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

by Pendleton, Don

  Descartes died in the year a.d. 1650. What does that mean? That he is no longer thinking, therefore he no longer is? But even his "death" is relative to our perception in time and space as to what life and death are. We could now say, could we not: Descartes died, therefore we know he lived. Could we not also say: We know Descartes lived more than three hundred years ago; therefore we know that now he must be dead?

  See how it all plays to the tune of time?

  Cogito, ergo sum, from our present perspective in space and time, would no longer appear to be a valid truth for René Descartes, would it? But how can we know for sure? Maybe Descartes is still thinking, somewhere outside space and time.

  Cogito, ergo sum does not even stand up to modern science. Were Descartes alive today, our brain-research people would want him to rephrase that a bit to say: "My neurons are firing, therefore..."

  The quantum physics people would rather see am as a process that converts energy to matter in a standing wave of electromagnetic fields. Rocks and men are made of the same basic stuff, you see, and it all converts down (or up) to "processes in time and space" (Einstein). Both rocks and men are processes. We presume that the rock does not think but still it is—in our perception of is, anyway.

  What it is, in its most obvious difference from us, is energy congealed (for awhile) in a particular packet at a vibrational density so much lower than our own that we cannot directly observe the processes occurring within that packet.

  Uranium ore is, of course, a rock of sorts. And we have devised instruments that can observe the is processes within that particular rock.

  The usual scenario for the natural destruction of our planet is tied to the natural processes within the sun, our star. As all stars do, ours is evolving, we are told, toward a moment in time when it will dramatically increase its burn rate for a while (during which phase its corona will engulf our planet) and then gradually subside into a cold, dense, dead body. But it will still be processing its own reality, and in time it will tick feebly away until all the chemical components have broken down into atoms and the atoms into basic particles and those presumably into whatever basic particles come from, though now with no guiding wave to give meaning (process) to their existence until another process captures them and converts them to its own design.

  Our astrophysicists tell us that this sort of process will continue until all the stars have burned out and the entire universe is a drifting, cold, diffusing body. But that comes to me with just too much absolute vision. The universe did not begin with stars, I am told—not anything, anyway, that we would recognize today as a star. So the stars are just part of the process—and the process is taking you and me, pal, right along with it, and who knows from where and to where.

  Descartes did not know. Einstein did not know. No man alive today knows.

  So how phenomenal are flying saucers?

  For the world of mankind at large, we should have reached the end of phenomenal things in the skies a very long time ago. Not that the things should not be there, but that they should no longer be regarded as phenomenal. They have been with us throughout the recorded history of the planet, and undoubtedly throughout the oral history as well.

  An American Airlines DC-10 whistling across the sky above an American city in the year 1987 is not a phenomenon. It's just another routine event.

  That same plane in the sky above New Mexico or Oklahoma a thousand years ago would have been a mind-blowing phenomenon signaling the coming of the gods or some such.

  That is perfectly understandable and appropriate for the time frame. The inexplicable has always fueled the developing imagination of humankind—and it would appear that phenomena in our skies have forever been there to do just that. Granite carvings dated at 45,000 b.c., discovered in China's Hunan Province, depict robotlike figures and cylindrical objects in the sky. The Cro-Magnon caves in France and Spain preserve paintings from 15,000 years ago that reproduce virtually every UFO description now being recorded in our modern age, and all the ancient religious writings from Vedic and Babylonian texts to the Holy Bible describe the phenomena in the language appropriate to the time.

  Virtually every civilization, every culture in the annals of humankind, have their traditions and "myths" recording the drama, from the "flying canoes" of the California Indians to the Greek Olympians and the hovering (sometimes thundering) "Lord" of Moses, throughout the world on every continent and even upon the islands at sea, each in their own way and according to their own perceptions but recognizably the same phenomena.

  The modern UFO era did not begin in 1947, as commonly reported, but as early as the nineteenth century when "airships" hovered over the great population centers of the world, producing "flaps" limited only by the communications technology of the time—even earlier, being reported by Columbus, Paracelsus, and Goethe.

  An entire British regiment was swallowed up by the phenomenon during World War I (and never seen again, alive or dead). I'm sure you've heard of the "Fooballs" over Europe during World War II and the phenomena associated with the Bermuda Triangle, all of which was mere prelude to the truly modern era with literally thousands of irrefutable sightings worldwide on a continuing basis for the past thirty-five years.

  So it's nothing new. It has become routine. Still, each new experience is quickly dismissed by our governmental authorities and scathingly ridiculed by the academies of science. Why? Maybe someone should be asking those ladies and gentlemen why.

  Aircraft are not phenomenal in our time and place.

  What is phenomenal is the reaction of modern, intelligent men and women to the presence of aircraft in our skies.

  After all is said and done, after all the comparisons of flight characteristics, wherever they come from and why

  they are here, the flying saucers are aircraft. They are therefore disqualified as valid phenomena.

