws for Sarge. Probably couldn’t get away with that in print or an ebook.)
“COME ON, Sarge, it’s a beautiful night out.” Liz batted her eyes at him. “How about we go out on deck for a little star-gazing, just you and me.”
He glared at her across the dinner table, apparently immune to her charms. Not that she’d been serious with the flirting, but she’d run out of other temptations.
Sarge pushed his plate away, the half-eaten ahi still swimming in the decadent sauce Chef Guillaume had prepared. “No, I’m good in here.”
“I wouldn’t mind looking at some stars with you,” said Mike, grinning from the next table over.
She gave him what she hoped was a discouraging look. “Do I need to convince you the world is round?”
“Erm, not really.” He went back to the plate in front of him.
Mike certainly wasn’t bad looking, and it didn’t take much to imagine what he’d look like with his shirt off. But the whole militia thing was a turnoff. As much as the languorous days of lounging in the sun on the lido deck, margarita in hand, had left her generally horny, none of the available partners seemed quite right. Sarge was out of the question, of course, even if she’d felt any sort of attraction there.
She turned back to him. “I just want to show you the Southern Cross, if you can stay awake that long.” The ship had held its line-crossing ceremony for the crew, all but the captain being Pollywogs, two days back. Now the southern hemisphere’s most famous constellation, hidden by the horizon until they’d neared the Equator, was making a nightly show in the southern skies. Tonight it would rise around ten p.m.
“And what’s that supposed to prove?”
“That we’re on a spinning ball.”
“Not interested.”
“Come on, Sarge, you’re the one who always wants evidence you can see with your own eyes. This is it.”
“Sorry, Liz, you’re not going to baffle me with your heliocentric bullshit.”
Mike cleared his throat, and he and the rest of his men rose from their table as one, helpfully carrying their dishes into the galley.
“Way to keep the party going,” Sarge said.
“You’re the one who got belligerent.”
“We’re on this trip to see the Ice Wall, and that’s it. For once, I’m setting the agenda.”
She glared at him, and he stared right back. Next to Sarge, Dawa gave them both a sad smile.
It wasn’t that she really wanted to convince Sarge of anything — that wasn’t a journalist’s job. But she wanted him to at least look at the evidence this trip was affording both of them, so she could record his response to it. Then again, his refusal to even look at the stars and think about what they meant was its own kind of response, one too typical of flat-earthers. That was the thing — Sarge was coming off like a stereotype, and she didn’t want that for him, or for her article. At least, that’s what she told herself.
They’d already spent too many nights over the past week like this. If it wasn’t for Chef Guillaume’s insistence that dinner be served at a specific time — “When Rock’s not on board, this isn’t pret a manger, how you say in Americain, a short order house?” — they’d probably all have continued eating separately to avoid such confrontations.
The argument over the trip’s logistics hadn’t helped. Sarge seemed to think they were just going to sail right up to the Ice Wall, spot the UN guards, then head home. He’d at least chartered an icebreaker, complete with helipad, out of Ushuaia, since Rock wisely prohibited the Fool’s Gold from sailing south of Tierra Del Fuego. But Sarge had made no preparations for cold weather gear and the like. And when they actually got to Antarctica and discovered not a single ice wall, but a complex land- and sea-scape of vast icebergs, pack ice, and glaciated mountains rising from the coast, what then?
She’d shown him a photo of a rocky beach with penguins and a snowy peak rising in the background. “Where’s your Ice Wall?” she demanded.
“If this really is the Antarctic — and I’m not admitting it is, those penguins could easily have been Photoshopped in — then it must be beyond those mountains.”
“Funny, I don’t remember any mountains around the edge of your flat-earth model. But anyway, we might have to climb over something like that to see if there’s an ice wall on the other side.”
“We’ll just take the helicopter.”
But Jerry, the chopper pilot, had nixed that idea. He had no Antarctic flight experience and there were too many variables that could keep them grounded: spotty GPS, wonky compasses, wind, fog. He recommended they be prepared to go on foot.
Dawa had been an unexpected ally. “Yes, we should be prepared for anything.”
“What, like ice climbing?”
“Yes, of course. And skiing across glaciers, camping in snow.”
Sarge had turned to her. “And you’re up for all that?”
“I’m no climber, but I go cross-country skiing every winter in the Berkshires, and I keep in shape.” She’d spent some time every day in the yacht’s fitness center and had encouraged Sarge to do the same. “And Dawa can train us in everything we need to know, right?”
“Of course.”
“See, Sarge, it should be a fun adventure.”
Sarge had relented and the plan was to gear up in Valparaiso. Then Sarge had balked at the list of equipment, which included everything Dawa claimed they’d need for a self-propelled journey over rugged ice and snow: down suits, goggles, mittens, long johns, thick socks, plastic boots, crampons, on and on, and sleds to carry it all. He’d even included five aluminum extension ladders, which he claimed would be useful if they encountered crevasses. That had spurred another round of debate, but at last they had the list pared down to what Sarge would accept.
