Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) (10 page)

Chapter
Seventeen:
 
Friends and Lovers

They looked like
regular dolphins to me. But I knew there was no way that the pool could have
been enlarged by any conventional method since the last time I'd seen it, not
unless Penny had help from a Navy Seabee battalion or some such. Even so, it
would have taken that much time to add the water alone, never mind all the
construction work. Actually it was an entirely new pool. The one I'd seen the
day before was a standard cement pool, no more than twenty by fifty feet, with
an ordinary cement patio surrounding it. This one was well over a hundred feet
long, made of Plexiglas or some other synthetic material with built-in
artificial boulders, surrounded by luxurious lawn, and it looked very deep
throughout. Underwater lighting provided a uniform glow from end to end.

Just
for the hell of it, I tried submersing the cigarette in it, then sheepishly
looked for somewhere to dispose of the soggy butt.

The
dolphins came over to check me out. I checked them out, too; neither looked
like Ambudala but I figured I'd give it a try just for the hell of it. I smiled
at both and said, "Ambudala?"

Both
whished in reply and took a turn around the pool in opposite directions then
came back for another look.

"What
are you called?" I asked them. "Jambalaya? Crawfish Pie?”

They
grinned at me and went away.

I
was thinking that I would have grinned too, in their place. Must have thought I
was some kind of nut.

Dolphins
are highly intelligent, you know. Perhaps, it is said, more intelligent than
man in many ways. I always get the feeling, around dolphins, that they are
merely indulging our superiority complex. They know that we want them to be
intelligent toys so that's the role they play, though all the while wondering
how we could be so stupid as to believe that we are the smarter species.

I
went over and sat in the darkness of the lanai, lit another cigarette, tried to
pull my head together about the events of the past little while. According to
my watch, I had just about had time to walk from my car to the lanai via the
carport with a brief stopover beside the pool. About three minutes had elapsed.

But
that could not be possible.

I
could not have dreamed that much in three minutes.

So
could it be possible to hallucinate such a vivid and elaborate experience in a
single flash? I doubted it. And what about the pool? Could it have been built
and filled and stocked with dolphins in less than a day?

I
had a terribly sinking feeling at that point of my inquiry. I looked again at
my watch. It's just a plain old-fashioned sweep-hand Timex without a calendar.
So how could I automatically assume that only three minutes had elapsed since I
left my vehicle? Maybe it had been twelve hours and three minutes, or twenty-four
hours and three minutes; hell, it could have been days since...

If
that spanking new pool could be a reliable measure of time, it could have been
weeks.

"Lost
time" is a common feature of UFO close-encounter experiences. And look at Ted
Bransen, who'd been whisked from a Los Angeles street to Buenos Aries, car and
all, in what appeared to him as a flash of the eye but turned out to be a
matter of hours.

So
where had Bransen been during those missing hours? Forget Buenos Aires. Where
had the guy been during the transit? I had assumed that they'd loaded him car
and all into a big saucer and carted him down there. But maybe that was too
mundane an explanation. Maybe those big saucers moved interdimensionally; maybe
they didn't need to use our space at all except for minor corrections for spot
locations. Maybe they did not even need the saucers for their hocus-pocus.

I
had not been in a big saucer. Had I? Hell no. I stepped through the fog and
straight into another world.

But
wait a minute!

It
only looked like fog. How the hell could I know what I stepped into? Maybe I
stepped into total oblivion, momentarily, and I simply had no memory from the
one step to the next. Maybe it all had been a dream—even a very long dream—and
that was the only memory available to bridge the time gap.

So
where had I been?

I
think I was really hoping for a time gap as an explanation of the experience,
but there was no time gap. I discovered that very quickly. The lights in the
lanai came on, I heard the patio door open, and Julie Marsini stepped out with
a revolver in her hand. She was pointing the gun at me so I sat very still
until she identified me.

"Oh
God!" she cried. "I'm glad it's you! I don't know what I would've
done if I'd found a strange man in the lanai."

I
muttered, "Nice to see you, too. What day is this?"

"What?"

"Did
you and Penny leave my house just a short while ago? Or was it a few days
ago?"

She
carefully deposited the revolver on the table, sat down across from me, and
fiddled with her robe as she peered closely at me and said, "Don't tell
me. Now it's happening to you."

I
said, very quietly, "Not just me. Have you seen your new pool?"

She
said, "What?"

"Pool."
I jerked a thumb over the shoulder. "Check it out."

She
checked it out from where she sat. Formerly the lanai had marked the transition
from pool-patio to tennis court. Now it was all pool. She gasped and rose out
of her chair, dropped back into it abruptly, said not a damn thing.

I
was waiting for her verbal reaction, so I said nothing, too. We sat there quite
a while saying nothing. Finally I asked, "Where's Penny?"

