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

by Pendleton, Don

  I said, "Already what?"

  He smiled, squeezed my arm affectionately, told me, "We already love you. Be assured that we mean no harm to any resident of earth. Will you work with us?"

  Well there was only one thing I could say in sanity; right? So I told him, "Guess I'm already part of it. May as well go for broke. What do you want me to do? Please don't ask me to publish a UFO newsletter."

  Donovan laughed.

  Penny frowned.

  Julie clutched my arm and whispered, "Be careful."

  Next thing I remember, Julie and I were walking hand in hand down the long ramp. I was feeling great, almost elated. Julie seemed to be upset, though; she was trembling and maybe sobbing a little.

  That particular part is like a mere snapshot in my mind.

  The next I know, Julie and I are embracing on the floor of my living room and she is moving her fully clothed body against mine in considerable urgency. There are tears on her cheeks but she is smiling through them as she says to me, "I find it convenient now, Ashton, that you attack my brains."

  And that, pal, was only the very front of the night.

  Chapter Eleven: Brain Drain

  I have since been able to reframe my memory and to thus realize that there were various real-time validations buried in the experience. For example, it was about eight o'clock when I was taken aboard the saucer. I calculate that from the fact that the sun was setting when Julie arrived at my house and night had fallen shortly thereafter.

  If the whole thing had been purely a mental experience, I doubt that my delusion would have been well enough organized to take the earth's time zones into account. Yet when Donovan whisked me off to London, which is eight time zones east of Los Angeles, Big Ben was showing the time as 4:12 and it was dark there so it must have been a.m.

  Then when we backtracked from Europe to Hawaii in a twinkle of time, the relative position of the sun was appropriately rolled back to a couple of hours before sunset.

  Of course—even allowing the experience as real-world

  and real-time—those apparent leaps through space could have been electronically staged illusions. I have had to consider the possibility that the "oval window" was actually a large view screen and that Donovan was playing tricks with my head. He had seemed a bit evasive when I asked how he did that.

  My feeling throughout the encounter, however—that is, the feeling that came through the memory of it—was that Donovan had been trying to convince me of the reality of the experience and to give me some hint of their technical capabilities. I don't know why he would think that important—or why they would even bring me aboard—if the only intent was to deceive me. What possible purpose could they have for something like that? If, on the other hand, they were genuinely trying to recruit me for some sort of service, then the actions were logical.

  I had to go for logic, so I had to go with the idea that I had been recruited.

  Recruited for what?

  I could not remember being asked to do anything specifically or agreeing to do anything.

  But then, also, there were identifiable gaps in my memory.

  So...they had planted something in my mind?— something that would operate like a posthypnotic suggestion?

  What the hell could they have programmed me to do for them?

  That was a worry. He'd said that they would not force me—and why would he have gone to the trouble to ask for my cooperation if the intent all along was to strong- arm my subconscious? But it was still a worry.

  During some earlier UFO investigations I had talked with several very convincing individuals who'd claimed to have been abducted by aliens and taken aboard their craft. I had felt that I had to suspend judgment in each of those cases because: a) the stories were so damned bizarre and yet; b) the individuals had so obviously undergone terribly traumatic experiences.

  In trying to compare my own experience with those, I could recognize various parallels. Yet I did not feel particularly traumatized. Other than the fact that I was seized and transported without my permission, I had not been abused or mistreated in any way. Even so far as being "seized," hadn't I long welcomed such an experience in my mind?—and if they had a way of knowing what was in my mind, couldn't that connote "permission" for what would seem a kidnapping from our point of view but perhaps only a form of invitation from theirs?

  And of course I "came back" in a most delightful way, wrapped up with Julie in a sensual wrestling match on my living room floor. Could that have been programmed too? If so, the program had been written for two because we were both half crazy with desire and it took a long time: to get fully sane—a long time—and we displaced most of the furniture in that room during the process. It was as though we were developing our own version of the Kama Sutra while also testing the human anatomical design for innovative concepts in sex. I am still wondering where we got all the energy and stamina because it seems that we compressed an entire lifetime of sexual experience into about three real-time hours.

  I do know that we were both hoarse and too exhausted to move when the thing had run its course. The room was a wreck, and so were we both. I crawled in search of a cigarette and righted several overturned lamps along the route, pulled myself upright at the bar, and grabbed cigarettes and a bottle of Seagram's, then crawled back and knelt beside my sobbing counterpart.

  I lit a cigarette and luxuriated in the exhalation even though it further overburdened my respiratory processes, then asked, "Why... the hell... are you... crying?"

  It took her a while to work the words through as she replied, "Because... so... happy... dammit."

  I giggled like a schoolboy and took a belt at the bottle, swished the whiskey around inside my mouth before swallowing it, got my breathing under control, then reminded her, "You said...it was...convenient time."

  Julie feebly rolled onto her stomach and rested her head on crossed arms, said to me: "Play it... again, Sam."