Liz still had her doubts about how they were supposed to approach the continent, a topic to which Sarge had given little thought. “We’ll just sail south, right? The captain of the Resolute will know the way.”
But it wouldn’t be that easy. In theory, once they reached Antarctica it should become obvious they were sailing around the outer edge of a continent, not inside a ring of ice that encircled the entire Earth. But in practice, Antarctica was far from a simple circle, with a huge peninsula sticking out toward South America, and a large bay facing New Zealand. And it was surrounded by pack ice, making it difficult to see the coast for most of the voyage around it. Even the Swiss Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition, using an icebreaker, had only sailed in sight of the continent for about a third of its journey.
Then there was the difficulty of approaching the land mass itself, even in an icebreaker. The most direct way from Ushuaia to the main part of the continent was through the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula. But there would be pack ice before they hit the Ronne Ice Shelf. The Resolute had a storied name, but in online photos it looked like a rust bucket. Would it take them that far? Images of the Shackleton expedition rose before her eyes, the prospect of floating in pack ice for a year with Sarge far from enticing.
She scanned the websites of expedition companies that took people onto the continent from South America. Those that approached by boat stuck to the peninsula and barely crossed the Antarctic Circle. Those that did reach the interior of the continent all traveled by air from Ushuaia or Punta Arenas. And she had to get Sarge to the interior to convince him this Ice Wall was a figment of his imagination.
She tried showing him the expedition companies’ websites and maps of the routes they offered and the approaches they used, some all the way to the pole, but he was having none of it.
“That proves nothing. Sure, they take their customers somewhere, but how would they know they were at the pole or not?”
“GPS?”
He only shook his head and laughed. “Some people are just so gullible. Surprising, for someone who considers herself an investigative reporter — but oh yeah! Your job is to prop up the dominant paradigm, not to question it. Those guides are just paid shills working for the UN, if not outright CIA spies. Of course they fly to wherever they take these people. Once you’re on a plane, there are too many ways they can trick you, just like Ester did with that ‘space’ ride — hyper-realistic screens masquerading as windows, compasses that point the wrong way. Fortunately, I’m not about to fall for that.”
She’d given up trying to convince him of the need for expert guides, but she kept scanning the websites, and coming back to one company, Amazing Antarctic Adventures. They had a base on Union Glacier and a penguin-viewing outpost on the pack ice at the base of the Ronne Ice Shelf, with regular flights between the two. That seemed perfect, and it didn’t hurt that the staff photo of their lead guide showed steely blue eyes and an open grin. She began to see the possibilities of a backup plan, and just that afternoon she’d fired off an email to the company contact.
Now, seated across the dinner table from Sarge, she tried a different tack. “What do you remember about ellipses from geometry?”
“God, Liz, not another boring lesson! You sound like the teachers who brainwash our kids about the globe Earth.”
She already knew Sarge cared little about the scientific — or even the pseudoscientific — aspects of the flat-earth fallacy. Some Arthurs — like that Brit she’d met on the Anóitoi — came at it from a math or science angle. A profoundly flawed one, but they thought they were doing real science, even defending it. Not Sarge. He’d been through a lot of the other popular conspiracies before hitting on the flat earth, calling it a master conspiracy that incorporated all the others. So his knowledge of science was limited, which probably explained why he didn’t want to look at the stars — he knew he’d have no response.
“Look, I’m not trying to convince you of anything, I just want to explain what I see in the ‘heliocentric model,’ as you call it.” If she could just show him how it all fit together, and what it all meant to her, maybe she could get through to him at last.
“Okay…” He folded his arms across his chest.
“So an ellipsis is an oval, right? But a special kind of oval with two focal points. The Greeks discovered it, so it has nothing to do with the heliocentric model. With me so far?”
“Sure.”
“So flash forward nearly two thousand years to Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. You’ve heard of them?”
“Sure. And they are shills for the globe Earth.”
“But this is about heliocentrism, not the shape of the Earth. The thing you should love about them is that they relied on the evidence of their own senses to inform their theories. Tycho made the most accurate measurement of the paths of the planets before the telescope. Direct observation, right?”
“Okay.”
“And Kepler relied on those measurements, even throwing out some of his own ideas when the facts contradicted them. He thought circles were a perfect shape, and God wouldn’t make anything less than perfect, so the planets must all orbit in circles. He spent three years trying to prove that and failed, because Tycho’s measurements wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t let ideology or received wisdom control him like the other sheeple did, he was brave enough to accept the evidence. You ought to love that, right?”
“If you say so.”
