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“Dooley, do you have any idea how long it would take us to travel all around the world?”

“Um… a day? Maybe two?”

“At the rate of speed we travel, it will probably take us a couple of years.”

“Years!”

“Sure. Like I said, the world is a big place, Dooley, and we’re small in comparison.”

“Oh,” he said, his excitement somewhat dampened. But if I thought he’d give up now, I was of course mistaken, as I should have foreseen. Once my friend gets a thought into his tiny nut, it’s very hard to dislodge it, even with the assistance of a monkey wrench. Or a cat wrench, if such a device exists.

“So what if we ask Odelia to come along with us? She has a car, and that way it won’t take us years but maybe just a couple of days, right?”

“Even if Odelia took us along in her car, it would still take us months to travel around the world,” I said. “Also, since a large portion of the earth is covered in oceans, we’d need to swim across those oceans. And I don’t think Odelia will be up for such a challenge.” I knew I wasn’t. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away from the small town I like to call home—or even tame ones.

“So… what if Odelia and Chase built a boat, and we traveled across those oceans by boat?” He shivered at the thought. Cats aren’t entirely fond of traveling in a small metal box that bobs up and down on the waves. We’d recently allowed Odelia and Chase to drag us along on their honeymoon,which they’d chosen to spend on a cruise ship, and we still hadn’t fully recovered from the ordeal.

“Look, Odelia has a job, and so does Chase,” I pointed out. “Their respective bosses aren’t going to allow them to go on some crazy trip trying to prove what everyone already knows to be true anyway.”

“And what’s that?” Dooley asked, interested.

“That the earth is round!”

“Fido doesn’t seem to think so.”

“That’s because Fido is an idiot,” I said, starting to lose my patience.

“So… the earth isn’t flat?” asked Dooley, just to make sure.

“No, it’s not. And now can I please take my nap? Thank you.”

For a while, things were pleasantly quiet. Birds were chirping in the background, crickets were rubbing their wings, and I was about to engage in a kibble-filled dream when Dooley said,“Or we could ask Odelia to charter a plane. If we don’t fly too high, and keep an eye on the ground, we’ll know when we reach the world’s edge, wouldn’t we?”

“There is no edge,” I said.

“I know, and that’s what we need to prove to Fido. So we’ll take him along in our plane so he can see for himself.”

“Honestly? I really don’t care what Fido thinks.”

“But Buster does. He’s really worried about him.”

“Worried in what sense?”

“Well, he’s online all the time, talking to his flat earth friends, and he’s been neglecting his business, except when he’s trying to convince his customers about some of his ideas. They’re already starting to go elsewhere for their haircuts.”

“Fido is losing customers?”

“In droves, Max. The talk in town is that you can’t get a haircut without having Fido trying to fill your head with all kinds of nonsense, and who needs that?”

I certainly didn’t. Then again, I’m not the kind of cat who likes to go to the hair salon, so I can’t really speak from experience. But the Pooles are all very fond of Fido, especially the ladies. Odelia visits him once a month, her mom Marge twice a month and Gran even schedules weekly visits to make sure her little white curls are always in tip-top shape. The men are a different story. Uncle Alec never goes, since one of the requirements of going to a hair salon is that you actually have hair on top of your head, which I’m sorry to say is not so much the case anymore for Odelia’s uncle. His girlfriend Charlene Butterwick, our local mayor, doesn’t seem to mind, though. She herself is an avid Fido fan, and then there are Odelia’s dad Tex, who’s a lukewarm salon goer, as is Chase.

Chase is a cop, you see, and cops, since they are in constant contact with the members of the public, need to look presentable to some extent, so as not to scare them off too much. And Tex Poole is a doctor, and no sick person likes to visit a doctor who looks like a hell’s angel.

“So maybe we’ll drop by the hair salon later,” I told my friend. In spite of myself, this whole Flat Earth Society business had piqued my curiosity, and I wanted to see firsthand what effect Fido’s affiliation was having on the man’s state of mind. If he was scaring off his clientele, maybe Dooley and Buster were right, and something needed to be done. Hair hygiene is a serious business, and if Fido scared away all of his customers, soon Hampton Cove would turn into a hippie town, where the greasy mane ruled supreme.