Chapter 68: Kelvin's Legacy

The Chums, now including Pugnax’s Ksenija, catch a great updraft over the Sahara, yet end up descending towards a Counter-Earth, the Anti-Chthon of Philolaus of Tarentum. This seems to confirm Chick’s theory that:

“each star and planet we see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy” (1020).

The boys survive the passage, but return, on a mission in search of their Russian counterpart. Finding him, they join him in mercy missions during the war, dropping, not masonry, but food and medical supplies to victims of the European War.

This chapter takes the Chums through the Armistics, and they leave for a mission back to America where the aeronauts encounter the “Sodality of Aethernauts” (1030). Thus the Chums are paired into domesticity, Chick with Viridian, Lindsay with Primula, Miles with Glee, Randolph with Heartsease, and Darby with Blaze.

And finally, in LA, Chcik reunites with his Dad, his Dad’s new wife Treacle, and sidekicks Roswell Bounce and Merle Rideout.

Reunions and couplings all around! Seems like even cynical people like Pynchon believe in the power of Love.