Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) (6 page)

Chapter Eleven:
 
Brain Drain

I have since been able
to reframe my memory and to thus realize that there were various real-time
validations buried in the experience. For example, it was about eight o'clock
when I was taken aboard the saucer. I calculate that from the fact that the sun
was setting when Julie arrived at my house and night had fallen shortly thereafter.

If
the whole thing had been purely a mental experience, I doubt that my delusion
would have been well enough organized to take the earth's time zones into account.
Yet when Donovan whisked me off to London, which is eight time zones east of
Los Angeles, Big Ben was showing the time as 4:12 and it was dark there so it
must have been
a.m.

Then
when we backtracked from Europe to Hawaii in a twinkle of time, the relative
position of the sun was appropriately rolled back to a couple of hours before
sunset.

Of
course—even allowing the experience as real-world

and real-time—those
apparent leaps through space could have been electronically staged illusions. I
have had to consider the possibility that the "oval window" was
actually a large view screen and that Donovan was playing tricks with my head.
He had seemed a bit evasive when I asked how he did that.

My
feeling throughout the encounter, however—that is, the feeling that came
through the memory of it—was that Donovan had been trying to convince me of the
reality of the experience and to give me some hint of their technical
capabilities. I don't know why he would think that important—or why they would
even bring me aboard—if the only intent was to deceive me. What possible
purpose could they have for something like that? If, on the other hand, they
were genuinely trying to recruit me for some sort of service, then the actions
were logical.

I
had to go for logic, so I had to go with the idea that I had been recruited.

Recruited
for what?

I
could not remember being asked to do anything specifically or agreeing to do
anything.

But
then, also, there were identifiable gaps in my memory.

So...they
had planted something in my mind?— something that would operate like a
posthypnotic suggestion?

What
the hell could they have programmed me to do for them?

That
was a worry. He'd said that they would not force me—and why would he have gone
to the trouble to ask for my cooperation if the intent all along was to strong-
arm my subconscious? But it was still a worry.

During
some earlier UFO investigations I had talked with several very convincing
individuals who'd claimed to have been abducted by aliens and taken aboard
their craft. I had felt that I had to suspend judgment in each of those cases
because: a) the stories were so damned bizarre and yet; b) the individuals had
so obviously undergone terribly traumatic experiences.

In
trying to compare my own experience with those, I could recognize various
parallels. Yet I did not feel particularly traumatized. Other than the fact
that I was seized and transported without my permission, I had not been abused
or mistreated in any way. Even so far as being "seized," hadn't I
long welcomed such an experience in my mind?—and if they had a way of knowing
what was in my mind, couldn't that connote "permission" for what
would seem a kidnapping from our point of view but perhaps only a form of
invitation from theirs?

And
of course I "came back" in a most delightful way, wrapped up with Julie
in a sensual wrestling match on my living room floor. Could that have been
programmed too? If so, the program had been written for two because we were
both half crazy with desire and it took a long time: to get fully sane—a long
time—and we displaced most of the furniture in that room during the process. It
was as though we were developing our own version of the Kama Sutra while also
testing the human anatomical design for innovative concepts in sex. I am still
wondering where we got all the energy and stamina because it seems that we
compressed an entire lifetime of sexual experience into about three real-time
hours.

I
do know that we were both hoarse and too exhausted to move when the thing had
run its course. The room was a wreck, and so were we both. I
crawled
in search of a cigarette and
righted several overturned lamps along the route, pulled myself upright at the
bar, and grabbed cigarettes and a bottle of Seagram's, then crawled back and
knelt beside my sobbing counterpart.

I
lit a cigarette and luxuriated in the exhalation even though it further
overburdened my respiratory processes, then asked, "Why... the hell... are
you... crying?"

It
took her a while to work the words through as she replied, "Because...
so... happy... dammit."

I
giggled like a schoolboy and took a belt at the bottle, swished the whiskey
around inside my mouth before swallowing it, got my breathing under control,
then reminded her, "You said...it was...convenient time."

Julie
feebly rolled onto her stomach and rested her head on crossed arms, said to me:
"Play it... again, Sam."

I
laughed and replied, "Fat chance, kid. This tune...is all played
out."

She
groaned, "Ditto. Kidding." She moved onto her side and rearranged her
head to peer up at me. "What time is it?"

I
squinted at the wall clock, told her, "Nearly midnight."