"Asleep,"
Julie whispered, still gazing toward the new pool.

"Sure
about that?"

She
looked at me then as she replied, "I just looked in on her. Why?"

I
said, "Because someone delivered her dolphins."

"
What
?"

I
said, gently, "Get it together, kid. You know what I said and you know
what I'm talking about."

"There
are dolphins in the pool?"

I
nodded. "There are."

She
said, "Ashton, this is crazy. I was out here just a little while ago. None
of this was here."

"Has
Penny been out here?"

"No.
She slept all the way home, in the car. I had a hard time getting her out of
the car and into bed. Why?"

"Did
she tell you how she got into my house? Where she'd been? Anything at
all?"

"No.
I told you, she slept all the way home. Why?"

I
growled, "Hell, I don't know why. Don't expect brilliant questions from me
in the face of all this. I just know that I was here yesterday and heard you
and Penny talking about getting dolphins for the swimming pool. You told her it
couldn't be done because the pool didn't meet the standards, or something silly
like that. So now there's a new pool and a pair of dolphins in her backyard. I
guess I am still trying to find something sane in all this. I desperately need
to find that."

Julie
had been all but dumbstruck from the moment she became aware of the new pool.
But now she laughed and lightly said, "I'm sure there's a perfectly
logical explanation. You know Penny, when she sets her mind to something."

I
said, "Uh-uh. Not in our reality, Julie, there is no logical explanation
for that pool. Even supposing some whirlwind contractor came out and somehow
did this job overnight, there would be some evidence of all that work. There is
no such evidence. And hell, it would take days to fill that hole with water,
even using fire hoses. No. Here is one we cannot explain away."

"Are
there really dolphins in it?"

I
took her hand and led her to the edge of the pool. Jambalaya and Crawfish Pie
came racing immediately to the spot and did a spectacular leap for us.

I
said, "There you go."

Julie
said, very quietly, "We're in big trouble. This is against the law, I
know."

I
said, "That's the least worry. Did you see the fog?"

"Sure
I saw the fog. Drove all the way from Malibu in it. Why?"

I
said, "Not that fog. I mean the one that settled over this house a short
while ago. The one that brought the dolphins."

Julie
took a step backward, gave me a rather detached stare, and replied, "Why
are you doing this?"

I
viciously shook my head, hoping that would clear it, and asked her, "Exactly
what am I doing?"

"All
these questions, this third degree. You know perfectly well why the dolphins
are here."

I
said, "Then I guess I forgot. Why don't you refresh my mind."

"Just
thinking it doesn't make it so."

I
said, "Julie, what the hell are you talking about?"

"Thinking
it's not doesn't make it not."

I
said, "Hey..."

"Just
accept what you have to accept and let it go at that!"

"Julie...”

She
was walking slowly back toward the house, tossing these little aphorisms at me
over her shoulder. But I'd already seen the explanation in her eyes, that
glassy stare which I had noted there before. God only knew what this girl had
been through already to test her sanity. I was just a new kid on the block,
still wet behind the ears—what could I know of sanity tests? So maybe this was
her way of handling it. They were not aphorisms; they were more like pressure
valves, vents for the mind—or maybe simple affirmations that all is well
despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Whatever,
she was walking out on me.

"I'll
call you sometime, Ashton. Thank you for a lovely evening. I'll tell Penny that
you looked in on us."

I
said, "Julie, for God's sake, cut it out. Let me help."

"Oh
you've been most helpful. Thank you so much. It's okay now. Thank you. I'll
call you."

That's
the standard kiss-off in this town. Nobody ever calls when they say "I'll
call you." It means "Don't call me." It means "Farewell and
fuck off."

I
said good-bye to Jambalaya and Crawfish Pie and went out through the carport.

Just
for the hell of it, I touched the hood of the Maserati to verify that it was
still warm. It was.

I
got in and hit the starter but the engine would not crank. I was cussing under
my breath with the decision that I would have to raise the hood and check the
battery cables but something else stopped me before I could get a foot on the
ground.

The
"something else" happened inside my skull, between my ears but not
through my ears: "It is all right, Ashton Ford. The vehicle shall function
now. Try again."

That
"voice" sounded familiar, yeah, but I couldn't be sure. I turned the
key in the ignition again and she kicked over immediately with a smooth purr.

I
muttered aloud, "Thanks, Ambudala."

"You
are quite welcome, but it is not Ambudala. Nor is it Jambalaya. We are called
Sinjasan and Marbotisun. Your reality is now our reality. May we be
friends?"

I
replied aloud, "Sure, sure. Welcome to my reality, kids. But I think you
were probably much better off with your own."

So
much for affirmations and mind-vents.

I
cut the ignition, locked the car, and went back across the street. It was time,
I figured, to talk turkey to a couple of dolphins. Or maybe just to talk old
times.

