Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (17 page)

I asked her, "Are these pictures of it?"

"Bits and pieces of it, yes," she replied.
"Cerebral cortex area."

Before I looked at that, though, I wanted to
know about those other "bits and pieces." I was looking at the
culture dishes as I asked her, "They are all still inside my head,
I hope."

"Be assured of that," she replied soberly.
"The culture studies are all done using fetus specimens."

I blinked at that and asked, "Human
fetuses?"

"Yes. The mitotics are much more dynamic at
that stage of development, so..."

I asked her, "Where do you get your
specimens?"

"From aborted fetuses, Ashton," she
explained, rather brusquely, and quickly moved on to another
subject. "Now these photographs are—"

But I was hung up back there with those
aborted fetuses. "So you have to be right there Johnny-on-the-spot
to get dynamic specimens," I pursued it. "These are living
cultures, I take it."

"Yes, of course, we are maintaining and
encouraging cell replication and studying the process. But if you
mean—no, Ashton, really. We are not Johnny-on-the-spot. A
commercial lab supplies the flash-frozen specimens. Now these
pictures—"

"Somehow that seems downright
cold-blooded."

"How else do we progress through science,
Ashton?"

I understood the argument. I'd been through
it before, inside my own head, many times—not in this particular
application but in similar ones—and I'd had to draw certain lines.
After all, Dr. Frankenstein had been doing his all for "progress
through science." But there were limits, and I'd found mine in
lesser trespasses.

Don't get the wrong
impression here, though. Laura's laboratory was nothing like
Frankenstein's. These were not whole fetuses, not even anything
recognizable; it was just a snip here and a snip there, so to
speak. Still...

"All entirely legal, I'm sure," I
growled.

It burned her. "Of course
it's entirely legal! What do you suppose we are running, here? My
gosh! Use some objectivity, Ashton. It's waste enough that a life
is aborted in the first place. Compound that waste by casting the
entire effort into a furnace or dissolving it in acid, or whatever
they do with the poor things, and—well, thanks, but I like to think
I'm doing something more positive than that!"

Our gazes clashed for a long, silent moment,
then I shrugged and told her, "Of course it's more positive. So
what are you learning?"

She sat down beside me, riffled the stack of
photographs, said, very calmly, "We are learning that the life
process is far more magical than the cold heart of science would
like to admit. We are learning that the organizing processes appear
to be obeying a pattern initially established beyond matter and
perhaps even beyond the ordinary concepts of space and time."

"What do you mean," I asked musingly, "by
beyond...?"

"Outside of."

I said, "Sheer energy, then."

She said, "Beyond that,
even, as we presently understand the term. Energy can be defined as
a certain state of space and time."

"This cannot? This...whatever...cannot be...
?"

"In the ordinary concept, no."

I asked, "What would be an extraordinary
concept?"

Laura replied, "It can be hypothesized that
the life force, whatever it is, is not indigenous to this universe
of space and time."

I chewed that for a moment, then observed,
"You know what you are saying, don't you? What you are
implying?"

She said, "The implications are rather
stupendous, yes."

I said, "You are back to special
creation."

"In a manner of speaking, I suppose that
could be.,."

I said, "Hand it to a Billy
Sunday and see what he does with it: You are back in
his
camp, now. He will
say that he has been telling you this all along. God created the
heavens and the earth. Presumably, then, God was somewhere outside
the thing being created when he did this. You can't climb into your
own test tube, can you. So he created
this
universe and all the things to
put inside it. But he was over there, somewhere—outside, somewhere.
He created all the living things, saving Adam for last, a special
creation into which he blew his own breath, his own very special
life force, and put Adam in charge, here."

She said, very quietly, "Yes. I get the
picture. But it does not change anything. I have compelling reasons
to believe that the life force is not indigenous to this entropic
system of expanding space and time."

I pushed the photographs away and told her,
"I really do not want to see these, Laura."

She explained, "They are merely microscopic
studies of—not actually 'pictures' but representative images
of—"

I said, "I know what they
are. I don't want to see them."

She showed me a rather
bemused smile, said, “A pet superstition, or...?”

"Call it whatever you like," I replied. "I
just don't want to become too self-conscious of my mental
processes. I have a hard enough time, as it is, trying to..."

After a moment, she said, "Please. Trust me
not to laugh at you. Stay open with me."

"I'm staying open," I growled. "And you can
laugh all you please. I could tell you a thing or two, Dr.
Summerfield, about ordinary concepts of space-time. And you'd laugh
like hell at me, I'm sure, forgetting that you'd promised not
to."

"Why don't you try me," she suggested
soberly.

"It's purely an intellectual concept," I
growled.

"What is?"

"Space and time. Space-time."

"Oh,"—softly.

"'Oh' is exactly right. We
are, all of us, sitting here in the very lap of a mind-blowing
phenomenon. It was not mind-blowing before there were minds to
blow, but now that man has come into the scene with his oversized
brain—and all that mind power—now, suddenly, it's a-mind-blower. So
we try to limit the size of the explosion, we try to find a handle,
a tool of some kind, to de-phenomenize the experience. We
intellectualize it. In that effort, we squeeze all the magic out
and try to reduce the whole thing to a series of mathematical
equations. That is what space-time is, and that is all it
is."

"But there
is
an objective world,
Ashton."

"Sure there is. And we're
trying to understand it. But the world, in itself, is basically
incomprehensible.
We
never
touch
that world, Laura, except with the mind. Therefore everything
perceived is no more than a mental construct, a mental
specimen,
damn it, of
reality. We don't
interact
with this phenomenon. We simply observe
it."

She said, after a moment,
"You will note that I am not laughing, Ashton."

I said, after another moment, "What have you
observed in my brain cells?"

