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

by Pendleton, Don

  Evidently she was as hungry as I, and we consumed the food with a minimum of conversation. Each time our eyes met she smiled and dropped her gaze as though embarrassed by the encounter. And she kept checking and adjusting her towel. I finally removed mine and tossed it across the room; said, "Who needs it?"

  She released hers at the underarm cinch and rearranged it across the lap without looking at me. Beautiful body, yeah. Glowing flesh, sculpted breasts, very inviting.

  I said, "That looks much more comfortable."

  Eyes down, she murmured, "It is. Thank you."

  We concluded the meal in silence. I lit a cigarette, offered her one, she declined. She still was avoiding my eyes. I said, "What's bothering you?"

  "Nothing is bothering me," she replied.

  "Queen Victoria," I suggested gently.

  She smiled and shook her head. "No, I've never felt confined by that standard. Guess I—well maybe so. Maybe I'm wondering what you think of me."

  "Does it matter?"

  "That's bothering me, too. It does matter."

  I chewed it for a moment, then asked, "So what do you think of me?"

  She raised luminous eyes to mine, smiled, said: "You touched depths in me that had never been touched before. I think it confuses me. I'm wondering if it confuses you."

  I said, "I think you're talking about falling in love."

  "Maybe. I feel sweet sixteen again."

  I said, "Couldn't have been so long that you would have forgotten how that feels."

  She said, "Oh yes it could."

  Those eyes were looking at me from far across the galaxy. I found myself shivering inside and knew that I had to ask the question.

  "Are you one of them, Julie?"

  "Yes. But then so are you."

  "In what way?"

  "In every way. They've awakened you now, as they awakened me."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because it is time again."

  "Time for what?"

  "I don't know. I just understand that it is time again."

  'Time for something very important."

  "Yes."

  "We're supposed to help."

  "I think so, yes."

  "How?"

  Those luminous eyes fell to an examination of the tablecloth. Suddenly I was into her. I can't explain how this happens because I do not understand it myself even though I have had such experiences throughout my life. I just knew suddenly that our minds were touching and that I was knowing what she was knowing. Not in words but in images, feelings, emotions.

  I encountered a great sadness in that interchange, an almost overpowering sense of regret, coupled with images of great destruction and widespread tragedy.

  It came and went in a flash, but I had the images in my mind now, and I had the great sorrow.

  Julie said, very quietly, "You just invaded me, didn't you."

  I replied, now totally enveloped in her mood, "Not intentionally. Sorry. Can we talk about it?"

  "No."

  "Then would you like to make love again?"

  "Yes."

  I stood up and took her hand and led her to my bed, and we did it again—the right way, this time—with tenderness, with feeling, and with respect.

  And, afterward, Julie said to me in a whispery voice, "Life is not a game. It is a terribly complex mission, and this is our only reward."

  “This is?"

  "Love is."

  I understood then why she wanted so desperately to be in love. Why we all do. And why some of us opt out for unsatisfactory substitutes easier to achieve. Find a negative human expression and you have encountered one of those substitutes. That was my illumination, there between the sheets with a fellow alien from the far side of the galaxy. But I still did not know what time it was.

  More than thirty-five years ago, at the very dawn of the modern UFO age, a scholarly Russian Jew from Israel landed on our shores with a manuscript that would forever challenge man's view of himself, of his own history, and of his solar system. The man's name is Immanuel Velikovsky, and his Worlds in Collision was destined to ignite a fire storm of controversy that now stands as the most shameful attempt to suppress nonpolitical ideas since the Inquisition.

  Velikovsky's great sin was that he chose to accept as literal truth the vast treasury of written history which modern scholars universally regard as religious myth. Another great sin was his vast intellect and fearless determination to state his views into the teeth of academic dogma and arrogance; his intrusion into the jealously guarded temples of science.

  Even so, the hysterical reaction by some of the most eminent educators and scientists must have gone far beyond anything this quiet scholar could have anticipated. The language used to denounce him—even before his ideas had been published—was ferocious to an extreme unmatched in modern times, harkening back to the dark days when scientists themselves were being anathematized by the church, and to the same spirit that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and inspired Galileo to recant in order to escape a like fate.

  Velikovsky did not write about or even mention flying saucers; indeed, he had undoubtedly never heard of such phenomena when he arrived in New York shortly after the end of World War II. But his story is relevant here as a stage setting for the later fire storm over UFOs, and I believe you will find it interesting as an insight into the functioning of some academic/scientific minds.

  He was a medical doctor and psychiatrist with a fascination with biblical lore and an inherent sensitivity to the broad historical overview of man and his environment. Whether his reconstruction of history was right or wrong was never the issue. It was the implications of that reconstruction that caused the panic in so many institutional minds and made his very name a sore point to academicians (to this very day) who have never read a line of his book.

  Velikovsky was not an astronomer or physicist, but the mere publication of his ideas was obviously highly threatening to the entire academy of astronomers and physicists here and abroad.

  He was not an historian, or a sociologist, or a naturalist, or an anthropologist, archaeologist or geologist, yet many of these almost with a single voice arose to denounce and castigate the man without even coming close to a direct contact with his writings.