“So he went back to the drawing board and finally hit on the ellipse. He realized that Mars’s orbit is elliptical, with the sun at one of the focal points.” She sat back, as if she’d just won a victory.
“So what?”
“So a mathematical principle, discovered thousands of years before, ends up explaining the orbit of the planets? To the religiously minded, that seems like it has to be a product of design. Kepler certainly felt he’d seen into the mind of God. For me, it’s just…beautiful.”
“It sounds to me like you and Kepler are just looking for patterns that aren’t there. Seems pretty random to me.”
“But that’s just one of his laws.”
“Laws, eh? My God, what hubris!”
“Today we’d call it a theory, but I’m not going to debate the meaning of that word with you.”
“Theories, that’s all you really have. I have theories too.”
“Argh! Then laws. They’re laws!” She waved at Benny, who was clearing the next table over. “Could I have another glass of the cabernet please, Benny?”
Sarge drained his glass. “And I’ll have another Heinie while you’re at it. Looks like we’ll be here a while.”
“And a green tea for you, Mr. Tenzing?” Benny asked.
“Yes, please.”
“So Kepler’s second law…”
“How many does this guy have?”
“Just three.”
Sarge rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Thank heaven for small mercies.”
“So his second law is really neat.”
Sarge looked over at Dawa. “Hear that, Tenzing? It’s neat. Next she’ll be showing us something totally keeno!”
She ignored him and began drawing dots on the ellipse to indicate arcs of different lengths. “You see how this arc near the focal point — the sun — is longer than this one farthest away from it?”
“Yeah?”
“I drew it that way because a planet travels faster when it’s closer to the sun than when it’s farther away. Those arcs aren’t equal in distance, but they are equal in the time it takes a planet to traverse them.”
“I’m supposed to think that’s neat?”
“That’s only half of it. Now if we draw lines from the points of those arcs to the focal point of the sun, we can make different wedges…” She drew lines from each point to the sun, creating lopsided pieces of pie. “So you see these different wedges, the long, skinny one and the short, squat one?”
“Yeah?”
“They may have completely different shapes, but all the wedges are equal in area. Doesn’t that blow your mind?”
“I mean, maybe?” Sarge knitted his brow and stared at the drawing.
“Such symmetry, it’s just…beautiful.” She sighed, seeing that she really wasn’t reaching him. “So that’s Kepler’s second law — planets sweep out equal areas in equal times. It all balances out.”
Benny brought out their drinks.
“So we just have one to go? I probably won’t even finish my beer before this lecture’s over.” He took a long sip.
“Okay, so Kepler’s third law. Just like a planet in its own orbit travels faster when it’s nearer to the sun, the inner planets go around faster than ones that are farther away. That’s why they call the sun’s closest planet Mercury, because it moves so fast.”
“Yeah? Seems pretty obvious.”
“But Kepler also realized that the speed increases or decreases according to a precise mathematical correlation — the duration of the orbit squared equals the distance from the sun cubed. Neat, right?”
“I don’t know, Liz, sounds pretty abstract, even if I believed in those distances, which I don’t.”
“But Kepler’s third law was corroborated long after his death, as astronomers discovered the last of the planets and the dwarf planets. They all follow that same proportion of duration to distance.”
Sarge scoffed. “Seems pretty easy to just make up a distance for each planet that matches Kepler’s prediction. How are the rest of us to know?”
“Like I said, I’m not trying to persuade you, I’m just trying to explain what it all means to me.”
“How does any of this apply to anything real?”
“Because we can see these laws working all around us.”
“No we can’t.”
“Have you ever watched a figure skater?”
“Sure. I mean not often, but you can’t avoid it during the winter Olympics.”
“So when they spin, what do they do? If they want to go slow, they hold their arms out to the side and they slow down. But if they tuck everything in, making themselves more compact around the axis of rotation, then they’re suddenly spinning so fast you can’t even follow it. Orbital mechanics in everyday life.”
“So?”
“So the same laws that apply out there in the solar system apply here on Earth. It all makes sense. And the correspondences, the symmetries, they’re beautiful. Everything is connected, from the tiniest grain of sand to us to the farthest star. We’re part of the universe and the universe is part of us.”
Sarge glanced sideways at Dawa. “Gee, Liz, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?”
She realized she’d been getting a little worked up, but she hated Sarge’s mocking tone. “And what does your model, such as it is, tell us? That nothing makes sense, that nothing is connected, that the stars are just mysterious lights stuck to a dome, and the sun and moon just hover in the sky like two weightless lamps, and you don’t even know what they are. And the planets, can you even explain them at all? At least Ptolemy, as wrong as he was, had a model that explained almost everything, and it was beautiful in its own way. But your model is the opposite, ugly in its know-nothingism and nihilism. Want to explain lava? Heck, just make up furnaces below the Earth’s flat surface, never mind where they came from or who keeps them running or what fuel they burn. No, it’s all bullshit, and offensive to everything I know to be true.”
