[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
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Welcome back to Ship of Fools and thanks for reading!
In this flashback chapter, Liz heads back to DC to do some research in the NASA archives. But on the way, she comes across a coincidence that can’t be just a coincidence.
AS HER plane reached cruising altitude, Liz pushed her seat back, hoping to get some sleep on the flight back to New York. She’d returned to Los Angeles from Himmelstein’s desert retreat late the night before and hadn’t slept well. When her alarm went off at five am, it felt like she’d just fallen into a deep sleep from which it was hard to wake. It was absurdly early for her flight, but her mother had warned her to leave plenty of time to spare, construction to protect LAX from the rising Pacific having snarled access to the airport.
After five minutes of her mind racing and no sleep on the horizon, she sat up straighter and tried an in-flight magazine. Anything to distract her brain from its obsessive replaying of Himmelstein’s story. It couldn’t be true, of course. So much of it was unlikely, too many people would have needed to keep the secret all these years. A mathematician had even calculated the odds of someone blowing the whistle on the regular version of the moon landing hoax: ninety percent after only three years. And Himmelstein’s version, with its shadow Apollo program, would have required an even greater number of collaborators. Surely someone would have seen the absurdity of the duplicate mission and gone to the press.
But still she kept replaying the connections over and over again, imagining ways to fill in the gaps, pondering the kind of research she’d have to do to confirm or negate the tale. Herzog’s whereabouts. The career of Max Slobotnik, the alleged cameraman. Investigating Herzog seemed the likeliest bet. The training for space travel alone would have occupied months. How did that fit with the official record?
God, even to herself she sounded like one of the conspiracy nuts she’d interviewed for her book. Once she started seeing the connections, she couldn’t unsee them, and the more she kept going over them, the more deeply ingrained they became. It was simply how the human brain worked, the neocortex filling its role as a pattern-recognition machine. When it made a new connection, it triggered the hypothalamus to send a hit of dopamine through the body, further reinforcing the pattern. And once the pattern was ingrained, data that didn’t fit was likely to be rejected or trigger a stress response. It was like those drawings that could be either a vase or two faces. Some saw the vase first and then it flipped to the faces, or vice versa. Others saw only one version, and couldn’t get it to switch. And a very few could flip it back and forth with ease. She’d always felt she belonged to the latter group, but now she wasn’t so sure.
She kept swiping through the magazine, trying to keep her brain from driving these paranoid patterns any deeper, when she came to a spread that stopped her. There, in a regular segment called “Pilots of Yesteryear,” was a piece on Max Slobotnik, with an old photo showing him decked out in a commercial pilot’s uniform. According to the brief bio, he had joined the airline in 1964 after his career in the Air Force, then moved on to a desk job with NASA in 1970, retiring in 1990.
Liz pressed the magazine’s cancel button, stunned. This must be the cover story given for Slobotnik after his theft of the incriminating film. But its appearance in this magazine on a flight she just happened to be taking — surely it was no coincidence. There are no coincidences, as every conspiracy theorist she’d ever interviewed liked to say.
Maybe she was wrong about it being a regular feature. Maybe it was a special just for this issue, maybe it was intended just for her. She recognized how crazy that was, even as she made a note to check other issues of the magazine. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was telling her she had to pursue this story, as outlandish as it was.
The raw film footage, that was the key. Everything else was too circumstantial, too easily faked. Failing to find it wouldn’t prove anything, but if she did, it would be all the proof she’d need. It hardly registered with her that she’d gone from trying to refute the story to trying to prove it.
She got out her smart phone and opened a video connection to Kevin, her contact at NASA. He accepted the connection right away, and his grinning face came onto her screen.
“Liz, I haven’t heard from you in a while. How are you? You look tired.”
“Oh, you know how it is with travel.”
“Come on, an old hand like you? Where are you headed?”
“Back home from LA. But listen, do you happen to know of any footage from Apollo 11 that didn’t make it over to the National Archives?”
He laughed. “What do you mean, like those lost tapes? I admit, that wasn’t the agency’s shiningest moment.”
“No, I mean film footage. They shot on film, not just TV broadcasts, right?”
Now he was frowning. Liz hoped it was out of concern. “Yes, of course. But I don’t know of anything off the top of my head. Why?” She ignored the note of suspicion in his tone.
“Oh, my editor has me doing a color piece on another crackpot. Just running down some loose ends.” She tried to keep her voice bright, hoping he’d understand her predicament.
“I thought you were out of that racket. And you never needed to check out the wackos’ stories before. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Sure, just jet lagged. But you know, Sid wants me to do a thorough debunking. No film canister unturned.” She tried a smile.
“Okay, Liz, I’ll check around, but I doubt I’m going to find anything.”
“I’m going to change my flight to DC at my stopover in Dallas. Probably be there this evening.”
“Ah, I’m sure I won’t have anything by then, but why don’t you come by tomorrow morning?” His eyes shifted to the corner of the screen. “I have some time in my schedule at ten.”
“Great! I’ll see you then.”
She swiped away the connection, then put her head back and closed her eyes, hoping she wasn’t flushing her reputation down the toilet.
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 are They trying to tell Liz with that piece on Max Slobotnik. And who are “They,” anyway?
Next up: Chapter 7, “Social Darwinists.” Back on the Anóitoi, we meet Reverend Paul Lee as he tries to convince Liz to take Creation Science seriously. But he is soon interrupted by Darwinists of an entirely different stripe.