  What caused such hysteria in our academic and scientific communities?

  Velikovsky took the biblical events and other "myths" as a true account of real experiences of real men and women sharing together the real history of this planet. He then looked for logical explanations within the natural world to verify this real history. His brilliant investigation took him into the heavens as well as into the earth, and his conclusions were spectacular.

  For example, though not an astronomer and with no credentials whatever to make such a statement, Velikovsky theorized that Venus did not begin its planetary existence as the other planets did, that in fact Venus did not occupy its present orbit around the sun until very recently, that in fact it was torn from the body of Jupiter by a violent upheaval within that planet and was loosed into the solar system as a comet that made several close passes at Mars as well as Earth, and settled into its present orbit during the recorded history of mankind. That "recorded history" is contained within the legends and myths for all to see.

  The whole astronomical world "knew" and had long accepted the thesis that Venus has a surface temperature below sixty degrees Centigrade and that frigid Jupiter is buried beneath miles of ice. With all that learned conviction, it is easy to see how the institutions would laugh up their sleeves at the novel conclusions by Velikovsky that both planets must be quite hot, but it is not easy to understand the anger and hostility with which these conclusions were met.

  Velikovsky's ideas were, of course, anathema to the body of professionals who enjoy the prestige and respect normally accorded our men of great learning. If Velikovsky was right then these guys were dummies and undeserving of their robes and honors—or so they seemed to feel.

  The most prestigious American ast
ronomer of the time, Harlow Shapley of Harvard (who apparently led the attack on Velikovsky) stated in a letter dated May 27, 1946: "If in historical times there have been these changes in the structure of the solar system, in spite of the fact that our celestial mechanics has been for scores of years able to specify without question the positions and motions of the members of the planetary system for many millennia fore and aft, then the laws of Newton are false. The laws of mechanics which have worked to keep airplanes afloat, to operate the tides, to handle the myriads of problems of everyday life, are fallacious. But they have been tested completely and thoroughly. In other words, if Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy."

  Shapley said it; I didn't. But Velikovsky was right. The pity is that none of these pillars of science would even consider the evidence. All of their protests were based on mere hearsay of Velikovsky's theories, long before the book was actually published.

  And, for the shameful aspect, the storm of protest was geared to a single goal: the suppression of the ideas. Shapley led a broad institutional attack upon the proposed publisher of the Velikovsky manuscript, Macmillan Company, which was highly vulnerable to academic displeasure because of its large investment in textbook publishing. In a letter dated January 25, 1950, to the publisher at Macmillan, he tried to get the message across in a sly way: "It will be interesting a year from now to hear from you as to whether or not the reputation of the Macmillan Company is damaged by the publication of Worlds in Collision. Naturally you can see that I am interested in your experiment. And frankly, unless you can assure me that you have done things like this frequently in the past without damage, the publication must cut me off from the Macmillan Company."

  Another member of Shapley's club, Dean McLaughlin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan, wrote Macmillan on May 20, 1950: "The claim of universal efficacy or universal knowledge is the unmistakable mark of the quack. No man can today be an expert even in the whole of geology or the whole of astronomy. There is specialization within specialties. I do not mean that we are ignorant of all fields but our own; I do mean that we are not equipped to do highly technical original research in more than several distinct specialties for each scientist. But no man today can hope to correct the mistakes in any more than a small subfield of science. And yet Velikovsky claims to be able to dispute the basic principles of several sciences! These are indeed delusions of grandeur!"

  The entire point of McLaughlin's letter was in protest to Macmillan's "promulgation of such lies—yes, lies, as are contained in wholesale lots in Worlds in Collision."

  Strange, isn't it, that the professor states in the same letter: "No, I have not read the book."

  This is just a tiny sample of the unprecedented conspiracy to suppress a publication and which succeeded to the extent that Macmillan passed their hot potato off to Doubleday, which has no textbook division. But the club even went after Doubleday.

  In a letter to a Doubleday subsidiary dated June 30, 1950, Fred Whipple—Shapley's successor at the Harvard Observatory—worded a sharply sarcastic broadside at the new publisher in discussing a public account of the matter: "Newsweek has unwittingly done the Doubleday Company a considerable amount of harm. They have made public the high success of the spontaneous boycott of the Macmillan Company by scientifically minded people."

  Whipple then went on (in the same letter) to suggest a similar treatment of Doubleday: "There will be no revision of Earth, Moon, and Planets (a book by Whipple) forthcoming so long as Doubleday owns Blakiston (the subsidiary), controls its policies, and publishes Worlds in Collision."

  Yet in a statement printed by the Harvard Crimson on September 25, 1950, Harlow Shapley said: "The claim that Dr. Velikovsky's book is being suppressed is nothing

  but a publicity promotion stunt. Several attempts have been made to link such a move to stop the book's publication to some organization or to the Harvard Observatory. This idea is absolutely false."

  What were these great men so frightened of?

  Velikovsky's thesis was to the effect that global cataclysms had fundamentally and repeatedly altered the face of the planet Earth during historical times, that the terrestrial axis had shifted, magnetic poles reversed, even a different orbit established.

