Regardless, Jed certainly wasn’t going to waste the whole night sleeping. He wanted to know more about what was going on, and how he was being used by both his brother and Transport. It was like he was being pulled in a single direction, but by two diametrically opposed forces—if such a thing could be possible. He wanted to be online, because he wanted to know more about this place, and what was happening to him, and, at the same time, he wanted to find out why he was being used… why his being online was so important to his brother.
He started reading through the files again, repeating his process of hacking into Transport’s system. He accessed the information on how Transport had determined that they could mine okcillium from the road base back on Earth. It was all right there in a memo sent to Transport command:
“We already ripped up the roads the first time around, only for a different purpose. This time, we’ll just put the road base material through a few more steps, and we can extract the okcillium at the rate of ten grams per one hundred metric tons.”
This information perplexed Jed. If Transport hadn’t harvested the okcillium from the road base the “first time around” (whatever that meant), and had only subsequently learned that the okcillium was in the road base, then what did that mean? That they went back to Earth to get it? So they went back in time?
He’d always liked puzzles, but this one seemed to be unsolvable. So he switched gears. Rather than study events in time, why not study time itself? He searched for anything he could find about the basis and science of time… and time travel. He studied documents and reports from throughout written history. For the most part, these papers were written in a style and manner that was completely over his head. He couldn’t make head nor tail out of them. So he closed his eyes, looked out into the universe above the Amish Zone, and tried to imagine what time must look like. He tried visualizing many different concepts, but every time he would encounter some flaw in his analogy. That is, until he struck on the idea of thinking of time as a long string—or, rather, an immense fabric made up of a large number of strings. This analogy wasn’t perfect, but it held up better than any other he’d come up with.
He remembered that as a boy his father had once told him that space was like an enormous blanket, or carpet, which God had stretched into place starting from a single point. Not like a blanket that swaddled the Earth like a baby, but more like an unimaginably large fabric that stretched through nothingness and the void. And the planet Earth was just one little element embedded in the fabric.
He’d seen Amish women making fabric on looms, so he understood that process. And, he thought, his own life had been like a journey along one of these threads. It started at one point and had progressed “normally” in one direction. Even if someone had tied a knot in the string (a concept he could understand), he’d still only traveled forward, and never any other way.
Two ants traveling on a string in this manner could have different journeys. An ant walking along the top of a taut, straight string would never loop back to where he’d already been. But another ant, perhaps walking along the bottom of the same string, could detour around a loose, hanging knot or loop, circling back to where he’d been before, while the ant on top of the thread kept right on walking.
Now Jed thought of an almost (but not quite) infinite number of threads—enough threads to form a fabric containing everything that is. Any single thread in that fabric could be crossed or looped at any point along any of the threads. This thought process helped him get his bearings, even if it didn’t help him solve any of his immediate problems.
As an Amish man, Jed had never progressed beyond the eighth grade in his education. Amish education existed mainly to prepare the plain people to deal with real-life issues and challenges. Things like communication, simple work, fellowship, humility, and submission were emphasized. For Amish men and women, education and job training would go on for life, but the primary, community level of education finished when one was about fourteen years old. Logic was learned by solving real-life problems in real time.
Well, he thought. Apparently, time travel has just become a real-life issue.
But Jed also recognized that if an education beyond the eighth grade automatically helped in solving time-travel problems, then probably a whole lot of the English would already be bopping around time by now, and it didn’t seem like they were. So maybe he didn’t need a public education. Maybe what he needed was just the ability to think things through.
He wondered: maybe some force had been applied to loop the thread of time back on itself. If time is an immense fabric, then like fabric, it can be wrinkled, looped, or folded. Jed remembered playing a game with Matthias where they would put a heavy leather ball (a toy they called a “corner ball”) in a small baby’s blanket, and then each of them would take two corners of the blanket. They’d pull tight and rocket the corner ball into the air. Then, when the ball descended, they would catch it in the blanket. As it came down with great force, they would lessen the tension on the blanket, and the ball would push the blanket down and curl the fabric back around on itself. From this loose analogy, it seemed to Jed that bending time might be possible if only the one wishing to do the bending could apply enough power, force, speed, or some such expression of energy.
Bending the fabric of time? That would take a lot of energy, he thought.
It seemed logical that the energy behind this time-bending force must be okcillium. He didn’t even know what okcillium was or what it did, but he knew that it was a unique and very efficient power source, and that both sides in the current war were keen to have a lot of it. Perhaps some enterprising scientist working for the government had been the first to use okcillium power to bend time?
Jed immediately pulled up a file that discussed the attributes of okcillium. He had dozens of documents to choose from, so he just pulled one randomly from the cabinet and began to read. It was a paper done for a university back on Earth. From what Jed could gather, okcillium was a completely new and different kind of power source. And it was incredibly efficient; this fact was repeated over and over again. Power generated by okcillium produced very little resistance as it traveled through just about any material at all. That means it didn’t produce a tremendous amount of heat, or a lot of noise either. A common piece of copper electrical wire was sufficient to send enough power to light a small town.
Here, he thought, is enough energy to produce a bend or loop in the fabric of time. So somehow, during his travels, he’d been tossed forward in time. His mind reeled at the thought of it.
He reflected on his journey to New Pennsylvania. How Dawn had told him that he’d never really ever gone to Texas. That apparently that part of the journey had been a show—a sham—perhaps some government method used to track down rebels trying to pass through time using Transport resources.
But then he’d been released by the Transport Authority, put inside his pod, and prepped by the woman whose job it was to monitor him on his trip. He remembered now that the woman hooked a tube up to his catheter. That was supposed to be his waste-processing system. Before now, he’d never considered that the catheter might have been for some other purpose. He pressed his eyes closed and tried to amplify his recollection of events. He remembered pushing the blue button, and he recalled the almost immediate cool sensation of some liquid pulsing through his veins. He remembered thinking that the cooling of his veins was odd, but not unpleasant, and then he remembered being surprised to see Dawn in the pod next to him, right before the lights went out for him.