The Earth Isn’t Round
by Arthur Davis
My name isn’t Arthur Davis. Who would choose such a prosaic, forgettable name unless they were being investigated by the CIA, Interpol, MI-6 and wanted to avoid detection? And why would these elite branches of international law enforcement be interested in hunting me down like a rabid dog?
For those few of you who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in three years with advanced degrees in both Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, the answer is obvious. I had developed a theory which I called “Enhanced Parallax Perspectives and Triangulating Celestial Spheres” that cleverly and clearly proves that the Earth isn’t a near-perfect sphere but a triangle, and not a particularly impressive one.
The simplicity and elegance of my theory and its implicit accuracy immediately upset and outraged much of the international scientific community, along with many influential American politicians. The world has risen up to defend itself and its antiquated versions of how planets are shaped as I am being burned in effigy in scientific institutions across the globe.
My response to this international backlash has been swift, pungent, and appropriate. “What the hell is the matter with you idiots?” I railed in an interview at the reception to my groundbreaking June 2022 article in Theoretical Physics Anonymous. “Didn’t anyone out there take third-grade, advanced Euclidean geometry, which addresses the theory of the conic sections, including the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola, on which my findings are based? Seriously?”
* * *
I had to go underground because of the worldwide firestorm created by that treatise. And I had to let go of Isabella, my maid and part-time linguist who had mastered a dozen languages before she was ten.
« Oh, s’il te plaît, s’il te plaît, ne me laisse pas partir, » she pleaded.
Undercover had been an important part of my life these past few years, and I was heartbroken that I had to go back to it in order to protect both myself and her.
“Ach, bitte, bitte, lass mich nicht ab.”
“I have to.”
“Å, vær så snill, ikke la meg gå.”
“Your life is in danger staying here.”
“Oh, si us plau, no em deixis anar,” she said, her cheeks swollen red with tears.
“I am not worthy of your devotion.”
“Oh, per favore, per favore, non lasciarmi partire.”
* * *
“You can’t spend the rest of your life on the run,” Harvey Musgrave said as we scarfed down beer and chips in the living room of my Montana log cabin.
I inherited the sprawling 1,748-acre ranch from Samuel Fay, one of my ancestors, who is credited with inventing the paper clip. The first patent for a bent wire paper clip was awarded in the United States to him in 1867. This clip was originally intended primarily for attaching tickets to fabric, although the patent recognized that it could be used to attach papers together. Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with degrees in electronics, science, and mathematics, was falsely credited with inventing the paper clip in 1899.
“Maybe not, but what choice do I have?” I said, already regretting having sent Isabella back to her lucrative modeling career.
Musgrave was desperate to convince me, strongly believing I would eventually be caught and jailed for War Crimes against modern physics, a serious felony in many European Nations and Nauru, an island country in the southwestern Pacific.
He had been my dearest friend since grade school. He was smarter than I was but too introverted to make a name for himself. A dear, sweet man, whose only youthful eccentricity back then, besides sporting an artificial limp, was a passion for tap dancing and playing the harmonica at the same time while walking back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge.
At his most musically incoherent moments, young Musgrave wasn’t in danger of hurting himself or anyone, but the California authorities felt that ignoring that kind of eccentric behavior set a bad precedent. Eventually, the authorities tracked him down and gave his parents two choices.
“Either keep him off the bridge,” they demanded, “or we will have him convicted of disturbing the peace and posing a threat to the safety of thousands. If you don’t get this under control, we will have him convicted and extradited to Georgia, where he will be condemned to harvesting peaches under the blazing sun for the rest of his life.”
“What do you think?” he asked me, petrified of his parents and psychotically evil sister, Marjorie, whom everyone on the West Coast hated and were certain would someday be the leader of an ultra-extreme right-wing party yet to be formed.
“You’re going to pick peaches for the rest of your life. I’m certain. I have credible contacts who confirmed that your parents have already cut a deal with the authorities in return for an estate they were offered in Normandy, your father’s favorite place to vacation. You have to get out of town today, tonight by 5:34 at the latest. And before dinner.”
Musgrave gave me a knowing handshake. “Thanks,” was his only sad reply.
He dug in his heels and, fuming with defiance, refused to take my advice.
