Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) (11 page)

Chapter Nineteen:
 
A Question of Time

I later learned that
two new items had been added that morning to the bulging file of
"crackpot" UFO lore. A commercial fisherman out of Morro Bay and two
of his crewmen shamefacedly reported to the Coast Guard an incident involving
their boat two miles off the California coast. All three requested polygraph
tests as verification of their report, but the news item indicated that their
story was not taken seriously enough to warrant any attempts at verification.

According
to the skipper, his boat was dragging a sea anchor in heavy fog, all his
navigation lights were showing, and he was sounding the required fog warning
signals while the craft stood dead in the water, when a cement swimming pool
filled with water and complete with diving board and slide descended slowly
from the overcast directly above them and settled into the ocean beside their
boat without a splash, as he and his crew gaped from the deck.

Little
wonder, is it, that nobody thought it necessary to hook these guys up to a lie
detector—except maybe the seamen who filed the other "crackpot"
story. In roughly that same time frame and less than fifty miles removed from
the scene of the other report, two crewmen of an oil tanker proceeding toward
Santa Barbara reported seeing a vertical column of water rising from the surface
of the ocean and disappearing into the low overcast. Both men emphatically
insisted that they saw several dolphins swimming up the column of water.

Those
two reports were among the most laughable to be seized upon by the press during
the California flap.

I
did not laugh when I read them.

In
fact, I would have paid hard money for those reports if they'd come to me at
the time. Because the stuff was really beginning to pile up around my ears, and
the more I experienced the more I wondered about my mental health.

This
new "pool" in Penny Laker's backyard was obviously a scientific
laboratory of some sort. The "equipment" in that vault was definitely
alien technology unrelatable to anything in my experience—various
cylindrical-shaped objects of shiny metal, some larger than me, others as small
as a softball—piping made of some kind of very hard but not metallic
material—spaghetti like bundles of stuff that could be wiring or anything.

I
could see nothing that would make me think of direct-read dials or gauges but a
large panel emplaced on the far wall could conceivably be a control panel. It
had "eyes" in it shaped like Donovan's, many of them, and I convinced
myself that I could see subtle movements deep within them.

The
dolphins looked like ordinary terrestrials to me. But if they were alive, they
were in a comatose or suspended state; they were absolutely motionless; they
could have been wax figures.

Each
was six or seven feet long, obviously adult; I could not determine sex.

That
section of the pool visible through the glass wall was apparently recessed from
the main area and not visible from above because I had seen nothing earlier to
suggest such a setup below.

I
was trying to get a better look at the comatose dolphins when Donovan's voice
spoke to me from the panel I mentioned earlier.

"They
are quite healthy, Ashton."

I
turned slowly to gaze at the panel, which stood about twenty feet away.
"Glad to hear that," I replied. "Maybe you should tell them
that."

I
had already begun moving toward the panel and I was trying to home in on the
precise source of the voice as Donovan responded to my little gibe, but it was
a futile attempt. The voice was just "there" somewhere, evidently
issuing from behind the panel yet clear and distinct. "We would not interfere
in any life process without permission."

I
said, speaking to the panel at large, "That's nice to know. Now how about
defining 'we' for me."

There
was a trace of amusement in the response. "Would you understand if I told
you?"

"I'll
sure try," I promised.

Then
I saw him...in the panel, through the panel, somewhere...as through a glass
darkly, just from the chin up. He was smiling as he said, "In good time, my
friend. For now, just try to stay out of trouble. Will you do that?"

I
was a bit irked by the tone, that of a father chastising a small boy. I said,
"You know, Donovan, you've got a hell of a nerve. I don't know what you
guys have in mind for this planet but I have to tell you that your methods
don't always make a lot of sense. I presume there is some universal standard
for good sense."

He
was still having subtle fun with me as he replied, "Which universe?"

I
growled, "How many are there?"

"How
many would you like?" he asked.

I
said, "See? You're treating me like a puppy."

