Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (22 page)

Where do those old guys get that kind of
thinking?

Maybe my "shot in the dark" to Jennifer,
that automatic response, was pretty close to the mark, at that.

How does all this
stuff
exist
independently yet come together as a unity?

Maybe, yeah, maybe the jinn
was the grand inductor. It had sure inducted the hell out of
these
people. In
physiology, an inductor produces a change or a response in an
organism.

Grand Inductor. Yeah, maybe
so. Another term for
whatever.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Eternally

The case was getting "curioser and
curioser," as you will see. But let me try to develop some analogy
to help you understand where we are, now. If you go to a movie
tonight, you may be able to relate the most memorable scenes, or at
least the central theme, of that movie to a friend a few hours
later, or tomorrow at work. You will not, however, have total
recall of every scene, every word of dialogue, unless you are most
unusual. By next week you will recall even less of the movie and
next year you may have trouble "remembering" if you even saw that
particular movie.

A lot of the same sort of
thing occurs routinely with all our experiences. We may "remember"
tonight that we bumped into an old acquaintance this morning but
already not be sure as to where the meeting occurred or what
exactly was said. The next time we bump into that same person, we
may have difficulty remembering when we saw him last.

This is all very useful
and practical, for all the value placed on "good memory," and there
is evidence to suggest that the human brain is designed to function
in just this manner. Recent research suggests that the brain has
some method to automatically sort and file experience in what is
termed a "print" to either a short term or a long term memory,
depending upon the importance of the experience. Presumably "short
term" memory decays quickly and is lost forever, in this theory.
However, I have seen remarkable recall of trivial detail by
hypnotized persons, so I am not comfortable with this quick-decay
idea. Maybe there is a passover to a dead storage file—to all
practical purposes, lost, but indelibly woven in somewhere and
accessible by extraordinary means.

Any way you look at it, though, the human
brain is a wondrous device. I am told that it may contain as many
as one hundred billion cells, or neurons, with a complexity that
defies all attempts to fully understand how it works. So don't get
too tough on me for shooting in the dark here. I'm no oracle and
certainly no authority on any of this stuff.

And that is precisely the
point I am trying to make. For all the apparent wizardry unleashed
in the magic circle, I am still just a guy with an ordinary brain
and subject to all its limitations and programmed functions.
Through some "magic," I was able to briefly link up with some other
ordinary human brains to effect a sort of "brain bank"—like
combining data pools in a computer link. But I did not "become" all
those people. For awhile—a very brief while, as it turned out—I had
access to an abundance of strong memory prints, and apparently
there was a brief integration of all that in my own mind, an
integration which produced some rather remarkable intellectual
conclusions. One minute later, however, or one second later, for
that matter, I could not repeat any of those equations and had only
the vaguest "memory" of having uttered them in the first
place.

In that same sense, then,
my "merging" of consciousness with all those others did not
automatically absorb any of the personalities into mine. When I say
that I "knew" something about that personality, I speak of general
assumptions, an integrated impression or hunch or understanding
involving the totality of personality but not the trivia underlying
that totality. It is a bit more complicated than that, because
there are various plateaus of "totality," but this is basically
where I was at, that night on Palomar Mountain.

I "knew" certain things about these people
without truly understanding the detail that formed such
knowingness.

Like, I know that Gary
Cooper was the good guy in
High
Noon
without really remembering all the
detail of characterization that led to that generalization; and I
recall the character with fondness, remember that he was a lawman
of some sort, and identify with the central theme of the story but
I cannot now recall a single line of dialogue from that
movie.

This is about where I was "at" with
Jennifer, Laura, Esau, Holden, and the others.

It was a marvelous place to be, let me
assure you. I was awed, almost overwhelmed, by the tiny grain of
understanding I had of these people—and there was enough of
knowingness there to send my own mind into a spin if I thought
about it too carefully. But it is so damned far out, all of it,
that I have this problem, now, of how to present it to you in a
credible way. If I just lay it out for you the way it was laid out
in my mind at the time, you are probably going to be skeptical as
hell, as well you should be. So I have to beg your indulgence while
I set it up properly and give you the opportunity to come at it
through some of the detail that formed my understanding.

So back to the story.

I must have been really
beat up because I drifted back into sleep soon after Jennifer left
my room, that evening, and this time I guess I really made it count
because it was past midnight when I again awakened. I think I must
have dreamed the whole time. You will fully appreciate that only if
you understand something about modern sleep research.

The sleep labs have discovered definite
cyclic patterns in the sleep process, varying between periods of
deep sleep, during which the brain produces an EEG pattern termed
"synchronous," characteristic of mental inactivity; and periods of
light, or REM, sleep with a desynchronized EEG pattern more
characteristic of the waking, or mentally alert, state. Dreams
supposedly occur only during REM sleep; presumably REM (Rapid Eye
Movement) always indicates that the sleeper is dreaming.

The average adult spends about twenty
percent of sleep in REM, with the first REM stage occurring after
the first hour of deep sleep, lasting for about ten minutes that
first time but with the REM stages lengthening to about an hour as
the cycles continue. Infants appear to spend about half of their
sleepy time in REM, and no one really knows why this is so, but it
makes me wonder about my own maturity because I believe I do most
of my sleeping in the alert REM state. I can even doze off for
twenty seconds in the middle of the day and get a dream out of
it.

