Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Read online

  The man behind the wheel of that other vehicle, an amiable guy of about forty, commented, with a grin, "Dr. Harrel is a walker. If I see her, I'll tell her you're here. Uh...our observation period is just beginning. Let's please observe dark skies. No lights, please."

  Souza grinned and tossed him a salute. "Right. Thanks a million, Tom. Good viewing. What?—are you on the Schmidt tonight?"

  "Yes. We're photomapping for the Hubble space program. God, I hope those crazy hunters don't come back. I've already lost six hours this week to weather and equipment glitches." He pulled slowly away, running without lights.

  I went around and slid onto the seat beside Souza. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat. "Lucky strike, eh? He is working the Schmidt. They came up to check out the gunfire. I told em—"

  "What is the Schmidt?" I asked, without really caring.

  "I just picked that up," Souza replied smugly. "I guess it's one of the other telescopes; 48-incher, I think. The 'monastery' is where these guys stay while they're on the mountain. Or they call it that. I told 'em—"

  I said, "She ran out the other side and into the night, Greg. How big is this place?"

  "Big enough," he replied, "that you're not going to find her if she doesn't want you to. What the hell is going on? What're you guys doing up here tonight?"

  I replied, "Looking for Donaldson, I guess."

  He said, "Shit, that's a waste of time. He hasn't been seen up here for months."

  I asked, "So why are you here? And what is this hot talk we need to have?"

  "Just scouting," he replied with a sigh. "I get a feeling the roof is falling in and I'd sure like to know where I'm standing so I don't get buried in it." He sighed again, produced a cigarette, lit it. "Something very strange happened up here a few months ago."

  I steeled myself for a Souza discourse and lent myself to the game. "What kind of strange?"

  "Don't know for sure, just know...strange. Donaldson was in on it. He called the President's science advisor, in Washington." A quick flash of the eyes, and: "Yeah, that president. Quite a commotion got kicked up. I know the National Security Agency got involved, also the Pentagon and the CIA." Another flash of eyes. "Donaldson also made a few calls outside the country, and it seems that he spent the next several days flying around the country for very hush-hush conferences with other scientists."

  I said, "Very interesting."

  "Yeah. But wait. It gets more and more. Donaldson dropped out of sight, about that time. So did a guy from M.I.T. and another from Yale. Both theoretical physicists. An exobiologist from somewhere back there also has come up missing. What exactly is an exobiologist? You know?"

  I replied, vaguely, "Something about extraterrestrial life, I guess."

  "That's what I thought," Souza agreed. "Okay. We also got a guy missing from somewhere out here on the desert, one of those radio astronomers from, uh..."

  "Socorro?"

  "New Mexico, right. You know about that?"

  "Not much," I admitted. "It's called a VLA, for 'Very Large Array.' It's a complex of, I don't know, a couple-dozen large dishes linked together over a large area. They're doing some kind of deep-space work out there."

  "Military application?"

  I shrugged. "What isn't, these days. Maybe so. Star Wars ain't that far off, pal."

  "Don't I know it," Souza said glumly. "Well, listen..." He fixed me with a stem gaze. "Since you and the beautiful doc have become so chummy...what did she tell you about that incident up here?"

  I smiled to myself as I replied to that. "The only 'incident up here' that she mentioned had nothing to do with the present problem, believe it."

  "So why'd you come?"

  I replied, "She came. I followed, discreetly." I told him about the incident at Glendale and the subsequent events at Malibu, finishing that accounting with: "Looks like whoever it is had a watch on this place, too. You said you were here for a couple of hours. Didn't you notice anything out of focus?—no sense of...?”

  Souza replied, "I think those guys followed her from the office area. That's the first I noticed them. She was definitely running. But why run from me? Why didn't she run to me, for help?"

  I said, "Maybe she was just trying to get clear of everyone. I believe she expected to find Donaldson out here. She didn't want to lead anyone else to him."

  He commented, "Well, maybe. But I'd sure like to know what happened up here to get the whole damned security apparatus of the nation excited."

  "Maybe the flying saucers are coming back," I said, only half-joking.

  Souza said, "Aw shit, Ash..

  "Why not?" I asked, not really expecting an answer.

  He said, "Are you serious?"

  "Would that really surprise you? You want to know something, Greg? I have had my head buried in phenomena my entire adult life. On the scale of things experienced—for me, personally—I would say that a three-dimensional, hard-surfaced alien vehicle in our skies would fall into the class of a very minor phenomenon."

  "You're serious as hell, aren't you," he decided.

  I was, I hated to admit even to myself, serious as hell. I had done some UFO research in the past—pretty extensively, in a couple of well documented cases; I had even traveled to Europe and South America in the quest for truth in the matter—and my jury was still out.

  So I was not ready to buy anything regarding the mystery of Isaac Donaldson. If the man had experienced something strange enough at Palomar to inspire a telephone call to the White House, and then telephone conferences with other scientists around the world—and if a bunch of those learned people were now "missing" with Donaldson...

  Well, no, I was not buying anything, yet. But I was not closing the door on anything, either.