The
face and voice became very sober as he replied to that. "I beg your
forgiveness. You are entirely correct. Superior technology does not necessarily
equate to superior wisdom, does it. Take the dolphin."

I
said, "Yes?"

"He
is very old and very wise. Yet your superior technology allows you to exterminate
him to the point of genocide. I have the nerve, Ashton? I have not slaughtered
you, my friend. Yet you have reduced virtually every life-form upon the planet
to serve your comfort. If you cannot eat it or skin it or otherwise process it
for your comfort, then you exterminate it. How say you now?"

I
replied, "I was about to say that I do none of that. But I guess I do, in
many subtle ways."

Donovan
said, "And in some ways not so subtle. But it is our fault, not yours. We
brought you here and abandoned you here to shift for yourself, charging you
only to subdue the planet. It appears that you have very nearly succeeded in
that."

I
was beginning to get a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach. I said, "Do
I stand indicted for the entire race?"

He
showed me a sober smile and replied, "There is no indictment, Ashton. But
yes, you do answer for the race. Each of you do. How else could it be? Are you
not now the heir of all that ever was before you? If you would reap the
inheritance, would you not also settle the debts against the estate?"

It
was getting heavy and my belly was having a hard time with it. I said to
Donovan, "If I am the heir then who was my father?"

"I
was," he replied quietly.

"Then
we stand at the bar together," I told him.

"Yes,"
he said. "Very good. You go to the heart, don't you, my friend."

"When
did you conceive me?" I asked him.

He
stared at me for a moment before replying: "As you calculate time you are
bound by time."

"I
asked you a direct question."

"So
you did. Then try nine hundred thousand terrestrial years for fit."

I
said, "Neither of us is that old."

"Oh
but we are, and I much older. We are older than your star, my brother; older
than my present star; and there were stars before those. Time, Ashton, has no
meaning to you and me. Time is an illusion produced by matter defining space.
We are older than matter, brother; older than space."

"Then
why can't I remember it?"

"How
would you use the memory? How could you cope with it? In your present limited
form, how would you bear it?"

I
said, "Uh...we had a guy here...name was Nietzsche. He said there were no
gods, otherwise how could he bear to be no god. Is that sort of what... ?”

Donovan
replied, "Very good, yes."

"You
are God, then?"

He
chuckled. "We are, yes."

I
said, despairingly, "Oh shit."

Were
these, then, the guys who threw the lightning bolts from Mount Olympus?—the
ones who settled on Moses's mountaintop with fire and thunderings?—the same
ones who inspired all the god legends across the planet?

And
was it their time once again?

Time
to do what?

I
was not to have a direct answer at that moment. Donovan's face disappeared
from view and a purplish smoke replaced it, drifted toward me, buckled my
knees, dropped my chin to my chest, toppled me onto the floor, closed my eyes
and my ears and all of my senses.

The
last thought to flare through that darkness was from me and to me.

Was
it time to pay the debts of the estate?

Chapter Twenty:
 
Echo the Stars

I looked it up later.
I was not really aware until then that dolphins are actually a type of whale,
most closely related to the so-called killer whale. Our experts regard the
whale as a very ancient order of the mammalian class that branched off into a
marine species very early in the evolutionary history of mammals, long before
man appeared.

That
is what our experts say. They also say that mammals first appeared on earth
less than a hundred million years ago—the whales about seventy million years
ago and man only one million.

We
are talking large slices of time here, pal. To personalize it and bring it down
to ruler size, think of yourself as all humanity from the beginning and you are
a mere infant, only about a year old, while your cousin the dolphin is a
great-grandpappy, seventy years old.

I
gathered that this was what Donovan had reference to in comparing man and
dolphin. To carry the comparison a step farther, these same experts tell us
that the evolution of life on this planet began about three billion years
ago—that is three thousand millions—so place the blue-green algae on your ruler
at age three thousand.