Incidentally, for all the
sleep lab-research, nobody really knows why we dream or what it
means to dream (let alone what dreams, themselves, mean) but there
are a lot of learned theories on the subject. The theory I
personally prefer—for ordinary, run of the mill dreaming—has a
dream as nothing more remarkable than the spin-off result of the
brain's data-processing activities while we sleep; that is, the
brain is going through the day's activities, sorting and filing and
throwing out the debris.

It is fairly obvious,
though, to any unbiased researcher, that not all dreams are of the
"run of the mill" variety. Some of the greatest music and the
noblest ideas ever to grace our planet were conceived in dreams.
There is also an unmistakably indismissable psychic component to
some dreams. And then there are those dreams that almost certainly
seem to originate in some other reality; we classify these as
mystic dreams, and human history in every culture about the globe
has been beatified by such dreams.

I do not know how to classify my
continuous-REM sleep on that Monday evening atop Palomar Mountain.
I do know that I fell asleep exhausted, experienced some five to
six hours of extremely active mental alertness while asleep, and
awakened totally refreshed. I felt, in every sense, a new man.
Perhaps I even scintillated, for awhile there. And I believe that I
perhaps threw off a lot of "debris" during that period.

Anyway, I came out of it tingling with the
vague memories of what I'd experienced earlier that evening and an
even more vague understanding of it. I ate the fruit I'd stashed
earlier that day, washed up, and went adventuring again.

This time I went straight to the dining
hall. I had noticed a collection of portraits adorning those walls
on my first casual inspection but had not given them any particular
attention. These were photographs, not paintings, but done up in
heavy frames and mounted similar to paintings, large—about 11x17.
Holden was there, and looked about the same as in the flesh, so I
presumed the others were relatively recent, too.

Holden was there, yeah,
and in favored company. To one side of him was a man of roughly the
same age who looked, yes, like Dr. Zorba—Isaac. I studied that one
closely, and had to smile. How relatively slight are surface signs
of age, yet how dramatically amplified are those subtle changes in
our gross perceptions. A line here, a puff there, a bit less hair
or a bit finer and less pigmented, a slight droop as flesh succumbs
to the law of gravity; a map of experience: that is what age is,
yes, and I smiled at the Edwardian texture of this map.

Are you Esau, or are you Jacob?

He was neither, both sons
of the biblical Isaac, but he was Isaac himself—right under my nose
all the while yet invisible in the mask of youth, scintillating
under the onslaught of a fantastic infusion of "living wave"
energy.

Tingle? Bet your ass,
tingle. Every hair on my body must have been standing at attention
as the physical evidence in those portraits confirmed the vague
understanding I'd gained in my tussle with the jinn. Not just the
evidence itself but the implications—my God, the implications! Who
would not "scintillate" under the influence of such an organic
"inductor'' and who would not be bursting to tell the world of such
magic? The evidence before me answered a lot of questions, yet the
tingling spoke not of answers but of a whole trembling train of new
questions.

Jennifer and Laura did
little to relieve that tingle.

Jennifer was dignified,
almost stately, heavy silver hair upswept from the graceful curve
of a still beautiful neck, eyes that still mocked with the constant
threat of warmth—still beautiful in a way that stole over
you—Bergman, yes, as Golda Meir, and I was in love with
her.

Laura was an ancient Pala
woman who had learned the white man's ways early, mastered them,
blended them with herself behind thick eyeglasses resulting from
too many years at the microscope—the long hair a bit coarser, now,
and less defined as to color—but beautiful, yes, in her way, still
very beautiful.

They all were there, all
this incredible team of senior scientists, the "young"
scintillators who had edged my perceptions with visions of aliens
from faraway places; they were indeed aliens, of a sort, from as
far away as Ponce de Leon and his fountain of youth and who knows
how much farther, into the myths and fables and longings of every
generation of man since Adam, from all the mandalas of all the
wizards in all the lands who patiently practiced their incantations
and recited their magical equations—good lord of all the lords, how
long and how diligently had mankind searched for this tingle which
now leapt at me from these photographs in reverse chronology—and
how very privileged I felt to be able to see the past as
future.

Or to see, perhaps, the past and future as a
continuum with the present. That, you know, is what eternity is.
And eternity, I believe, is what these people had unlocked.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Decision

I found the team in the study. They had
moved in two computer terminals and printers and the place showed
evidence of recent bedlam. All was quiet now, though, peace
reigned, and the human atmosphere in there was one of sober
reflection.

Holden looked up as I entered and motioned
me toward a chair at the blackboard turret, where he sat with Laura
and Jennifer. Esau/Isaac was toying with some expressions on the
blackboard while conversing in a monotone with another
scientist.

I waded through discarded printouts and
joined the group at the table. Holden showed me a delighted smile
but said nothing. The two women looked beat, barely acknowledged my
presence.

I observed, to no one in particular, "Looks
like it's been back to the drawing board, eh?"

Jennifer replied, in a weary voice, "Back
and back and back again, yes."

Holden, energetic as ever but speaking in a
stage whisper, said, "But they've deciphered it, by God!"

"Doesn't appear to be a
particularly happy conclusion," I said, glancing around at the
sober faces in that room.

Laura smiled faintly and
replied, "Not necessarily unhappy, though. Just, uh,
sobering."

I said, "I see that, yeah."

Jennifer said, tiredly, "May I have a
cigarette, Ashton?"

I passed one to her, lit it, said, "What's
the conclusion?"

She got the smoke going, then replied, "You
don't want that in twenty-five words, I hope."

I told her, "I'd settle
for one or two."

"That's easy, then," she said. "In a word,
life."

“
Life?” I
echoed.