* * *
I called Ernie Miles, my bookie, a teenage math whiz who dealt in longshots, and placed twenty thousand dollars that Musgrave would be told of the deal at dinner. His family had sacrificed his future for a measly European estate. Miles confirmed the Las Vegas line at 280:1.
Fools.
I cleaned up on young Musgrave’s misfortune.
Getting a royalty on every paper clip ever manufactured, I didn’t need the money and donated all of it to pet charities.
* * *
Since then, Isabella was featured on the cover of Vogue, Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Popular Mechanics. I miss her. She had a lovely way of bending over in her skimpy French upstairs maid’s outfit to pick up whatever I dropped, accidentally or not.
I’ve considered multiple options to secure my safety, including surgeries to hide my identity involving body-lengthening or complete facial reconstruction; I was thinking somewhere between George Clooney and Samuel L. Jackson. Maybe alter my fingerprints, eye color, and retinal alterations in ways the most sophisticated scanning couldn’t detect. I also researched voice, tonality and speech-augmentation procedures.
In order to guarantee the deception I flew to Denmark, a country where everyone wears costumes throughout the year. I purchased a clever rubber mask with large black glasses and bulging eyes, an oversized nose and a thick unruly moustache so I would not be recognized. I was wearing my favorite rumpled trench coat and wide-brimmed fedora which had served me well in the past.
* * *
“Are you Professor Abe Heffernan Steinbach?”
I turned and faced this small, frail creature of maybe fifty years who suddenly appeared from nowhere, though the concept of nowhere eludes me to this day. “No.”
“Yes, you are,” he said, jumping up and down at a frightening pace. “You have to print a retraction immediately. It has caused so much disruption in the global scientific community. Hundreds of other proven astronomical and cosmological theories, the very foundation of how we look at Earth, our solar system, the galaxy, and our place in the universe, are crumbling as we speak.”
“I am a dishwasher at the restaurant across the street,” I said in an Armenian dialect I had been perfecting in the past few weeks. There was no restaurant across the street, or anywhere in sight.
“Yes. Actually,” he said stepping back, “the glasses and bulbous nose and mustache don’t match your photo in the press,” he said, walking away looking dejected. “I got it wrong again. What’s the matter with me?” he mumbled over and over before getting into a chauffeured 1929 Bentley 4.5-Litre Tourer in the style of Vanden Plas, which was last auctioned by Bonhams, a privately owned international auction house, in November 2014 for $471,900, and driven away.
* * *
In the last few years I have aged and hopefully gained some wisdom. I found a wife, a charming, quite beautiful professor at a small Vermont college, whose father was a physicist and one of the few scientists that gave my theory serious consideration. I wish I had met Margaret earlier but feel blessed to have her at my side, even if the need to wear my rubber mask remained an unsettling distraction. I’ve almost come to the point of being settled down, for a man who’s just crossed the fifty-yard line.
I’ve been a plumber, construction worker, park ranger, tutored teenagers in math and physics, gardener and finally arrived at peace with myself. It might be my imagination, but like any parent, you want to see your child succeed. My child was a brilliant theory.
In recent years, the backlash has all but disappeared, and I’ve noticed more footnotes in scholarly papers mentioning parts of my theory, in part or whole. Maybe the world, or fringes of it, have at least not blown off my achievement as the working of a madman.
It’s been a strange journey. I have asked myself, if I had to do it over, would I have presented my theory to the world now as I had done when I was in my early twenties? And every so often, the answer would be no.
And that amount represented the merest fraction of my soul, even with the more tempered ego of a man who was once a pariah and thankfully has been downgraded to what could be called an influential oddity.
* * *
Once, many years past, I pretended to be a Federal Express delivery man. Both my parents signed off on the delivery of bath towels I stole from Neiman Marcus. They looked me right in the eye and never noticed. Of course, I regretted not having to stay in contact with them or my friends and family these long difficult years, but I was certain their home was bugged and they were being followed 24/7 in the hope I would crack and try and make contact.
After so many years on the run with Margaret lovingly at my side, wearing her own rubber mask and barely surviving as an international fugitive, I found out last week that I've been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics for my early cosmological insights and now universally accepted theory that Earth — like every planet in the universe — is a perfectly shaped triangle.
At least, I’m pretty sure of it.
Sort of.
Copyright © 2025 by Arthur Davis
