Their system put the latitude numbers across the top of the sheet, going from zero to twelve hours, left to right, and the longitude, going from zero to twenty-four, top to bottom. Which, I suppose, seemed normal enough to them. To us, it was turned sideways. Furthermore, it was written in Westronese, and the spelling and phonic value of the letters in Westronese are at least as random as they are in English.
Another peculiarity of the map, to our eyes, anyway, was that the land masses were almost blank, while the oceans were thoroughly charted. The notations on ocean currents were particularly extensive. Still, we knew vaguely where we were, and once we turned the map sideways, the coastlines of North and South America were easily recognizable.
When we started doing the math to translate the Westronese system into something that we could think in, we discovered that we did not have a single writing instrument aboard. Not a pen, not a pencil, not a piece of burned stick. Not an auspicious beginning.
“Well, we left in an awful hurry,” Adam said. “I just wonder what else we forgot to remember.”
Still, we were engineers, and nobody gets good with machinery without having a good sense of visualization. We sat down and worked it out in our heads. After a few hours, we both actually managed to come up with the same answers.
“About twenty-two hundred miles west of the Galapagos Islands, and about three hundred north of the Equator,” I said.
“Yeah. That puts us just about due south of San Diego,” Adam said, “but I don’t think that we should try for it. It’s too far away. Actually, the islands of French Polynesia are our closest landfall, but we’re in the Equatorial Counter Current, and getting there might be rough.”
“Not to mention the problems of hitting a small island in a big ocean. I don’t have that much faith in our navigation. The same argument holds for trying for the Galapagos Islands.”
“Nah, I could do it. I can come to within a couple of minutes of the right latitude easy enough with the sextant, and then we could just drive along that line of latitude until we got there. You can watch for land birds, too, and the skies above an island are supposed to look greener than those above the ocean.”
“You’ve got to be pulling my leg. You don’t know a land bird from a penguin, and the only green thing I’m likely to see will be your throat if the weather gets rough.”
“You have very little faith, Treet.”
“I have none at all, as you’ve often noted. No, we have to make for the nearest large body of dirt we can find, namely the coast of Mexico, and our course is due northeast. That keeps everything easy.”
“Or as easy as a twenty-three hundred mile long trip in an open boat is likely to be.”
I said, “At our best speed, say maybe three miles an hour in this tubby boat with its little sails, we might be able to do that in a month or so. We’ve got all of five weeks worth of supplies aboard, so what’s to worry about? Have faith, my friend. Trust in God.”
Adam was looking for something that he could throw at me, something that we could afford to lose. He couldn’t find anything in that category, and eventually he gave up on it.
A little before noon by my watch, I handed Adam his sextant, and we went through the drill of shooting a noon sighting.
After twenty minutes of fiddling with the ancient contraption, and another hour of doing arithmetic in our heads, we decided that our latitude seemed to be about right, from what we remembered of what the sun should be doing at this time of the year. We could check it with greater accuracy at night, assuming that we could find the North Star.
The big problem was with the longitude. After much mental juggling with numbers, we came to the annoying conclusion that either we had been given a longitude reading that was four hundred seventy-one miles off, or that my wristwatch was wrong by twenty-seven minutes, or that our math was screwed up something fierce. We both did the math all over again, and we both came up with the same bad answer.
“Screw it!” I finally said. “It doesn’t really matter where we actually are! Knowing precisely where we are won’t change our actual arrival time one bit. If we just keep going northeast, we’ll hit land eventually.”
“Yeah, but will we still both be reasonably alive when we hit it?”
“If we’re going to die, do you really want to know about it in advance?”
“Yes, actually, I certainly do. I, at least, have a soul, and it would be nice to have the time to get it in order,” Adam said.
Adam seemed to prefer conning the boat, and since it didn’t make much difference to me, I let him do it. I was content to trim the jib, bail the bilge, and break out stores as required. I took over and manned the tiller when Adam got sleepy, but that didn’t happen in the first three days. Neither of us could sleep for the first seventy-two hours, what with the way a small boat bounces around on the Pacific ocean.
Even when the weather is nice.
THIRTY-FOUR
“There are some dark clouds there on the horizon,” I said.
“I saw ’em. More important is the fact that they are to windward. Not that we can do anything about it. Everything that can be tied down already is, and we can take the mast down in a few minutes if we have to. So take the Chinaman’s advice, and relax.”
“Right. You know, Adam, I’ve been thinking about something you said once on the island, about how it didn’t matter if you called something magic or technology. I think you were wrong.”
“Three days in the sun is getting to your brain. You should put your hat on.”
“I don’t need one. Unlike certain others, I still have all my hair. I meant what I said. Technology is something that you understand, or at least something that you could understand if you wanted to spend the time studying it. Magic is something that is inherently not understandable, but works on rules of its own. It is a phony alternative to the laws of physics.”
“If you want to define your terms that way, fine. I can’t see where it makes any difference. We form concepts as a first step in comprehending the varied universe around us. Names are merely the arbitrary labels we put on those concepts, handles that make for easy carrying. As long as we agree on which concept is attached to which label, we can communicate with each other. It doesn’t matter if the label is pink or blue.”
“But it does make a difference. A big one. All the horse shit going around about politically correct speech is happening because the annoying people pushing it believe in magic.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious. One of the big rules of magic is that anything may be substituted for its symbol. If you want to manipulate something or someone, you make or get a symbol for that thing or person, and then you manipulate the symbol. You’ll find the same rule in European Witchcraft, African Voodoo, and even in the various forms of American Indian, India Indian, and Oriental magic.”
“So? All that proves is that crazy people think alike. Or, if you want to state it in a politically correct fashion, it undeniably substantiates the postulation that certain mental aberrations tend to be predominately species specific rather than being substantially culturally engendered. Not that that’s a particularly politically correct thought. The people biggest on political correctness are the schoolteachers who want politicians to pay them to make the world bright, beautiful, and suitably respectful of schoolteachers and politicians. Therefore, people of all flavors have to be amenable to education, indoctrination, and persuasion. Strange ideas like inherited intelligence and innate ability must therefore be condemned as basically wrong, if not downright evil.”
“You figured all that out for yourself, eh? That might be why certain feeders from the public trough push political correctness, but not why it is there in the first place,” I said.
Adam moved us a half point farther off the wind, and said, “Personally, I think that political correctness has a lot to do with the art of memorizing meaningless or at least inane phrases so as to keep your lungs and vocal cords in operation while your disengaged brain tries to think its way out of the dumb shit question that some pushy person with a microphone just asked you, hopefully while offending as few politically active people as possible. In American politics, of course, people who are not politically active simply don’t count, and the only important point for a politician is to not offend inactive people enough to make them active for the other side.