She
groaned, got an elbow under her and elevated to a sitting posture, curled in
her legs, said, "It was still daylight when I got here. What was in that
wine?'

I
replied, "Hey, kid, if what we just had came out of the wine, I want a
patent on that sumbitch."

She
giggled weakly and took a drag from my cigarette, coughed, told me, "Guess
you did promise me a brain drain, didn't you."

"Purely
as a figure of speech," I replied. "I think we brought it back from
the saucer."

"Where?"
She was giving me a sort of dizzied look.

"From
the flying saucer or whatever, mother ship, whatever."

Her
eyes widened. "I didn't dream it?"

I
replied, "When did you have time for dreaming?"

She
said, "I meant...during our—while we were—I think I'm still confused.
Could I be dreaming now?"

I
said, "God I hope not."

"Well
I mean... all that really happened?"

"What
do you remember?"

"I
just...remember...this weird place. Wait! No! First, I saw it right outside!
Then...this strange place and... and Penny was there. Wearing a uniform. We
talked. I don't remember what about. Was there another man? Or was that you?—in
a uniform. Oh. Oh. I feel very scrambled inside."

Scrambled,
yeah.

That
was the word.

I
was scrambled a bit too, but maybe I had a better handle on it all only because
I was more accustomed to unscrambling things in my head.

I
helped the confused and physically exhausted woman to her feet and walked her
to the bathroom, adjusted the shower, left her to her privacy, and returned to
the living room for another taste of bourbon.

I
was not even aware of my own nakedness as I went to the window and stood there
with the bottle in my hand to gaze into the heavens.

The
night was clear and starlit.

Far
up and far out, at about a forty-five-degree angle

above
the horizon, a particularly bright star commanded my attention. I stared at it
for several minutes, during which time I would have sworn that it changed
positions very slightly several times.

Could
have been an airliner out of LAX streaking for Hawaii. If so, it sure hung a
long time in the vision, and it did not seem to diminish in size or brilliance.

Toward
the end of that brief vigil, I imagined that the thing winked at me. Twice.
Off, on; off, on again.

I
raised the bottle and waved it over my head. It winked again, slowly. Off, wait
a beat; on, on a beat; off and gone.

It
was an airliner.

Sure
it was.

Chapter Twelve:
 
Scenario X

Once you get past the
UFO question—is it or isn't it an intelligently controlled vehicle of some
sort?—you can settle down to the practical questions. Where are they from? How
do they get here? What do they want?

It
is not even a totally safe bet to declare them extraterrestrial. They could be
based right here on earth—beneath the seas, in very remote areas, even within
great hollows of the earth. I've heard all those theories soberly considered by
educated persons.

I
always preferred to believe that they are not based on the earth. They could
have bases in other parts of the solar system. It seems that our moon would
make an excellent platform in space. Various planets and/or their moons could
also provide a stable physical environment for the establishment of spaceports.
They could even have their own artificial satellite implanted independently in
our solar system.

All
of those solutions beg the ultimate question, of course: what is their origin?

Donovan
told me, "Your origins are my origins."

Swell.
So how does that help the understanding?

Either
they cloned us and left us here millennia ago to shift for ourselves, or they
are an echo of a much older civilization on earth than any of us have yet
discovered. Maybe Atlantis really happened, or something similar. Maybe these
guys were off adventuring in other neighborhoods of the galaxy when hell came
to earth, wiped away every vestige of culture and technology, and left only a
few pitiful survivors brainwashed by centuries of terror and unimaginable
hardship to begin again the human effort to dominate the earth. So maybe Atlantis
or something like Atlantis was the real Eden. And maybe these guys have finally
returned home only to find a totally alien planet, and they're trying to figure
it out or to decide how best to merge back in with us.

Don't
like that?

Well
maybe we have a much more distant common origin. Donovan said the place ceased
to exist before man began on earth. Maybe our star was dying and everyone had
to bail out of that solar system. Maybe they had hundreds, even thousands, of
years warning so had plenty of time for an all-out technological effort to
launch some lifeboats into space. Maybe the lifeboats got separated—as
lifeboats often do—and they ended up in different worlds. Maybe the one that
came to earth crash-landed, or maybe everybody was sick, or maybe it was forty
generations after the launch before the setdown on earth and all the occupants
had lost their marbles or regressed or whatever scenario you prefer to explain
the almost total loss of knowledge and technology.

