Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (14 page)

It was, yes, a rather breathless
atmosphere—heady.

Everyone seemed to notice Holden and me as
we wandered through that, acknowledging our presence with a smile
and a nod or a wink of the eye, but the activity went right on
unchecked as though we were not there, at all. We would pause at a
particular "station" and Holden would make a brief comment for my
benefit: "Mass spectrometer here, Ashton, they're doing
constituency studies"—"Impulse generator, you see, simple Marx
circuit, question of mass defect here, I think"—"These fellows are
trying a Schrodinger equation on those wave studies"—"Ho, here's
the brain of it all, a hundred megabytes computing power in this
dandy, Ashton."

They had it all, yeah.
And, obviously, the brains to make the most of it.

"How long has this been going on?" I asked
my host.

"Oh, quite awhile, yes indeed—one thing, you
know, naturally leads to another so we just bring another gadget
in. Though I must confess to you, Ashton, I have only the barest
surface understanding of what these fellows are up to. They go
around with their heads in a cloud much of the time, Lord knows I
can't bring them down, wouldn't want to, good Lord no, keep at it,
keep at it."

I said, "Keep at what? What are they going
for, Holden?"

He gave me an odd look. "Don't you
know?"

I told him, "Well not in
so many words, no."

"But I thought you'd come to work with
them."

I said, "Well, yeah, but... I haven't been
fully briefed, yet."

He replied, "Well don't look to me for that,
Ashton. I'm just the facilities man, here. Ho! Rank amateur! Lord
no, don't look to me for that. What's your field, by the way?"

"Psychic phenomena," I told him.

"Ho! There's one for
you!
Psychic
phenomena! Bully!
That
is b
ully
!”

"Not to be confused with
bull
shit
," I
muttered.

"How's that?"

"Bully, yes," I said, more clearly.

"How does one go about quantifying psychic
phenomena?"

I shrugged and tried a shot in the dark.
"It's all one world, Holden."

"Yes?"

"Sure. Question of
field.
Right?"

"Bully!" he fairly shouted.
"That is
bully
."

It sure was.

And I felt trapped in his damned
crucible.

Chapter Sixteen: Equation

Notably absent from that
beehive of activity in the lab were Jennifer, Laura, and Esau. I
asked Holden about that and he rather absently replied that they
were probably in the study, his study, which apparently had been
temporarily converted into a sort of operations center.

I went looking for that
and found it on the main level, occupying nearly half the wing on
the north side of the bubble. Very impressive, with heavy furniture
and draperies. Two walls were richly paneled; another was solid
books from floor to ceiling, featured a ladder on tracks for access
to the higher shelves; the other wall was evenly divided between
corkboard and blackboard, both very busy. A couple of long library
tables and a massive desk were piled with open books and computer
printouts. Several smaller tables were arranged in a sort of turret
near the blackboard. The blackboard itself was crammed with
mathematical hieroglyphics, the tables arranged for studious
viewing of such and neatly adorned with ruled tablets and boxes of
pencils.

Jennifer Harrel sat at one
of those tables, attention riveted to the blackboard, a pencil in
her hand toying with a series of equations.

I quietly sat down beside her and inquired,
"Have it figured out?"

Without otherwise acknowledging my presence,
she replied, barely moving the lips, "A moment, please."

I sat there for about five "moments" before
she regretfully put the pencil down and turned to me with a sigh.
"Hello, Ashton. Glad to see you're up and about. Feeling okay?"

I had just lit a cigarette. I blew smoke
toward the ceiling and told her, "Feeling fine, yeah. Hope I didn't
catch you at a critical moment."

She gave me about a one-fourth smile as she
replied, "They're all critical now, I'm afraid. Give me one of
those, please."

I gave her mine and lit another for myself.
She said, "I renounce these damn things fully fifty-two times each
year, but every time someone lights one in my presence..."

"Addictions are like that," I observed.

She said, thoughtfully, "Yes. What else are
you addicted to?"

I shrugged. "Oxygen. Food. Water. Sex. Not
necessarily in that order of dependency."

She beautifully arched the eyebrows and
said, "Now there is an addiction. That last in the order, I mean.
But then you qualified that order, didn't you. Let's see... where
would we rank it?"

I soberly replied, "Sort of floats, I guess.
Finds its own order."

She said, "Yes. Well. Other than that, what
can I do for you, Ashton?"

That was very definitely a put-down. Or else
a kiss-off. I told her, "I was hoping to find Isaac here."

She gave me a rather blank look and
inquired, "Why?"

I replied, "Well... it's a natural desire,
isn't it."

"I don't know. Is it? I find it nowhere in
your order of addictions."

"There's more to life than addictions. Is he
here?"

"I am not going to reply to that,
Ashton."

"Why not? What are you afraid of? I'm on the
team, now. Or haven't they told you that. At least, I've been asked
to join. I'd like to meet the boss before I decide."

"Who said Isaac is the boss?"

That one gave me a bit of pause. "I
naturally assumed..."

"Simply because a fuss was raised where you
could hear it? I should think—"

"Where the White House could hear it," I
corrected her.

"Well now you see, Ashton," she said, with
heavy sarcasm, "the White House is not necessarily the very center
of the universe. As a matter of fact, my dear, the universe has no
center."

"Is that what those equations are telling
you?"

"Unfortunately, we have not yet found a
coherent solution to the equations."

"Where is Isaac, Jennifer?"

"I am not going to respond to that question,
Ashton. Leave Isaac alone."

"Why were you in Los Angeles last Saturday
morning? Instead of here, with the team?"

"I am really terribly busy."

"I know that. So why the
useless trip to Los Angeles? And why give the entire day over to
a...? Jennifer, why did you seduce me?"

She laughed, the nice laugh. "I suppose I
did, didn't I."