  I laughed and replied, "Fat chance, kid. This tune...is all played out."

  She groaned, "Ditto. Kidding." She moved onto her side and rearranged her head to peer up at me. "What time is it?"

  I squinted at the wall clock, told her, "Nearly midnight."

  She groaned, got an elbow under her and elevated to a sitting posture, curled in her legs, said, "It was still daylight when I got here. What was in that wine?'

  I replied, "Hey, kid, if what we just had came out of the wine, I want a patent on that sumbitch."

  She giggled weakly and took a drag from my cigarette, coughed, told me, "Guess you did promise me a brain drain, didn't you."

  "Purely as a figure of speech," I replied. "I think we brought it back from the saucer."

  "Where?" She was giving me a sort of dizzied look.

  "From the flying saucer or whatever, mother ship, whatever."

  Her eyes widened. "I didn't dream it?"

  I replied, "When did you have time for dreaming?"

  She said, "I meant...during our—while we were—I think I'm still confused. Could I be dreaming now?"

  I said, "God I hope not."

  "Well I mean... all that really happened?"

  "What do you remember?"

  "I just...remember...this weird place. Wait! No! First, I saw it right outside! Then...this strange place and... and Penny was there. Wearing a uniform. We talked. I don't remember what about. Was there another man? Or was that you?—in a uniform. Oh. Oh. I feel very scrambled inside."

  Scrambled, yeah.

  That was the word.

  I was scrambled a bit too, but maybe I had a better handle on it all only because I was more accustomed to unscrambling things in my head.

  I helped the confused and physically exhausted woman to her feet and walked her to the bathroom, adjusted the shower, left her to her privacy, and returned to the living room for another taste of bourbon.

  I was not even aware of my own nakedness as I went to the window and stood there with the bottle in my hand to gaze into the heavens.
/>
  The night was clear and starlit.

  Far up and far out, at about a forty-five-degree angle

  above the horizon, a particularly bright star commanded my attention. I stared at it for several minutes, during which time I would have sworn that it changed positions very slightly several times.

  Could have been an airliner out of LAX streaking for Hawaii. If so, it sure hung a long time in the vision, and it did not seem to diminish in size or brilliance.

  Toward the end of that brief vigil, I imagined that the thing winked at me. Twice. Off, on; off, on again.

  I raised the bottle and waved it over my head. It winked again, slowly. Off, wait a beat; on, on a beat; off and gone.

  It was an airliner.

  Sure it was.

  Chapter Twelve: Scenario X

  Once you get past the UFO question—is it or isn't it an intelligently controlled vehicle of some sort?—you can settle down to the practical questions. Where are they from? How do they get here? What do they want?

  It is not even a totally safe bet to declare them extraterrestrial. They could be based right here on earth—beneath the seas, in very remote areas, even within great hollows of the earth. I've heard all those theories soberly considered by educated persons.

  I always preferred to believe that they are not based on the earth. They could have bases in other parts of the solar system. It seems that our moon would make an excellent platform in space. Various planets and/or their moons could also provide a stable physical environment for the establishment of spaceports. They could even have their own artificial satellite implanted independently in our solar system.

  All of those solutions beg the ultimate question, of course: what is their origin?

  Donovan told me, "Your origins are my origins."

  Swell. So how does that help the understanding?

  Either they cloned us and left us here millennia ago to shift for ourselves, or they are an echo of a much older civilization on earth than any of us have yet discovered. Maybe Atlantis really happened, or something similar. Maybe these guys were off adventuring in other neighborhoods of the galaxy when hell came to earth, wiped away every vestige of culture and technology, and left only a few pitiful survivors brainwashed by centuries of terror and unimaginable hardship to begin again the human effort to dominate the earth. So maybe Atlantis or something like Atlantis was the real Eden. And maybe these guys have finally returned home only to find a totally alien planet, and they're trying to figure it out or to decide how best to merge back in with us.

  Don't like that?

  Well maybe we have a much more distant common origin. Donovan said the place ceased to exist before man began on earth. Maybe our star was dying and everyone had to bail out of that solar system. Maybe they had hundreds, even thousands, of years warning so had plenty of time for an all-out technological effort to launch some lifeboats into space. Maybe the lifeboats got separated—as lifeboats often do—and they ended up in different worlds. Maybe the one that came to earth crash-landed, or maybe everybody was sick, or maybe it was forty generations after the launch before the setdown on earth and all the occupants had lost their marbles or regressed or whatever scenario you prefer to explain the almost total loss of knowledge and technology.

  Note that I said almost total loss.

  There are evidences around the globe of extremely ancient civilizations that seemed to know more than those who descended from them. Take even the "creation myth" of Genesis which scholars now believe to predate the Babylonians and even the Sumerians, who lived in roughly the same place but at different times, the Sumerians being older. Their language is the oldest written language on earth, and the origins of the peoples themselves is lost in prehistory. Their written language was in cuneiform script and today's scholars cannot forge a relationship between that language and any other known on earth. Wonder where it came from, and where it went.