  Not that we should not be impressed by their presence. We should be. But the phenomenal aspects of the existence are produced by the feeling that the impressive presence of such aircraft in our skies gives us the same message it gave early man: we do not know as much as we think we know about ourselves and our world; it is more phenomenal than we think; we are not as special as we think; the world and all its systems of stars were not built for us alone.

  The danger, I think, is that we then tend to see the presence in our skies with either too much reverence or too much fear. Some of us, as from time out of mind, will want to fall down and worship them. Others will want to destroy or exploit them. I cannot feel that our visitors desire either reaction, or that they deserve either reaction.

  So what do they want?

  That is the question I had to consider at the very outset of this case—because what they want may not necessarily be the same thing that we want. All truths, after all, arc relative to their own time and place. And I was feeling very uncomfortable about this time.

  Chapter Eight: Question of Time

  I couldn't get that weird conversation with Julie Marsini out of my head. The words just kept repeating, the way the symbols had done earlier. But had she been speaking from some specific knowledge or from mere speculation? And those eyes. They kept looking at me, as from very far away.

  Even more weird had been that exchange between the two women. Strange enough were the words, stranger yet the context of those words. They'd behaved as though I were not even present. And when Penny departed, Julie acted as though she had no memory of it whatsoever.

  And what about that dolphin bit! Some kind of code? —a way of talking around my presence? Or did Penny Laker really want a pair of dolphins in her backyard?

  I was shaken a bit, sure, but not to the extent that I was ready to leap at shadows. But what the hell did it all mean, taken in context with the events of the night? What about Grover Dalton? He seemed to me like a no-non-sense guy. I had to believe his story, not just because I could partially verify it from my own experience but because the guy would not have told such a story if he had
not thought it true. I mean, a career cop is not going to invent a story like that to alibi cracking up a police car. There were too many safer lies to tell, if that was the intent.

  No...the guy believed what he said.

  So what was the significance of his experience?

  The woman he saw in the road must have been Penny Laker. A second woman is just too much coincidence. He saw Penny. But what was she doing when he saw her? Fleeing? From aliens? Or had she been doing something with them?

  Why else would the aliens "lure" him away on a futile chase through the canyon?

  Evidently I'd stumbled onto Penny while the saucer was playing games with the cop. But then she'd run from me. Because she was disoriented and panicky and mistook me for them? Or for some other reason?

  Had I really merely stumbled onto her—or had I somehow been directed to the scene myself?

  If I could believe Julie, the experience possibly was not entirely unusual for Penny. "It has become almost routine," Julie had told me.

  What had become routine?

  "Visitations," said Julie. "This is their time to come."

  "Weird stuff," complained Penny's husband.

  "That's what happened," declared a grim-lipped young cop.

  I could settle for nothing less than the sum of all that. And maybe I was allowing for a whole lot more.

  I cranked up my computer and worked for several hours with the graphics that had been deposited in my head, reproducing them in silicon logic and playing with random sequences and groupings, but it got me nowhere.

  The only two that had any significance for me outside the encounter that gave them to me were the triangle and a pyramid, which two are nearly the same since a pyramid is really a three-dimensional triangle. This had no particular meaning for me at the moment, though, nor did any of it stimulate any intuitive perceptions, so I ran off hard copies of the designs and arranged them on the wall behind the computer, then went for a walk along the beach.

  I walked about a mile and back again, my eyes on the sky much of the time though I did not really expect to see anything unusual up there. I guess it's sort of a reflex. I had noted the same "eye on the sky" tendency in others following encounters. Only unusual thing I saw the whole time was a collection of starfish washed onto the beach opposite my house, maybe a dozen of them. I don't know just how unusual that is on California beaches, but I could not recall seeing one outside my house before.

  It was about five o'clock when I returned from my walk. I should have been tired and I should have been hungry but I was neither, nor had I lost any of the mental focus which I had hoped would subside. So I went back into my study and settled onto an old leather recliner which I favor for meditation. I lay there for several minutes trying to encourage strong alpha rhythms, which is very difficult for a brain under the kind of internal stimulation I was experiencing; the alphas are strongest when the brain is awake but totally idle, weakest during focused problem solving. Actually I was trying to fake-out my left cerebral cortex and bring the right side dominant. This is sort of like self-hypnosis but with a tighter control.

  The left brain of right-handed people dominates linear thinking—that is, step-at-a-time logic sequences—but it does not function well with imagery or spatial logic, the ability to see things out of sequence. However, the left brain tends to want to dominate all thinking and will suppress the right side to a greater or lesser extent depending on the learning experience, sometimes to the point of severe imbalance even in highly intelligent people. Since our culture has traditionally encouraged and rewarded left-brain development, we have unconsciously become a left-brained culture and sometimes it is very difficult to give equal time to the right brain, even when we consciously wish to do so. I have been working with mine for years, and I know that it is the seat of my intuitive abilities, but I still usually have to work to bring it up to a dominant position.