  Chapter Nine: Beneath the Eye

  Please don't leap away from me, at this point, if you feel that I am heading into an area of interest which may offend your intellectual or emotional sensibilities. I am trying to present the thing as it presented itself io me—so just bear with me awhile, please, place yourself in my shoes, and enjoy the adventure as I did, without prejudice. Enjoy it, I did, most of it, thoroughly, and I believe that you will, too, if you just give it half a chance.

  Anyway, you should not be too stuffy about your own conditioned reality unless lately you have examined it close-up, from the inside out. A common failing among we humans is a penchant for comfort at the expense of something more important than comfort; like, it's easier to sit down and turn the TV on and observe fantasy while dinner turns to fat cells inside our bodies than to run a few laps around the block. We do the same things with our heads, almost as a matter of habit, because we tend to find comfort in the reality that is conditioned by our daily routines.

  I'm not saying that's bad: it's probably good, and that is why we do it that way; who wants to go around with his head buried in metaphysical puzzles all the time? I sure don't, but I do try to keep some faint touch with the idea that the sum total of my daily experiences is not nearly large enough to approach anything resembling reality; I therefore live in a conditioned reality which is primarily built of my day-to-day routine.

  It's like man's early concepts of cosmology and cosmogony. Cosmology has to do with the theory or philosophy of the nature and principles of the universe. Cosmogony is involved with creation theory, and every religion has one. There was a time, long ago, when the thing that we now call "science" and the thing we call "religion" were one and the same thing. The major schisms now, between science and religion, involve these matters of cosmology and cosmogony—though mainly, I think, cosmogony. But ever since men have been men, probably, there has been this curiosity—innate, no doubt—about how the universe came into being and how it operates.

  Early scientists (and I use the term in the broadest sense) were also religionists. Their perceptions of reality, then, usually became codified into a mass of unquestionable dogma which could not be modified without doing damage to the religious edifice—and, since most religions
anchor their influence into a good bedrock of divine infallibility, it has been very difficult throughout most of the history of mankind to "change the model" of cosmic reality.

  It was the church, remember, that forced Galileo to recant his cosmological theories (though we use those theories to this day in our explorations of space) and it was the church that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for refusing to recant.

  See, there was an intellectual "comfort" in having the earth the center of the universe, a very special creation, instead of being merely one of countless billions of bodies hurtling through space headed God knows where.

  You don't have to return to Galileo and Bruno, though, to find a very deep schism. At this very moment, certain fundamental religionists are greatly concerned over the teaching of evolution in the classroom; they do not agree with the present cosmogonical/cosmological models favored by the same scientific tradition that placed men on the moon. Some of these people, indeed, would burn Darwin at the stake if they could get their hands on him—but see, it's really a question of comfort within a conditioned reality.

  Quite a few generations of scientists since Darwin have devoted lifetimes to a meticulous study of that area of reality and consequently could find no comfort whatever in the reality-model of "special creation" (the biblical version). Quite a few generations of religionists since Darwin have kept right on reading their bible and find no comfort whatever in evolution theory.

  For myself, I find no controversy there. Science has not yet replaced the Book of Genesis. It has just filled in the blanks—and pardon my ignorance, if that's the problem, but I can see no real conflict between the two accounts.

  So I think what it boils down to, probably, is a few diehards who simply find no comfort whatever in the thought that they may be descended from monkeys.

  I sort of like monkeys, myself, so...

  Actually, the evolution model does not say we came from monkeys. Monkeys, and all the other simians, if the model is true, descended with man from a common ancestor—which probably means something worse than monkeys, so what the hell...

  The only point I'm trying to make is that a conditioned reality can be quite comfortable. We move from one to another with the greatest reluctance, usually. The sad part of that is the fact that most of us get our conditioning by default—that is, from mommy and daddy and aunt julia and father john and nbc/cbs/abc and the national enquirer etc.—instead of sallying forth with an adventurous spirit and an open mind to see what's really out there.

  So please do not turn from me in disgust unless you really know where your own reality is coming from.

  I would have given a bundle, believe me, to have known where mine was coming from, there in the shadow of the Eye. I am really a very ordinary guy, remember—but saddled with a "gift" that I never asked for in the first place, and one that does nothing but get me in trouble in every other place. So try to have a little sympathy, please, as you watch me struggling through this thing—and save your criticisms for the end.

  I did not know what the hell was coming down this pike. It started as a simple "missing person" case. I get a dozen or more of those a year—very routine, even though sometimes very sad as well—but routine in the sense that a common-logic flow of cause/effect events may be tied together with the slightest psychic insight, consisting maybe of no more than a "hunch"—but you can build a great psychic reputation that way. This case began where it should have ended, with the discovery of a corpse. It exploded from there to geeks and spooks, a professional hitman waiting patiently for my head at my driveway, the President of the United States and the entire world intelligence community, a whole gaggle of missing eminent scientists, a creation-physicist with thunder in the valley and a frightened child between the ears, a gun battle beneath the eye of God—and all this coupled to the certain knowledge that this particular reality was expanding at the speed of light because there was no gravitational mass to restrain it.

