Chapter 7

Jack changed Jane’s diaper as his first act on her second morning of being tied to the bed. He had brought a bottle of baby power to relieve the rash that she had developed by the previous evening. She almost sighed in contentment when he had sprinkled it on her rear.

Jane said, “Leave off the diaper for a little bit.”

“Sure,” Jack said stepping back from the bed.

“This is unhealthy. I could die from being tied up like this,” Jane said.

“I could die by untying you,” Jack said with a smile.

“I promise I won’t attack you,” Jane said.

“If our places were exchanged, I’d promise you the world, and break your neck the minute I was free,” Jack said putting an end to the discussion.

Jane growled in frustration. “You are not a nice man.”

“I am a nice man. There was a time when I wasn’t,” Jack said.

He walked over to the chair and took a seat. He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head while staring up at the ceiling. Jane watched him.

Jack said, “About a year before I was sent back in time, I was given a major investigation. It seemed that a number of people just disappeared and the correlation of times suggested that there was some plot at work. Now I have to explain a couple of things so that my story makes sense to you.

“When the government took over everyone’s homes using eminent domain, the houses that had once been in the suburbs were removed using bulldozers. The land was reclaimed as ‘green spaces’ to help restore nature’s balance. Laws forbade trespassing in the green spaces so it was actually pretty wild.”

The change from single family dwellings to high-density single individual dwellings had resulted in the formation of slightly more than two hundred urban areas of approximately two hundred square miles each. That was basically an area of two hundred by two hundred miles. To put this in a better context, the result was that ninety-six percent of the American population lived in a total area slightly greater than the area of Greater Los Angeles in the year 2000. With a near total absence of manufacturing, the remainder of land use was devoted to agriculture and supported the remaining four percent of the population. This resulted in huge tracts of green areas devoid of human occupation and use.

Jack continued, “After a week of investigation, we decided that these missing people had headed into the green spaces. We followed after them with orders of shoot to kill. The fear was that they would report just how much space there was outside of the city and it would cause a mass exodus.

“We found the remains of an old highway and followed it. We were on special bicycles developed especially for rough terrain. As a result, we made pretty good progress. It took us almost a week to find them. They had traveled over a hundred miles. Even though we moved faster, we had to find them and that took time.

“One of the outlying towns had not been bulldozed and these people had holed up in the houses. These houses weren’t in very good condition having sat there for more than thirty years without any maintenance.

“Being good little FBI agents, we moved in and eliminated the entire group. We burned their bodies in one of the abandoned houses. We decided to spend an extra two days there justifying it as a means of assuring that we hadn’t missed anyone. Each of us claimed a house so that we could pretend to be a high government official. It was actually a kind of joke among us.

“I picked out a house that looked to be in exceptional shape. Almost all of the windows were intact. The doors were closed and the roof was in one piece. As I discovered when I came here, the house was a rarity in that had a metal roof and that had protected the interior better than the shingles that are much more common.

“I went inside the house and started to explore all of the rooms. It was the fourth or fifth room when I made my great discovery. The room contained a library of books and magazines that were in amazing condition. All of the material dated back more than thirty years and some of it was sixty years old.

“I sat down and spent the next two days doing nothing but reading the magazines. One of the things that I discovered was that the United States was the first country in the world to send a man to the moon. I stared at the picture of a man standing on the moon in front of an American flag for an hour. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“I was taught in school that Americans were no good when it came to math, science, and engineering. The subject was too hard for us to really comprehend. Then I’m sitting there looking at a picture of an American on the moon, put there by NASA. I read about how in less than ten years we went from never having been in space to actually getting to the moon.

“I then read a magazine called Popular Mechanics. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Here was a magazine for regular people on how to build stuff. I devoured an article on how to build a solar water heater for a backyard swimming pool. Until I read that article, I didn’t even know what a backyard swimming pool was or why one would want a solar water heater for one.

“I looked at pictures of people with all of their teeth. Their teeth were straight and white. They almost didn’t look human. I mean, I wondered if the pictures were doctored somehow. I even came across an old magazine with pictures of naked women. Almost all of them still had hair in their pubic region.

“By the end of the second day, I was wondering how it was that such a great country described in those magazines came to the miserable state that it was in. I was sad. I was angry. Hell, I was disgusted. I actually considered running away to see what else I could discover about the past glories of this country, but I knew what would happen to me if I did.

“I grabbed a book and stuffed it into my backpack to read at home. I had picked it at random without really looking at the cover.”

“What was it?” Jane asked.

“It was the Bible,” Jake answered.

“Oh.”

Jake said, “I could have been killed for having it in my possession. It was one of the few banned books that carried a death sentence for people who were of Christian descent. I had forebears who were Christian. I’m not sure who, but the code on my arm indicated it was one of my grandparents.

“My team and I returned home without incident. I went to my little home and started to read the Bible. God was a total mystery to me. In school, God was presented as some kind of puppet master who ran the world from Rome and made little boys have sex with his servants. This book talked about God in a totally different way. God created the universe.

“I read the ‘Song of Solomon’ with tears running down my cheeks. I read that book from front to back several times. Each time, I felt like I understood the message in it a little better.

“I wanted to understand it. I wanted to find someone who knew what it all meant and could explain some of the parts to me. I knew that was impossible. Talking about religion with another person was a crime, and it was virtually impossible to bribe one’s way out of it.

“Months passed and I kept returning to that book. One night, I looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘God, help me understand.’ Much to my disappointment, nothing happened. There were no bright lights or angels appearing before me. I closed the book and went to bed.

“It was three days later that a volunteer was requested to return to this time to protect the ‘Great Orator’ who ushered in our Golden Age. The descriptions of the conditions to be found here were horrible enough to make even the bravest agent think twice about taking it. I looked around for a second and volunteered. My double-thinking was put to a real test as I expressed grave concerns about making the trip, and the fear of what I would find.

“Training for the trip was grueling. I had to read two years of ancient copies of the New York Times. I was terrified of running into one of those Tea Party people. They sounded like wild animals who wanted to kill anyone who looked different from them. If the Tea Parties weren’t scary enough, there were gangs that rode around killing people at random. It was pretty frightening. It would have been even more frightening if I hadn’t read all of those magazines a year before.

“I was sent back to this time. I wandered out of a woody area claiming amnesia just like you. I was taken to the hospital to be examined by the doctors. I was in better health than you, but they still bought the act that I was suffering from amnesia.