Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (24 page)

"Hey, come on, don't do this to me,
Ash."

But I was doing it to him. And happily. I
stepped out of the car and closed the door tightly behind me.

Everyone, now and then, has to pay his tab.
Scenario Souza was now even.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Jinnesis

I had better explain a
couple of things before you get the idea I'm doing to you what I
did to Souza. What exactly are the jinn and what kind of bull is
this about the fountain of youth and all that.

Let me assure you, first,
that it's no bull. These people were actually "rolled back" in
biological time to a moment when their élan, or life force, was at
its most vigorous. But note that I said "biological" time, not
calendrical. They did not lose the years, or the experience, or
anything whatever in real time. What they lost was biological
decay.

How account for that?

Well, I am shooting in the dark again—and
this is no easy explanation, at best. It has to do with what life
really is and what a living cell really is and how life itself
asserts domain in an entropic reality. If that sounds like
double-talk, I'm sorry. I will try to make the talk as singular as
possible...but you will have to bear with me, once again, while I
discuss these very singular ideas.

First of all, etropy. The
word was coined by a nineteenth-century German physicist, man named
Clausius, to describe a thermodynamic principle in nature: the
observation that a certain amount of energy is unavailable for
useful work in any system undergoing change. The universe itself is
such a system, and it has been postulated and experimentally
demonstrated that entropy (disorder; useless work) always
increases and available energy always diminishes at a steady rate
in our physical reality. What this means, essentially, is that our
universe is steadily decaying and has been doing so since the big
bang which supposedly began our race through space and time. There
will come a time when it all runs down, when there is no further
energy available for useful work—such as star-building and the
formation of dynamic matter. Our
entropic
reality,
then, is a dying universe in
which the natural tendency is toward further and further
disorder.

Upon this scene strides
man, carried on the back of countless generations of other life
forms from the amoeba to protoman. The miracle of life is that it
is here, at all. Life gathers together, unto itself, the energetic
particles of a decaying universe and infuses them with purposeful
activity. That is a powerful idea. Even the lowly amoeba is a
majestic miracle of purposeful activity when considered in company
with a band of lifeless molecules. The molecules are steadily
decaying and giving up energy while the amoeba absorbs that energy
and grows with it.

Still with me?

Consider, then, that the
amoeba is built of essentially the same particles of matter that
built the lifeless molecules. They all started together in a star,
somewhere, the erupting product of nuclear fusion and the building
of complicated atoms, flung out into cold black space to drift and
coagulate into congealing lumps of matter which somehow in time
found a space for itself in orbit around the star that built it—and
the same debris that built the decaying molecular planet built also
in its dust—or vapors, whatever pleases most—a vehicle by which
quite another force, not encountered in any free form anywhere in
creation, began purposeful activity.

That is what life is. And that is how, to
the best of human understanding, life began on this planet.

That understanding, however, is woefully
inadequate at the present stage to answer the deeper questions
about life. It does not answer, nor attempt to answer, even, the
question of how "purposeful activity" arose in a lump of lifeless
matter. Most scientists today would avoid the question by saying it
is not in the province of science to answer such questions. That is
pure bullshit. It most definitely is within the purvey and the
province of science to ask as well as to answer every question
bearing on the nature of this reality we all inhabit. So don't let
them get away with that.

One scientist who did not try to get away
with it was the guy I mentioned earlier, the late astrophysicist
Gustaf Stromberg. It is a pity that this man did not have access to
recent findings in the still-infant science of microbiology. The
postulates he did come up with, while microbiology was still a
primitive science, would have been Nobel material had he not been
so far ahead of his time. As it was, he was largely ignored or
pooh-poohed by his contemporaries, who perhaps were embarrassed by
this scientific lapse into what surely was regarded as
mysticism.

Well, maybe that isn't
fair. Einstein himself wrote a glowing cover blurb for one of
Stromberg's books,
The Soul of the
Universe
, in which he sets forth a
brilliant theory of life processes.

Stromberg, you see, though
an astrophysicist, apparently became intrigued by what was
happening in microbiology during the second quarter of this
century. And he was fascinated by the research being done into
basic life processes, particularly that having to do with the
embryonic development of a living creature, or embryogenesis.
Considerable spade-work had already been done by various eminent
biologists, including De Beer and Huxley, to show that embryonic
development occurs within an "organizing field," and the German
biologist Gurwitsch had published a study in 1922 in which he
stated, "The place of the embryonal formative process is a field
(in the usage of the physicists) the boundaries of which, in
general, do not coincide with those of the embryo but surpass them.
Embryogenesis, in other words, comes to pass inside of the field.
What is given to us as a living system would consist of the visible
embryo (or egg, respectively) and a field. The question is how the
field itself evolves during the development of the
embryo."

Which brings us full circle back to the
jinn.

Gurwitsch's "field" (in the usage of the
physicists) is an electromagnetic field and it posits the existence
of "an organizing field" of electromagnetic energy in which the
embryo is embedded.

Stromberg envisioned
"living wave systems" which he christened—are you ready for
this?—
genii.
It
is patently unfair to do so, but I will try to sum up, for quick
consumption here, Stromberg's conclusions by quoting a single
paragraph from his book, Soul of the Universe:

"Matter and life and consciousness have
their 'roots' in a world beyond space and time. They emerge into
the physical world at certain well-defined points or sources from
which they expand in the form of guiding fields with space and
time properties. Some of the sources can be identified with
material particles, and others with the living elements responsible
for organization and purposeful activities. Some of them exist in
our brain as neurons, and some of them have a very intimate and
special association with their ultimate origin. They are the roots
of our consciousness and the sources of all our knowledge."