Chapter Eighteen:
 
Poor Fish

I can relate this
story to you only in terms of the subjective experience that unfolded in my own
consciousness, along with whatever objective commentary I may use to dimension
or explain or rationalize that experience to myself. You should bear in mind,
as I have tried to, that a respectable school of professional thought regards
all UFO phenomena in purely psychological terms. Of course it is often
impossible to reconcile certain manifestations of the phenomena with the
psychological theories, such as the actual physical movement of objects and people
from one location to another, physical imprints upon terrain, and actual
physical effects (radiation poisoning, etc.) suffered by contactees.

Such
physical effects apparently do not deter those who insist upon the
psychological syndrome, who invariably find a way acceptable to themselves to
dismiss such evidence from their studies. I regard that as an interesting
psychological study in itself, since it shows how far even a highly educated
and intelligent professional can travel to accommodate his own bias while
studying the "delusions" of others.

Let
me give you an example of what I mean by that. The "Midwest flap"
occurred during early August 1965. An area of some several hundred square miles
was subjected to strange "nocturnal lights" which appeared on three
successive nights. Police officers and various other reliable witnesses across
several states reported the phenomena. The Air Force's Project Blue Book, the
only official UFO investigatory body, received direct reports from other Air
Force commands as the thing was going down. Those reports were logged by the
Blue Book duty officer, a Lieutenant Anspaugh, who made the comprehensive
report reproduced in part below.

1:30
a.m
.—Captain Snelling, of the U.S. Air
Force command post near Cheyenne, Wyoming, called to say that 15 to 20 phone
calls had been received at the local radio station about a large circular
object emitting several colors but no sound, sighted over the city. Two
officers and one airman controller at the base reported that after being sighted
directly over base operations, the object had begun to move rapidly to the
northeast.

2:20
a.m
.—Colonel Johnson, base commander
of Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, called Dayton to
say that the commanding officer of the Sioux Army Depot saw five objects at
1:45
a.m
. and reported an alleged
configuration of two UFOs previously reported over E Site. At 1:49
a.m
. members of E Flight reportedly saw
what appeared to be the same formation reported at 1:48
a.m
. by G flight. Two security teams were dispatched from E
flight to investigate.

2:50
a.m
.—Nine more UFOs were sighted, and
at

3:35
a.m
. Colonel Williams, commanding
officer of the Sioux Army Depot, at Sydney, Nebraska, reported five UFOs going
east.

4:00
a.m
.—Colonel Johnson made another
phone call to Dayton to say that at 4:00
a.m
. Q flight reported nine UFOs in sight: four to the northwest, three
to the northeast, and two over Cheyenne.

4:40
a.m
.—Captain Howell, Air Force Command
Post, called Dayton and Defense Intelligence Agency to report that a Strategic
Air Command Team at Site H-2 at 3:00
a.m
.
reported a white oval UFO directly overhead. Later, Strategic Air Command Post
passed the following: Francis E. Warren Air Force Base reports (Site B-4 3:17
a.m.)
a UFO 90 miles east of Cheyenne
at a high rate of speed and descending—oval and white with white lines on its
sides and a flashing red light in its center moving east; reported to have
landed 10 miles east of the site.

3:20
a.m
.—Seven UFOs reported east of the
site.

3:25
a.m
.—E Site reported six UFOs stacked
vertically.

3:27
a.m
.—G-1 reported one ascending and at
the same time E-2 reported two additional UFOs had joined the seven for a total
of nine.

3:28
a.m
.—G-1 reported a UFO descending
further, going east.

3:32
a.m
.—The same site has a UFO climbing
and leveling off.

3:40
a.m
.—G Site reported one UFO at 70°
azimuth and one at 120°. Three now came from the east, stacked vertically,
passed through the other two, with all five heading west.

I
go to all this trouble merely to show you how far others are willing to travel
in order to deny the evidence before them. And I quoted official Air Force
sources—men in high positions of responsibility who are entrusted with the
defense of the nation—to show you that no one is immune to the treatment.

The
entire Midwest flap of 1965 was totally dismissed by the official explainers as
"stars seen through inversion layers." How far can we push
credibility to suggest that scores of highly trained professionals whose
business it is to distinguish between optical illusions and threats to the
security of the nation went into a near panic produced by optical
illusions?—and, if it is true, how secure can any of us feel that our national
security is in good hands?

I
don't really worry that much about the latter consideration because a Cal Tech
astronomer laughed when I asked him about it. It is possible, sure, he said,
for thermal effects to produce some small perturbation of stars; parallax
effects are quite common, sure; but it would require atmospheric temperatures
into the thousands of degrees to produce a show like the Midwest flap, and of
course we'd all then be too fried to notice.

But
the psychological espousers eat it up. I still hear this thermal inversion
theory advanced to debunk hard-to-debunk reports of aerial phenomena.