On
the scale of life on earth, then, our year-old babe is riding high on the crest
of genetic material that had been cooking for three thousand years to produce
him. But that ruler is now a distortion, as applied to genetics, because the
very first cell to appear on earth was composed of potentially immortal
material and traces of it are present in every gene alive on the planet today.
So our babe may have a prefrontal life of only a single year but it required
three thousand years of constant stewing to produce the recipe for that life.

I
believe this is more or less what Donovan had in mind when he was talking about
the heirs to the estate. Our endowment is that gene pool. It took a very long
time to build it. Some debts were incurred along the way.

So
what is the human debt to the planet and how do we repay it?

Donovan
had been speaking figuratively, of course, when he said that he begat me—but
there had been a literal ring to his words when he was alluding to the origins
and age of mankind, the meaninglessness of time, and the common bonds between
us.

As
for that debt...well, I was to be reminded that bills come around from time to
time and have to be paid from time to time if you do not want to have a
valuable possession repossessed.

Maybe
the mortgage had come due on Planet Earth.

I
had about ten million questions to ask Donovan but I probably would not have
thought of one of them even had the purple smoke not detached me from the
process. I don't know, maybe I did get a few questions in somewhere because I
came out of that purple haze with a vague, dreamlike memory of another
conversation with Donovan while standing on a balcony in a huge domed enclosure
and looking down upon hundreds of uniformed people engaged in various tasks.

In
the dream or whatever, I asked him, "When do you go home?"—and he
replied: "We are home now."

I
think also I asked about my earlier experience when I walked into the fog and
met Ambudala, because I remember the smile on Donovan's face as he struggled to
convey an understanding of multidimensional reality.

"Picture
a bar magnet," he suggested, "and add to the picture the
electromagnetic lines of force that you know surround the magnet even though
you cannot see them with the eye. Now imagine that the magnet itself is
transparent and that you can see the same lines of force not only surrounding
the magnet but permeating it. Fit a powerful microscope to the eye, now, and
zoom in on the molecular reality. Note how each molecule dances to the lines of
force and how every atom within the molecule contributes to the dance. Now go
even deeper and watch the particles of an atom as they give to and take from
the rhythm of the dance. Hold that focus but gradually enlarge the field of
vision until you arc seeing the entire bar magnet as individual particles
moving within those same lines of force—and now tell me, Ashton, what your
magnet looks like."

I
had the image in my mind. I told him, "The same particles define both. It
just seems to move more slowly and more densely when defining the bar
itself."

"Exactly,"
he responded. "There is your reality, my brother."

I
said, "It's all in the vibrations."

"It
could be so simplified, yes, one field meshing with another and another, on and
on infinitely, and the scale is also infinite. What is music, Ashton, but a
scale within which dance the tones and harmonics of particles in motion? But is
the tune mere particles in motion or is it a synthesis of overlapping fields
vibrating form the mind of the composer through the mind of the musician to the
mind of the listener, and do these fields not guide the particles along their
dance? When you hear Beethoven, does your very brain not vibrate as his did
when he composed the piece? Is music not multidimensional? Is the bar magnet
not? Are you not?"

I
commented, "Experience itself, then, is a matter of being tuned to a
particular wavelength. There are some wavelengths I can't tune to. If I had an
infinite tuner..."

"You're
on the right track, yes. But you need to refine it. And perhaps you need to
redefine experience. Experience
is
but the
echo,
my friend."

"Echo
of what?"

He
smiled and told me, "When you understand that, then you will understand
all."

But,
as a matter of fact, I understood nothing. I awoke to that realization, and to
a feeling of utter frailty, total helplessness, and complete despair.

So
I guess I saw a lot more in that "dream" than I consciously
remembered. Because I felt like a smudge of blue-green algae.

The sun was in the sky
when I awoke and I was lying on a chaise on Penny Laker's lanai. I was fully
clothed, shoes and all, and held an unlit cigarette between my fingers. I guess
I vocalized something as I sat up, because I drew the immediate attention of
two concerned women. Both were wearing string bikinis and nothing else. Penny
stepped over from the pool area. She had obviously been in the water recently.
Julie came from the kitchen carrying a tray with orange juice and coffee. She
put the tray on the table, then both of them just stood there staring at me
with quizzical gazes.

