Chapter 10: Challenges

'Holy Crap' sort of said it all really. No need to bend the wisdom of Great-great grandpa Arlington to this purpose. Simple honest expletives were plenty good enough.

Once that enormous sense of seeing something impossible happen eases off a bit, you only have the normal shock of having everything you understand about how the world works pulled out from under you. Dad managed pretty well I think. It only took him an hour to ask his first question.

"Are there other places where you can do this?"

"I think so. I haven't tried. This is the strongest. There are a couple other strong ones, and I see weak ones everywhere."

"What assumptions are we starting with?" Good, Dad was slipping into his engineer mode. I had seen this before.

"Its still Earth. Its the same place on Earth," I said. "It feels like the season hasn't changed, this is still early autumn."

"Agreed."

We tossed questions and ideas back and forth for a couple of hours before the burst of energy from sharing this new adventure wore off a little. We decided we'd better get our camp set up so we wouldn't have to worry about doing it after dinner. Those efforts also included another trip back through to the boat to get the boat cooler. It had one of those nifty cooling units in it that worked off the boat's 12 volt electrical system, so we had left it for just before dinner.

During dinner I finally asked Dad something that had been gnawing at me since that first trip to the ledge."Dad, when I fainted that day, you didn't react like I would have expected you to. I would have expected you to tell me we had to go home immediately. Why didn't you? Why were you willing to let me stay?"

"I've wondered when you would ask me that son, and the answer is one maybe you can guess. I feel something in this spot too, though I don't see these lines you do, and I don't really feel the pull you say you do. But I brought you here that first time knowing there was something here, something I'd felt only a couple other places, and I wondered if you would feel it too. The truth is, I didn't decide to bring you here out of simple curiosity. I needed to know if you shared whatever that sensitivity is that we so obviously do share."

"Why?" An obvious question, he knew it was coming.

"Because there's another place, back home in Chocowinity like this place, only stronger. Much stronger. You'll see. You'll find out the rest of that story while we are there for your birthday."

And like Dad did with my fainting spell that first day on the ledge, I just let it go, knowing there was more to it, but willing to wait until the right time to get my answers.

Dad and I didn't let our new project go however, we spent the next year trying to gain as much knowledge and insight into what was happening and where I was taking us. We were able to confirm pretty much absolutely that it wasn't time travel. We had no problem finding Mars and Venus in both night skies, and Dad found a very cool telescope on the Internet that plugged into a computer. The computer then could point the telescope at a particular star for you once it was set up right. It produced identical results from either ledge.

Since the evidence did not point at time travel, we decided the lake didn't exist on the other ledge because the dam which had created it did not exist. There were a lot of explanations for why that might be the case. Dad said that our dam had been built after many years of political fighting and controversy, so it could just be a matter of a few votes here or there along the way during one of the many votes to fund or authorize construction of the dam. Dad even suggested perhaps in that other world someone blinked during the cold war and the nuclear missiles got launched. We pretty much had a theory a day. Some of them were the real tinfoil hat variety, but damn, we were jaunting off the face of one Earth onto the face of another, and doing it using the mental; 'powers' of a 15 year old kid. Tinfoil hats were in season.