Note
that I said almost total loss.

There
are evidences around the globe of extremely ancient civilizations that seemed
to know more than those who descended from them. Take even the "creation
myth" of Genesis which scholars now believe to predate the Babylonians and
even the Sumerians, who lived in roughly the same place but at different times,
the Sumerians being older. Their language is the oldest written language on
earth, and the origins of the peoples themselves is lost in prehistory. Their
written language was in cuneiform script and today's scholars cannot forge a
relationship between that language and any other known on earth. Wonder where
it came from, and where it went.

The
creation story told in the older writings in Genesis (there are several such
stories, sort of overlapped and bastardized by a succession of later writers)
shows what would seem to be an amazing understanding of cosmology from such a
primitive viewpoint. So much so that there really is no basic conflict between
the general story of creation in the Bible and the generally accepted
scientific theories of today, until you get to Adam and Eve in the garden at
Eden (which was a much later embellishment on the story).

Of
course the language is quaint from our point of view because the story had come
through the mists of time and can be interpreted only through our present
understanding of language, but the true scholar is left with the eerie feeling
that he is reading a partially bastardized memory of greater truths once known.

Beginning
with a universe of chaos and darkness from

which the earth was
cast, then developing by successive stages the appearance of order, then of
plants, then animals, and finally man—the reader encountering this fragment of
a sentence would not know if it were quoting a scientific account or Genesis.
It happens to be both. And it represents the very earliest recorded thoughts of
man regarding his origins.

So
where did prehistoric man get all this understanding?

Maybe
it was one of the few tattered fragments left in a shattered lifeboat, and
maybe the survivors were too busy with the elemental tasks of adapting to an
alien and terrifying environment to devote much time to anything else,
especially to cultural luxuries. What did it serve you to know how the world
was made or how a shattered craft was powered from another world if wild beasts
are stalking you and you are cold and hungry? If you have no tools and none of
the materials with which you are familiar, what good is technology?

Does
the average man or woman alive today have any really valid idea of how images
are flashed through space to come alive on their television screens? Can anyone
reading these words build a television station or even a receiving set with
bare hands and raw materials? Can anyone working alone and without modern
facilities build even a transistor? So if you are shipwrecked like Robinson
Crusoe will you devote your time to trying to figure out how to build a
television receiver or will you forage for food to stay alive?

If
that is how it all began with man on earth, then suffice it to say that he
foraged for food and forgot about the fineries. We are here today as evidence
of that, if that it is. And now our long-lost brothers-in-kind have found us.
Evidently their ancestors fared better than ours, (because they still have the
technology of survival in space that ours lost. They would approach us with
great care and discretion, not with bands blaring and arms outstretched to
these primitive throwbacks who cannot even find peace among themselves.

To
continue the scenario, put yourself there for just a moment and try to relate
it to something in your own experience. You live in Omaha and you discover as
an adult that you have a long-lost sibling who was stolen from his cradle by
Gypsies. You learn that he is alive and living as a terrorist in the Middle
East; he is a religious fanatic committed as a holy mission to the destruction
of the Great Satan, Uncle Sam. Already he has bombed school buses and killed
hundreds of innocent people. What are you going to do—and how are you going to
approach this wild man, if at all?

We
could go on with many such scenarios, one for every theorist who has ever
thought about the problem.

I
really do not know what good the scenarios do.

We
are being visited.

Our
visitors are vastly superior to us in many ways.

They
probably have the capability of destroying us one and all overnight.

Even
our governments around the world are afraid to admit that they are here or that
they even exist.

Our
scientists too, by and large, scathingly ridicule any suggestion that they do
not know all that there is to know about everything in the universe. Since they
know nothing whatever of the technology that brings these visitors to our
world, obviously these visitors exist only in the minds of self-deluded
persons.

I
shall speak later of two prominent spokespersons for the scientific
establishment who best exemplify that turn of mind, and I will give you samples
of their reactions so that you may see for yourself the depths to which the
human mind can travel in trying to shape its own reality. For now, just trust
me that it is true, subject to later verification.

Our
educators are in the same boat as the scientists; by and large they are
essentially one and the same and their behavior is the same for the same
reason.

Ditto
for the churchmen, for different reasons but with the same result.

So
to whom do we turn to get the truth?

There's
the rub, my friend.

There
are none to turn to.

You've
got to figure it out for yourself, and your very survival may depend on how
well you do that.