I
noted for the first time how alike they looked, standing side by side and
practically naked. Same height, same body contours, same soft and
smooth-all-over femininity, except that Penny was blond and Julie raven-haired.
You would not even read that much difference in age, though there had to be
some ten to fifteen years between them.

This
seemed like the Penny Laker I had known for the past few years. I'm speaking of
the personality and mannerisms. But she was not exactly hospitable. She seemed
puzzled by my presence there, too proper to demand an explanation but also
probably just a bit upset about the whole thing.

We
were acquaintances more than friends, understand, but I still thought she was
acting peculiarly under the circumstances. I mean, okay, I'd just dropped in
without an invitation but we were involved in a common puzzle and I had done
the lady a couple of good turns in recent hours. She was looking at me as
though wondering how to handle a gate-crashing fan.

Julie's
behavior was even more puzzling. She turned around without a word and snared a
terry-cloth robe from the back of a chair, put it on, went back inside the
house.

I
went to the table and helped myself to the coffee, told Penny, "Sorry to
crash in on you this way. Well, no, actually I am not sorry because I did not
crash in. I think Donovan dropped me here. You know? Donovan? The guy in the
silver BVD's?"

She
showed me a thoughtful smile and a shake of the head as she replied, "No,
I... I'm sorry, Ashton, you startled me. I didn't see you come in, and..."

I
said, "Okay, so maybe he beamed me here. I don't recall arriving,
myself." I looked her up and down. "I see you've been in the pool.
Enjoy the dolphins?"

Her
smile grew even more puzzled but it hung on as she replied, "Yes, I love
dolphins. Don't you?" She did not give me a chance to respond to that but
hurried on with: "Ashton, I must ask you to excuse me. I have a very busy
schedule today and—what can I do for you?"

I
sipped the hot coffee while intently studying her over the rim of the cup. She
was a superb actress, sure, but I could not read this as an act.

I
put the coffee down, showed her a smile, said, "Don't let me detain you.
Actually I'm looking for Ted."

"Isn't
he at his office?"

"Not
today," I told her.

The
actress sat down across from me with a searching gaze. I was visualizing her in
the silver uniform as she asked me, in a concerned voice, "Are you all
right, Ashton?"

I
said, "Probably not. But why do you ask?"

"Well...you
came in here yelling 'What planet is this?' and you really haven't said
anything more sensible than that since you arrived. Are you drunk? Would you
like to sleep it off?"

I
did not respond to any of that. "Do you like your new pool?"

"I
love it, yes. How'd you know about that? Did Ted tell you? Oh! Oh! I get
it!" She looked around expectantly. "Where is he? How did he ever
pull it off?"

I
growled, "Relax, Ted's not here. He's in Buenos Aires, or at some point in
transit."

I
left her sitting at the table with a dumb look on her face and crossed to the
far side of the pool. It was the new pool, yeah, but I could not find the
manhole cover. I even got on my hands and knees and covered the entire
surrounding area with probing fingers but I could not find it. Penny was
watching from the other side and pacing nervously, as though undecided as to
what she should do.

I
stripped down to my jockeys and went into the pool, oriented myself, then dived
for the glass wall. But of course there was no glass wall down there. On the
second dive I did find the evidence to preserve my sanity, a barely noticeable
seam about ten feet long and three feet deep outlining what I took to be a
"flap" in the side of the pool.

I
carried my clothing back to the lanai, toweled dry, and got dressed without a
word to my hostess nor her to me. While I was donning socks and shoes, Julie
reappeared, clad in the now familiar workout suit with a shorty skirt pulled
over it.

She
showed me a dazzling smile; said, "I'm ready, Ashton," then went over
to say something privately to her employer.

A
moment later I was leaving via the front door with a radiant Julie Marsini on
my arm.

Hell,
I'd decided, I was ready, too. For most anything.