The
so-called Condon Report, a supposedly scientific study commissioned by the
United States government and rubber-stamped by the National Academy of Science,
has been revealed as an out-and-out con job on the American public, who funded
that study. Condon, a professor at the University of Colorado, obviously set
out in the beginning to ridicule the whole thing and succeeded in doing so by
concentrating his conclusions on the most ridiculous reports he could find
while ignoring the baffling ones or disposing of them under such tags as
"anomalous propagation," his way of explaining away radar contacts.

The
reasoning goes something like this:

a)All
UFO reports are produced by deluded individuals who believe they have seen something
that could not exist, or by pranksters or charlatans;

b)Objects
that have no physical existence obviously cannot be detected by radar;

c)Radar
has been known to display targets when no physical targets are present, the
result of anomalous propagation of the radar signals;

d)Therefore
any alleged radar contact suggesting impossible flight characteristics of a
physical object is the result of anomalous propagation.

It
does not seem to matter if the anomalous blips are describing the same aerial
movements as those sighted with the naked eye by hundreds of reliable
witnesses, including base commanders, fighter pilots, and other trained
professionals, but the debunkers eat it up. That's okay. Let them. Just be
aware that I am paying no homage to such people when I mention a possible
psychological content to some of the things that I have experienced. Actually I
would be surprised if there were no psychological content because a lot of this
stuff is simply too bizarre for the human mind to handle in raw form. So we
probably do "process" it just a bit in the attempt to assimilate
something essentially alien to our mental models of reality.

I
mean, even my mental models, which have been expanded quite a bit through the
years to accommodate all manner of bizarre experiences, were taking quite a
beating. Please be aware of that. I am trying to give you the real thing here.
But I can give you only what is real to me.

I
have to confess that I was only slightly more than half convinced of the
reality of any of it as I left my car for the second time that morning and
retraced my steps onto the Laker estate. And now it is time to give you a
feeling for the neighborhood. It is in that section of Brentwood that is most
exclusive and most seclusive, above Sunset Boulevard in canyon country. It
probably would not conform to your idea of a Los Angeles neighborhood. In fact
it is pretty wild up there, a jumble of canyons and serpentine roads and
country lanes; it can get very rugged in spots.

Penny
Laker had chosen one of those latter in which to plant her California roots.
There were few neighboring structures; none at all close enough to feel really
neighborly about. I guess she had several acres but only a third of it was flat
enough for any practical use and the house itself took up quite a bit of that.
The road was black-topped but narrow and winding; it dead-ended about a quarter
of a mile beyond the Laker place and there were no more than three or four
houses on that stretch.

The
atmosphere up there was still quite misty but the base of the coastal layer was
now too high to discern in the darkness and the surface visibility was okay
except for occasional small pockets of drifting fog.

I
went back through the carport and again scaled the wall to drop into the
backyard. The lanai was still lighted but the pool was not and there was no
sign of my two new friends from another reality. I walked all the way around
the pool looking for them. Dolphins are required to surface for air every few
minutes, so I figured they'd have to show themselves pretty soon even if they
were now feeling shy, but a ten-minute vigil at poolside did not reveal so much
as a ripple on the surface—so if they were in there and breathing air like all
the dolphins I know, they were being very quiet about it. I was wondering why
they were evading me, knowing they could do so in the darkness with stealthy
movements—and wondering also why I could not reestablish telepathic
communication with them. But of course I was also wondering with the other half
of my mind if there ever had been any dolphins in that pool and if I had
somehow hallucinated the whole thing.

But
the new pool was still there and it was even harder to accept than the presence
of dolphins within it. On an impulse I knelt beside it and gathered a sample of
the water in my hands and tasted it. It was salt water. From the Pacific?—no
less than three miles distant, as the crow flies? Or was it being processed
somehow from the freshwater supply?

I
went looking for the answer to the salt water and found more than that. From
the moment the question was raised, it became evident that I had overlooked an
even more basic question: Where was the filtration system? None of the usual
stuff was in evidence—pumps, pipes, filters, none of that. I found it in an
underground vault beneath a manhole cover that was emplaced twenty feet behind
the pool. A circular steel ladder dropped me into the vault at the same level
as the bottom of the pool. I knew that because I could see the pool from down
there, or at least a goodly portion of it, and nothing was separating me from
it but a wall of glass.

The
vault itself was maybe twenty by forty feet and it was crammed with equipment
and pipes.

A
series of perpendicular glass tubes about three feet in diameter were attached
to the glass wall, or maybe they were part of the wall because they were filled
with water except for a small air space at the top.

There
were ten of those, and there were tubes and wires and other umbilicallike
devices running from each of them to various items of equipment.

There
was a dolphin in each one. They looked dead, but I knew that they were not.

They
were, I surmised, being prepared for their new reality...whatever that may be.