  Anyway, that is what I was doing. And I wanted to study those computer graphics on my wall with a right- brain focus.

  I had no sooner done so than I was jolted to realize that the wall arrangement was not the same way I had left it. I recognized this immediately, because I had led with the triangle and pyramidal shapes and now they were at the exact center of the display.

  I saw something else significant in that brief look also, but the jolt woke up my left side and it took over the

  problem before I could get a right-brain fix on it. I wish it wouldn't do that. It knows that the other side is superior for this kind of work, but still it does not trust the right in matters of grave importance.

  It wanted to work with words.

  So it fired up the computer and loaded in the word-processing program and started asking questions about the symbols. We've been through the routine before, so both sides of me knew how to play the game. The left side would do all the talking. The right side would have to channel through the labyrinthine connections to the verbal centers on the left side via imagery and feelings. The result is sort of like playing a hunch or going with a flow without knowing where the flow is coming from, running with imagination, playing mental games with yourself. Even so, it can sometimes be nearly a hundred percent valid. I have learned to trust those results, but not unquestioningly.

  Here's the way it went. Bear in mind that this is "keyboard talk" and that my left brain is controlling though under strong right-brain influence. The Q is a question from the left; A is hopefully a right-brain response with minimal resistance from the left.

  Q—Was the graphics display really changed or are we just imagining?

  A—The triangle led.

  Q—Then who changed it?

  A—Someone came in while we were gone. Might still be here. Better check.

  I got up and looked through the house at this point. We were alone.

  Q—Why was it changed?

  A—To give two-dimensional sequence. These are obviously thought-forms from a being who does not reason in two dimensions.

  Q—Oh great, that's wonderful. You could be my alien, couldn't you.

  A—Better than you. But I don't fly saucers.

  Q—Why does the pyramid follow the triangle in this two-dimensional sequence?

  A—This signifies step-up. Dimensional step-up.

  Q—Dimensional change?

  A—Maybe. Also note the four faces of the pyramid.

  Q—Are you suggesting four dimensions?

  A—Or the fourth dimension.

  Q—Where would that be?

  A—We now have four dimensions of reality.

  Q—You're figuring time, though, as the fourth. How else could we express dimensional concepts?

  A—Space, time, and motion would be the basics; of a matter universe. Encompassing the usual three spatial dimensions into a single expression as space, we then confront a three-dimensional reality where motion is the third dimension.

  Q—So what is the fourth, in this concept?

  A—Logically the fourth would then be will.

  Q—Will what? Finish it.

  A—It is finished. Will is the fourth dimension.

  Q—Give it to me another way.

  A—Reverse it with will as the first dimension. All else follows naturally.

  Q—Let me see if—reverse the whole order?

  A—Try it that way.

  Q—Will, motion, time, space. How's that?

  A—Not sure. Try.

  Q—Will produces motion. I think, therefore I am. Am is motion. All matter is motion. Am is consciously directed motion. What do I have here?

  A—Transpose again.

  Q—Let's see I am, therefore I think. Thought produces things. Things occupy space, define space, give meaning to space. Now.... What of time?

  A—Motion produces time.

  Q—And motion is the inevitable result of thing—no —try this: will is beingness. Thought is the expression of will. Thing is the expression of thought. Time is that which measures motion.

  A—That sounds c
lose.

  Q—So will, motion, time, space. Will moves as thought and is expressed as motion to produce matter that is defined by time in the matrices of space.

  A—I don't see stepped sequences as well as you do but I believe you have it.

  Q—I have nothing. Take these out of stepped logic, please, and scramble them for me as a statement that is consistent with a four-dimensional reality.

  A—Existence is thus defined.

  Q—Try it again; less abstract, please.

  A—Existence is the sum of the pyramid.

  Q—Don't think I have that. Again, please.

  A—The pyramid is the symbol of return.

  Q—Return to what?

  A—Trine plus one.

  Q—What?

  A— Trine plus one.

  Q—I don't get that. Try it again.

  A—Trine plus one. What do they want?

  The right brain was worried, too. When it starts asking the questions, I know we're in trouble.

  I printed out the dialogue and turned off the computer, stared again at the graphics display on the wall.

  I knew more than I understood.

  I was sure of that.

  Which is a hell of a lot better than understanding more than you know. Small comfort. Because I did not understand a damned thing.

  But I suddenly knew that Julie Marsini was at my front door. I knew it about one second before the door chimes sounded, and I knew it was she even before I opened the door and let her in.

  I still knew a lot more than I understood.

  As though to prove that to myself, I greeted Julie at the door with this surprising (to me) statement: "There is no time but that produced by things in motion."

  She was looking at me oddly as she responded: "What?"

  "Time is the solution."

  "I see."

  "Wish I did. What does it mean?"

  She came inside and perched on the edge of a chair,

  gazing at me through those distant eyes. "Is it like a platitude? Like, 'time heals all wounds'?"