  So don't sneer at me, damn it, for talking about flying saucers. A flying saucer is only marginally more phenomenal than a phantom jet, anyway; it is a difference, primarily, of performance capability, a matter of order of magnitudes somewhat in the same class as the difference between Orville Wright's Kitty Hawk experience and NASA's Space Shuttle. To a Neanderthal, peering fearfully from his cave at a silver disk hovering directly overhead: okay, yes, phenomenal as hell—but don't smirk at me about flying saucers when I am standing beside a telescope that sees the edge of the universe. The Neanderthal and I do not, thank God, inhabit the same conditioned reality.

  If you want to talk "miraculous," then let's please move into the miraculous class. Let's talk about quasars and pulsars, red giants and black holes; let's talk temperatures of 100 million million million million million degrees which, I am told, accompanied the birth of this universe, and let's talk "energy" and "matter" as interchangeable terms for the same stuff depending on temperature. Closer to home, much closer, let's talk about individual atoms created in stars yet used by an exploding ovum to fashion a living being like you or me.

  Then let's get down, really down, and talk about a pastoral God who wallowed in the dust of planet earth to bring forth Adam—the same dust, presumably, that He built in the stars—and let us wonder, for just a moment, where the ancients got these fantastic ideas. How did an ancient, prehistoric man ever draw the connection between living flesh and planetary dust? Who told him that? Who told him that there was nothing before a moment of creation, when all around him was abundant evidence of foreverness—and who told him that "the spirit" moved across the flowing rivers of celestial hydrogen (two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, remember, makes water) and separated them to bring forth the world, when clearly, to him, water was water and air was air (firmament) and never the two did occupy the same space at the same time.

  You want to talk "miraculous?" Let's talk, then, about an aboriginal tribe in Africa whose oral history traces their origins to a binary-star system in the Pleiades—and their "logo," apparently a star map depicting a binary-star and created many hundreds of years before our own astronomers with their powerful telescopes were able to determine the existence of such a system in Pleiades. Who told them that?

  We were discussing conditioned realities, remember. If it is that difficult, and apparently it is, for many modem humans to think freely, imagine how much more difficult it must have been for early men to make the break from the sensible world and to leap the mind into an entirely new and nonsensible world which, nevertheless, was more real than the other.

  I am not saying that the "Lord" of Moses was a flying saucer—but it sure sounds like one, and something fed those folks in that desert for a couple of generations, "manna" or whatever. I am not saying that the ancient Hindus ever actually got off the ground but the Vedic texts give very convincing descriptions of "...an apparatus that moves by inner strength like a bird, whether on earth, in the water or in the air [and] is called a Vimana by the priests of the sciences...[and] can move in the sky from place to place, country to country, world to world—" One of the epics purports to give an eyewitness account of a trip in one of these incredible machines, during which the whole earth shrinks beneath its ascent to the size of a ball suspended in space. Again, if it did not happen, who told that ancient poet that the earth would look like that from such a height? If this author was the first science-fiction writer, he is to be congratulated on a superb leap of mind which carried him from virtually the Stone Age to twenty-first-century earth and Star Wars complete with laser weapons and arsenals our own technical genius is still trying to devise.

  So. I am standing there beneath the Eye, trying to leap the mind into an understanding of what could have been experienced here that sent a senior scientist scrambling to the White House hotline.

  Don't go stuffy on me, please.

  My mind has just now begun the leap.

  Chapter Ten: Vectored

  Souza left his car at the Hale and rode with me to the "monastery"
for a quick look around. He had been there earlier, a couple of hours before the nightwatch began, and bluffed his way inside—but it probably did not require much bluff because things seemed rather loose in there. The residence probably got its name from a time when just about all astronomers were male—and it was a rather remote site, too far from Cal Tech for daily commuting, so they rotated staff up there and tried to make things as comfortable as possible during the stays on the mountain.

  Actually, the place had a sort of traditional "men's club" look—heavy leather chairs, walls of books, that sort of thing. The sleeping quarters were not much, remarkable only for their simplicity and the heavy black shades for daytime sleeping.

  Two young men were present—very young men, collegiate—eyeing the bulletin boards when we walked in. Souza and I just acted as though we belonged there, and so did they.

  "What's the latest on Halley?" Souza inquired breezily as we walked past.

  "Still a fuzzball," one replied, glancing up with an absent grin.

  "Big letdown," said the other. "Much ado about popcorn in the sky."

  So...these kids were not poets. Probably had a bleak future in astronomy, then. Souza and I went on through to the kitchen and got some coffee, carried it with us and sipped at it while we nosed around.

  I tried just once, while I was in there, to pick up another fix on Jennifer Harrel but had to withdraw quickly because of the same "static" I'd encountered at the foot of the mountain.

  Souza saw me grab my head. "What's wrong?" he growled.

  "Some kind of crazy energy enveloping this mountain," I replied, almost groggy from the effect of it. I sat in one of the armchairs and balanced the coffee in my lap for a moment, trying to pull it all back together.

  A man of about fifty came into the clubroom while I was seated there, walked over with hand extended to introduce himself. He wore blue jeans, the uniform for this mountain, and a shirt similar to the one Jennifer had worn at our first meeting. He was just "Fred," apparently functioned as some sort of stationkeeper, permanent resident staff.