"Damned right you did. And it has occurred
to me that I was set up, coming in. Wasn't I? Did you go to L.A.,
Jennifer, just to suck me down here?"

She did not reply to that.

"Or, anyway, to establish
contact? Did 'the team' retain Greg Souza? And did they do that in
the expectation that he would then retain me? Or was it set up like
that all the way? Did you people suggest to Souza
that—?"

"Why certainly," she said, sarcasm dripping,
"and, of course, we had already arranged the murder of Mary Ann
Cunningham in time for her corpse to ripen so that you could find
it easily, and we hired those men to come to my home after I'd
seduced you and sent you on your way so that they could murder me
and make you feel obligated at my funeral, and of course we—"

"Huh uh, shame on you, Dr. Harrel, you may
not mix the terms of the equation. Two apples and two oranges do
not equal four grapefruit. The only solution I am after, in this
particular set, is why you happened to be in Los Angeles on
Saturday morning."

She rounded up an ashtray,
took her time disposing of her cigarette, then told me, in a
quietened voice, "Very well, Ashton, I will tell you this much but
no more. Please go and play your game of twenty questions with
someone who has the time to spare. We knew that Souza had brought
in a psychic. We knew—"

"When did you know that?"

"We knew it on Friday evening. He had left a
message on my telephone recorder in Glendale requesting a meeting
at Griffith, for the purpose of introducing this psychic consultant
to the case."

I said, "But he made first contact with me
at seven o'clock on Saturday morning."

"That is about the time we
confirmed the meeting. You'll need to make your own conclusions
from that. I had already returned to Glendale, on another matter.
It was felt that one of us should be present at Griffith...just in
case. So I confirmed the meeting with Souza. That is all. We set
nothing up. The sequence of events from that point was purely
spontaneous. That it brought you here, and that it led to a finding
concerning your extrasensory perception of the energy field was
simply fortuitous."

I was not so sure about
the "fortuitous" bit, but the rest I could buy, for the moment. It
was very like Greg Souza to contact me only after setting it up,
first, with everyone else—which could explain the hitman at my
driveway within minutes after I knew I was on the case.

Jennifer was saying, "I can understand you
being upset with us for knocking you out. But, whether you choose
to believe it or not, it was our concern for your safety that led
us to that. You see, Laura had already foreseen a possible
interaction. When you mentioned a distressing result, she became
highly concerned."

"So what did she find?" I
asked quietly.

Jennifer's gaze swept the blackboard.

I said, "All that?"

She replied, "Laura's findings have led us
to all that."

"What does it mean?" I wondered.

"It
could
mean..."

After a moment, I prodded her with:
"Yes?"

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"You don't get the significance?"

I said, "I don't even get the drift. My math
is not that hot, Doc."

“
It could have been,” she
scolded me. "Why in the world didn't you pursue your potential,
Ashton?"

I replied, a bit defensively, "Thought I did
that. There's more here than math and Bunsens, you know."

She said, "Yes, but... are you aware that
you have an impressively high IQ?—I mean, phenomenally high."

I said, "I've always wondered what is really
being measured, though. I suspect it does not mean a hell of—"

"Don't be ridiculous! Of
course it does! And an obligation goes with such gifts. Some of us
are simply born to lead. If we fail to do so, then the lead passes
by default to those less qualified. Or less endowed. It is an
endowment, Ashton. And you have tried to abandon yours."

I protested, wryly, "Why do I get the idea
that your lecture is serving only to evade a question? What is the
significance implied by the equations?"

She stared at me for a thoughtful moment,
then: "They are field equations."

I said, "Yes, I gathered that."

"They seek a correspondence between certain
aspects of your brain waves and certain aspects of the radiant
energy we are encountering here."

I said, "Okay. Any deductions?"

"Several, yes. But without coherence. Laura
is now analyzing those in relation to the tissue analysis, hoping
to find—"

"Which tissue is that?"

"Nerve tissue."

"Miner'

"Yes. And—"

"Hold it, hold it. Explain that,
please."

"Electron microscope studies. She—"

"Wait right there. Are you
talking
brain
tissue? Mine?"

"Yes. She hopes to—"

"Hold it. How'd she get it?"

"She did not
get
it, Ashton,"
Jennifer explained patiently. "There is no need for alarm, no
damage was done, everything was—"

I had been carefully probing my skull with
all ten fingers. I told her, a bit testily, "Course not, no damage
whatever, just pinch off a little specimen here, a little specimen
there..."

"There was no specimen work. Esau has
developed a technique which allows environmental microscopy at the
cellular level without disturbing the host system."

"Then he needs to quickly patent that son of
a bitch," I growled. "It would revolutionize medicine. Come on,
Jennifer, talk sensibly to me, I know better than this."

I thought that she had been doubletalking
me. But maybe not. Her only response to that was a curt, "Perhaps
you do not know all that you think you know."

I did not respond to that, because she did
not give me the opportunity.

She stood up, showed me her back, and walked
out.

Leaving old Ashton with a taste of ashes in
the mouth.

I sat there for awhile
idly studying the series of equations on the blackboard, even while
knowing that I could not pierce that particular veil. I did
recognize, here and there, values representing mass and energy,
gravity and velocity, in a series which may have had something to
do with critical density and the expansion of the universe, but I
was just guessing; this stuff was several lifetimes beyond my
grasp.

So, what the hell, I'd
offended her again—so, why not?—she'd offended the hell out of me,
time and again. It was not
her
brain tissue under that microscope! Who the hell
did these people think they were?—gods, or something?—that they
could just snip off a specimen willy-nilly, without permission ...
?

I knew what an electron
microscope is. I'd seen the damn things. They shot a damned beam of
electrons into matter, irradiated the hell out of it,
and...