Mr. Stromberg was
describing, I believe, the jinn, although his own terminology
was
genii
.

I also believe, however,
that Stromberg's
genii
were in a high degree of organization, since he was speaking
of embryonic life fields, which would presuppose greatly
specialized and sophisticated living systems.

Our jinn are not quite in that category, as
you shall see.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Adventure
Begins

The cleanup had begun, in the study. Isaac
was erasing the chalk marks from the blackboard. Others were
rounding up computer prints and stuffing them into boxes which, in
turn, were being carried away by Pala braves. Books were being
carefully returned to library shelves. Holden stood to one side,
absently watching the activity, now and then leaping to assist a
Pala position a heavy box in his arms.

I watched Holden for a few minutes,
wondering about that delighted and delightful old man and trying to
picture him as he would have looked fifty years earlier, decided he
was a hell of a man at any age.

Funny, you know, how you
can project a "process" forward or backward in time and still
identify the result of it. Life appears to be a process. A process
of
what
, I can't
say—but it seems that all of us begin as a gleam in our father's
eye and then something inexorable takes over to project us into the
matrices of space-time and then to keep us moving through a flow of
experience from which we may never withdraw until it is time to
escape space-time. That which occurs between gleam and withdrawal
is a process of some sort, meaningful work lending itself to
purposeful activity in a process conceived by a far greater
intelligence than mine.

Holden had said that we
take it with us, all of it—and I was wondering what it was that he
would be taking with him, what net result of his own personal
processing. Suppose that he was bringing it to me and that I
existed in that other world, somewhere outside space and time: what
would be the gift from Holden that could be built nowhere but here?
Joy, perhaps, delight, a rare appreciation for experiential magic,
a sense of generosity, a sense of purpose, a sense of...

Yes,
senses
of things, not the things
themselves.

So...was that what "life"
was processing? If life had come to the space-time universe to find
something of value which could not be built in that other universe,
could
sensory experience
be what it is all about? And what was being built
behind the matrices from these space-time processes? What would
Holden bring as a gift of value to that endeavor? He'd called this
earth a
crucible
.
So what had he built, here, of his own life processes, for that
other world?

I was just wondering, with
no expectation of finding an answer. But maybe I found one, just
the same. Because when Holden spotted me standing there, and turned
to me with that delighted grin and hurried to me with that
boundless enthusiasm—at the age of seventy-five, no less—I found
myself responding in kind and I knew what it was that men like
Holden built for that other world. And, yes, in his case, one plus
one most certainly equals infinity. If I ran that other world, I
would not shut this fellow down, not ever.

"The adventure begins, Ashton," he announced
with a delighted shuffle of eyebrows.

It had begun quite a bit earlier, for me,
and I was not sure I could take much more, but I told him, "That's
bully."

"Yes, damn right it's
bully." He hugged me and I hugged him back without a trace of
embarrassment. "See here, my friend," he said, after the embrace,
"I have been authorized to invite you to stay with us. It was a
unanimous vote. We'd all like you to be one of us."

I said, "I already feel that I am one of
you, Holden. But I appreciate the gesture."

"It's no gesture, my boy. Let me assure you,
it's no gesture. And our adventure is just beginning. We'd like you
to share that with us, if that is your desire. No pressure, of
course, ho!—no!—no pressure of any kind, not in a matter such as
this!—but—'"

I said, "I don't have a
lot of rollback available, Holden. If you could bottle a few jinn
for me, though, why I'd be delighted to take a rollback or two home
with me for future use."

He laughed and I laughed
and we had a good time with it while he explained that was not
exactly what he'd had in mind; then Isaac came over and the whole
thing turned very sober again.

"The troops are coming," I told him, then
went on to relate what I'd learned from Souza.

The news did not
particularly surprise him. "Perfectly understandable," was his
comment. "Actually they have been very patient with us. Much more
so than..."

I knew what he meant. I said, "It was a
disaster over there."

He nodded and replied, "Yes, I got that from
Washington yesterday morning. And I can understand their concern
that this thing be approached with full safeguards. However..."

I said, "You know what the
pressures will be, I'm sure. They'll want to put you people in test
tubes and probe for every conceivable effect. And they'll want to
draw more blood than your bodies are capable of producing. They'll
be trying to synthesize and package this thing, and I would suppose
the first move would be toward establishing a brain
bank—politicians first, no doubt—to preserve senior wisdom. You
people are going to be first-line curiosities. If Barnum were alive
today, he'd be lobbying for the exploitation rights." I was
beginning to feel like Scenario Souza, but Isaac came to the
rescue.

"We have considered all that, of course," he
told me, "and it has helped form our decision. Do you know what
that is?"

I knew what it was, yes. I'd known it hours
earlier, back in the circle, before any talk of "decision." But it
was not all that clear a knowingness, more a vague premonition or a
priori reasoning to an inevitable effect.

"Essentially, yes," I replied. "I know what
you must do."

"Good." He looked to Holden, back to me.
"Will you join us?"