She stopped. She was breathing hard. Sarge was staring at her, speechless at last. Dawa looked more distressed than she’d ever seen him.
It didn’t take long for Sarge to regain his snark. “Gee, Liz, you seem triggered,” he said with a fake look of concern.
She’d had enough. She grabbed her half-full glass of wine and stood up. “I need some air.” She left the dining salon without looking back.
Out on deck, she leaned against the railing and sipped her wine, trying to calm down, halfway wishing she’d taken up smoking. She tried to concentrate on the stars. Cassiopeia was low on the horizon in the north, with the Big Dipper nowhere to be found. Explain that on your flat earth, Sarge! Orion was just rising in the east, flat on his back, bow pointing at the sky. The bright star Sirius had just risen, a little farther south. And farther south still, it was all strange, the constellations — asterisms — bearing unfamiliar names like Carina and Hydrus. At least Crux, the Southern Cross, had been easy to spot, on the nights she’d stayed up into the wee hours to see it. As they moved south, that wouldn’t be a problem. It would appear in the sky all night — as long as there was a night — rotating around the southern celestial pole.
This is what she’d wanted Sarge to look at and try to explain: If the planet actually was flat, why did some stars disappear and others appear as they moved south? Why did the stars rotate clockwise around the southern celestial pole, but counterclockwise around the northern? And once they got to the land of the midnight sun, how would that work on a flat world?
But of course he couldn’t explain any of it. Facts like these didn’t matter to a person caught up in a conspiracy theory, as she well knew. Which made her outburst all the sillier. Conspiracists were infamous for holding diametrically opposed beliefs, even about the same conspiracy.
No, Sarge’s resistance to facts and logic was easy to explain. What was harder to explain was her own growing obsession with convincing him to give up his false beliefs. It wasn’t part of her job, or even necessary for her article. But still she found his obdurate ignorance offensive. Why should that be?
Just then Dawa appeared at her side. It was strange how he often would sneak up on her like that, but he never startled her.
“Ms. Dare, are you all right?”
“I’m fine, and I’ve told you, call me Liz.”
“You seemed distraught. Your mind seemed over-run with a storm of emotions — unlike you, I must say.”
“You mean Sarge really gets my goat? You’re right about that.” She raised her glass to her lips, then realized it was long-empty. “It’s just that, I was taught to believe the world is knowable, you know? And that we could communicate about it, find common ground, mutually agreed-upon facts, even solve problems, if we could just think and communicate clearly enough. I went to college during the Obama years, so that seemed possible. But all that went out the window with everything that came after. I guess I should have wised up then, but I never did.”
“This is what happens when we cling too tightly to concepts.”
She glanced sharply at him, then pointed south. “Look Dawa, that’s the Southern Cross, just coming up over the horizon. It exists, despite what you and I may think about it. There’s a reason we can see it now, but we couldn’t see it this early last night, and we couldn’t see it at all the night we left port in LA. And the reason is, Earth is round. It’s a fact, not a concept.”
Dawa smiled. “But this Southern Cross, it is only a pattern in our minds, correct? Its stars are far apart and have nothing to do with each other?”
Liz groaned. “You have me there. But it was the roundness of the Earth I was talking about. That’s still a fact.”
“Of course. And recognizing facts is important. But it is also possible to cling too tightly to facts, to build up our entire self-concept around them. This is how we fall into ego-delusion.”
“So what do Buddhists believe in, if not facts?”
“We believe that the only constant is change, that what is a fact today may not be a fact tomorrow. And so we follow a path of non-attachment, whether to things, facts, beliefs, or concepts.”
“I really could have used some of that detachment tonight.” They were silent for a few moments as the ship continued south. It must have been her imagination, but she thought she could feel the air growing colder.
“So, Dawa, you seem pretty attached to the idea of getting onto the Antarctic continent, maybe even to the South Pole. What do you think you’ll find there? I know you don’t believe in this Ice Wall.”
“I follow the path in front of me. If it leads onto the continent of Antarctica, and even to the pole, then that is where I will be. But I cling to no definite beliefs about what I might find along the way. Better to keep an open mind and see what comes to pass.”
Liz couldn’t help but laugh. “You really play up the Eastern inscrutability thing, don’t you?”
He dipped his head. “When it suits my purposes.”
In the dim starlight his smile was — Liz wished there were another word for it — inscrutable.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.
What do you think of Liz’s efforts to get Sarge to admit he’s wrong? Understandable? Misguided? Why do you think she responded with such emotion?
Next up: Chapter 16, “The Worst Kind of Socialist.” Can you guess who might be coming to Reverend Paul’s rescue?
Love the reference to figure skating and “Everyday Orbital mechanics.”