She replied, "In a word, mutations."

"Great. That's really wonderful, Laura. That
explains the psychic angle? I'm a mutant?"

"We are all mutants, Ashton. Thank God for
that. Otherwise the world would be populated entirely by
amoeba."

"So much, then," I said sourly, "for special
creation."

"Oh it is still very special," she assured
me. "The process involves complementarity, a whole range of it.
'Mutation' is simply a convenient description of the process. One
of your 'intellectual constructs,' say."

I said, "Okay. What sort of mutant am
I?"

"We're still working on
that. One thing is sure, however. Certain neurons of your cerebral
cortex have developed receptors which cannot be correlated with
what is known about neurotransmitters in the cortex. I characterize
these as mutations simply for want of a better name. But there is
something decidedly different about your brain, Ashton. And we
believe that we know, now, why your brain interacts with the
strange energy we have been studying."

I said, "With the jinn."

Her eyes flared and she replied, "You know
about that, then."

I said, "Esau told me. He wants me to
'interact' in some controlled manner, I gather."

She replied, eyes downcast, "Yes. We have
devised an interesting experiment."

I said, "Esau also told me that there is an
element of danger in that experiment."

"I would say, a very small element."

"What kind of danger?"

She raised those dark eyes to mine as she
replied, "There is some small concern about the interaction itself.
You mentioned the noise, and the dizziness."

"Yes?"

"From just momentary interaction?"

I said, "Momentary, yes, but I wouldn't go
so far as to call it an interaction. A perception, maybe."

She said, "With the jinn, Ashton, all
perception is interaction."

"How do you know that?"

"All perception, Ashton, is caused by an
excitation within certain nerve tissue, produced by an external
source."

I said, "Okay."

"Therefore, perception is interaction. The
nerve tissue is sampling its environment. It responds within a very
narrow range of possibilities, and usually in direct relationship
to the nature of the stimulating force."

"Okay."

"You have already
interacted with the jinn. Perhaps you have been doing so, in some
finer way, throughout your psychic lifetime. This could account for
your ability to receive perception without using the five common
senses. But this would be a very fine, let me emphasize that, a
particularly fine, interaction, as compared to the particulate
stream now being experienced. In the experiment, moreover, we shall
be refocusing that stream into a more concentrated target
zone."

"My brain."

"Yes."

"Okay. I'll think about that."

"Another factor should be an important part
of your consideration. You have every right to know this."

I said, "Okay."

"It is entirely possible that the
differences noted in the neurons of your cortex—remember those?—the
mutations?"

I said, "Yes, I remember those."

"It is entirely possible that those almost
insignificant differences are a direct result of your presence
here at Palomar."

"You mean, I wasn't like that before I came
here."

"There is that possibility. Since we have no
way to correlate the present findings with what obtained last week
or last month or last year...well, we can only say, there is that
possibility."

I said, "Let me get this straight. You are
suggesting the possibility that I have already experienced some
mutation as a result of a casual perception—or interaction, as you
will—with the jinn."

"You have it straight, Ashton."

I had it "straight," yeah. And I would be
straight out of my mind to go along with these people on this
thing. Even if I knew who they were or what they were. But I did
not know that, even.

But, what the hell, I wasn't here for win or
lose. I was here to play the game. And I'd probably found the most
exciting game in town.

Chapter Twenty: The Goal

I was not entirely satisfied with my little
visit with Laura Summerfield, but she was a very busy lady and I
was obviously in the way. In fact, she made it quite clear that I
was a distraction, so I got out of there and left her to her work.
As I was crossing the yard, I noticed that the Maserati was in the
clear. There was a brief debate with my inner self over whether I
should or should not seize the moment and get the hell out of
there. I lost that one, then lost another regarding the Walther PPK
which, I presumed, still nestled in the floorboard compartment.

So I went on to the big
house, wondering if I was totally crazy—or totally mutated already
and under the control of these people. Hey—if it happens in the
movies it can happen anywhere to anybody. I believe the old maxim
that anything conceivable is also possible, no matter how far out
it may seem at conception. All
science
fiction,
I believe, should be regarded as
science
future,
because once the concept is there, the reality is not far
behind. So don't grin at my state of mind on that Monday afternoon
as I was strolling across Summerfield's lawn and forlornly eyeing
my Maserati. I wanted out of there, make no mistake about it. With
the same mind, though, I knew I had to stay and see it
through.

So I lit a cigarette and
paused to palaver with a couple of Pala braves. Except that it was
sort of a one-way palaver—a monologue, actually. Damn it, I knew
these guys
could
speak English, but they concealed that ability very
well.

"Hi, guys."

I was not even there.

"Nice day for a slide on the ass down the
mountain, eh?"

I was standing where they wanted to work so
they just worked around me.

"Running Bear was really a squaw who decided
to fuck housework. Or tepee work. Put on this bearskin, see, and
proclaimed squaw lib. That's why you guys are out here with the
brooms right now."

I could not get a rise out of these guys,
although one of them sort of, almost, maybe halfway smiled at his
broom. I went on inside, visited the basement and received almost
the same treatment down there. That whole team was really pumping
adrenaline, now. Godzilla could have walked among them as unnoticed
as I.

I kept hoping for a peek,
at least, at Isaac Donaldson, but could not even find a clue to his
whereabouts. Esau was nowhere in that lab, either—nor was Jennifer.
So I went back upstairs and just casually nosed about. It was a
hell of a big house. I counted eight bedrooms besides the master
suite apparently shared by Holden and Laura, that latter sporting
two queen-size beds and two separate baths but rather Spartan in
the decor—masculine, I suppose, if you want to gender it—nothing at
all like the master suite at Isaac's place in Glendale.