  The creation story told in the older writings in Genesis (there are several such stories, sort of overlapped and bastardized by a succession of later writers) shows what would seem to be an amazing understanding of cosmology from such a primitive viewpoint. So much so that there really is no basic conflict between the general story of creation in the Bible and the generally accepted scientific theories of today, until you get to Adam and Eve in the garden at Eden (which was a much later embellishment on the story).

  Of course the language is quaint from our point of view because the story had come through the mists of time and can be interpreted only through our present understanding of language, but the true scholar is left with the eerie feeling that he is reading a partially bastardized memory of greater truths once known.

  Beginning with a universe of chaos and darkness from

  which the earth was cast, then developing by successive stages the appearance of order, then of plants, then animals, and finally man—the reader encountering this fragment of a sentence would not know if it were quoting a scientific account or Genesis. It happens to be both. And it represents the very earliest recorded thoughts of man regarding his origins.

  So where did prehistoric man get all this understanding?

  Maybe it was one of the few tattered fragments left in a shattered lifeboat, and maybe the survivors were too busy with the elemental tasks of adapting to an alien and terrifying environment to devote much time to anything else, especially to cultural luxuries. What did it serve you to know how the world was made or how a shattered craft was powered from another world if wild beasts are stalking you and you are cold and hungry? If you have no tools and none of the materials with which you are familiar, what good is technology?

  Does the average man or woman alive today have any really valid idea of how images are flashed through space to come alive on their television screens? Can anyone reading these words build a television station or even a receiving set with bare hands and raw materials? Can anyone working alone and without modern facilities build even a transistor? So if you are shipwrecked like Robinson Crusoe will you devote your time to trying to figure out how to build a television receiver or will you forage for food to stay alive?

  If that is how it all began with man on earth, then suffice it to say that he foraged for food and forgot about the fineries. We are here today as evidence of that, if that it is. And now our long-lost brothers-in-kind have found us. Evidently their ancestors fared better than ours, (because they still have the technology of survival in space that ours lost. They would approach us with great care and discretion, not with bands blaring and arms outstretched to these primitive throwbacks who cannot even find peace among themselves.

  To continue the scenario, put yourself there for just a moment and try to relate it to something in your own experience. You live in Omaha and you discover as an adult that you have a long-lost sibling who was stolen from his cradle by Gypsies. You learn that he is alive and living as a terrorist in the Middle East; he is a religious fanatic committed as a holy mission to the destruction of the Great Satan, Uncle Sam. Already he has bombed school buses and killed hundreds of innocent people. What are you going to do—and how are you going to approach this wild man, if at all?

  We could go on with many such scenarios, one for every theorist who has ever thought about the problem.

  I really do not know what good the scenarios do.

  We are being visited.

  Our visitors are vastly superior to us in many ways.

  They probably have the capability of destroying us one and all overnight.

  Even our governments around the world are afraid to admit that they are here or that they even exist.

  Our scientists too, by and large, scathingly ridicule any suggestion that they do not know all that there is to know about everything in the universe. Since they know nothing whatever of the technology that brings these visitors to our world, obviously these visitors exist only in the minds of self-deluded persons.

  I shall speak later of two prominent spokespersons for the scienti
fic establishment who best exemplify that turn of mind, and I will give you samples of their reactions so that you may see for yourself the depths to which the human mind can travel in trying to shape its own reality. For now, just trust me that it is true, subject to later verification.

  Our educators are in the same boat as the scientists; by and large they are essentially one and the same and their behavior is the same for the same reason.

  Ditto for the churchmen, for different reasons but with the same result.

  So to whom do we turn to get the truth?

  There's the rub, my friend.

  There are none to turn to.

  You've got to figure it out for yourself, and your very survival may depend on how well you do that.

  Chapter Thirteen: National Anathema

  Donovan had said to me: "Why should we conquer you?" And he started to say more, as though to answer his own question: "We already..."

  "Already what?" I'd asked.

  "Already love you," he replied.

  Doesn't really fit, does it. I call that a recovery from a near blunder. He almost told me more than he wanted me to know.

  So. Already what?

  Already conquered us?

  Already own us?

  Already what?

  I was quietly pondering the question when Julie emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. The sight of that immediately tossed my mind back to that encounter beside the pool with Penny Laker, and I was mentally rehashing that weird experience when Julie playfully slapped my bare bottom and pushed me toward

  the shower. She seemed totally collected, refreshed, in charge of herself again.

  I doubted that a mere shower could have that effect on me, but I definitely needed the shower. I spent about twenty minutes under the stinging spray, by which time I was at least beginning to think rationally, and I emerged to find a Spanish omelet and scalding coffee awaiting me at the dining table.