  In horrific convulsions, the oceans had replaced continents, Earth's crust had folded, massive volcanoes spawned new mountain chains, lava flows of up to a mile thick covered vast areas of the planet, climatological changes converted lush gardens to frozen tundra, and forests became deserts.

  Civilizations collapsed in a wink and whole species disappeared as gigantic tidal waves swept along the continents, crushing and burying everything in their paths.

  Stunned human survivors recorded the events as best they could, and those records survive today for any who will look and see.

  Velikovsky looked, and he saw and reported it again. He also theorized a logical explanation, based entirely on the evidence, of how it all came about. Jupiter gave birth to Venus, which became a comet and roamed the solar system for eons before inevitable celestial mechanics brought the huge mass into a collision orbit with Earth.

  It is not even important to my point here that Dr. Velikovsky's radical theories have been largely vindicated (though not on purpose) by new discoveries during our space age. Venus is a hot body with a very thin crust, as Velikovsky concluded, and it does rotate in a retrograde motion, again as he concluded. Jupiter is a very hot body —now even possibly thought to be a dim companion star to our sun—and it is a radio source, as Velikovsky theorized.

  Many other of Velikovsky's theories, regarding electro-magnetism and sunspots and various other phenomena of our solar system, have been vindicated.

  None of that is the point.

  The point is that the entire scientific/academic community rose up to crush these ideas even before they could be promulgated, and with the aim of suppressing them rather than meeting them head-on in true scientific curiosity.

  This is one example of a human phenomenon, the curious workings of the mind having to do with intellectual arrogance and survivalist instincts.

  We will meet another example later, in the discussion of a similar conspiracy to suppress through ridicule all reasonable debates and/or researches of the UFO question.

  Then we'll try to figure out why these people are so frightened.

  Or do we already know why?

  Chapter Fourteen: Star So Bright

  Julie and I had fallen asleep in each other's arms. I was awakened at a few minutes past two by a bright light flashing through the bedroom, like automobile headlights can do if you live close beside a roadway.

  I woke up with a start, thinking, Oh hell, they're back.

  But I couldn't hear anything unusual and Julie was sleeping peacefully, so I also wondered if I had merely awakened from a dream. I carefully disentangled myself from Julie so as to not disturb her sleep, sat up and lit a cigarette, and knew that I was going to have a hell of a time getting back to sleep again, even as tired as I was.

  I'd had only a couple of drags off the cigarette when I heard a movement somewhere in the house. I was preparing to investigate that when a figure appeared in the bedroom doorway. It was no more than an indistinct silhouette in the darkness but I knew that someone or something was there.

  So I hit the bed lamp.

  Julie awoke with a jerk.

  Penny Laker was standing in our doorway. I thought at first that she was still in "uniform" but as my eyes adjusted to the sudden light I could see that she was wearing a skintight workout suit similar to the one I'd seen before. It occurred to me in that same moment that the tights were also very similar to the uniforms, and I again wondered if the whole saucer thing was mere delusion. If so, then we had an even larger phenomenon, involving the workings of the human mind, to consider in trying to understand a universal delusion shared by every culture upon the globe.

  All that went through the mind in a flash and even as Penny spoke: "Julie? Is the
party about over? Can you take me home now?"

  That voice was quavery, frightened, confused, and finally embarrassed. Very convincing. The real Penny Laker was back, or at least the one I'd known in the past.

  I said, "We'll be right out, Penny."

  She retreated from the doorway but I could still hear her frightened breathing as I pulled on my pants and growled at Julie, "Make it quick, huh."

  Julie nodded her head in understanding and I left her to pull herself together while I went to talk her boss back into the terrestrial world.

  I hit every light switch we passed to dispel all the darkness inside there as I took Penny to the kitchen. I sat her down and small-talked without letup while building coffee and until Julie came to my rescue.

  All the while the actress kept darting glances everywhere and obviously trying to pull the corners of her mind together in some understanding of where she was and why.

  I would not have considered asking where she'd been and how she'd gained entry to that locked house. She seemed to be under the confused impression that she'd been asleep on the couch.

  Julie came in fully dressed and apparently ready to travel, the tote bag slung from her shoulder. We had coffee and talked idly for several minutes but Penny was still obviously very confused when they departed.

  Julie hung back at the doorway to brush my lips with hers and whisper, "I'll call you."

  I whispered back, "Do that. And keep a close eye on your boss."

  Hell, I just couldn't figure it. Oh in medical terms, sure, it could figure. Dissociation, split personality, etc. If she'd gone to a shrink and told him about the memory gaps and waking up in strange places and stranger situations without remembering anything about flying saucers or aliens, sure—there would be no problem diagnosing the disease.

  The problem—and I'd been aware of it for years—is that in dealing with any disease of the mind, the therapist is always using one imprecise term to define another. With all the talk about chemical imbalances, inherited tendencies, complexes, and the whole wide range of mental disturbances, nobody really knows where the crazies come from or what initially produces them. There is not even now a broad consensus among medical people as to how best treat the symptoms, and apparently there is no such thing as a true "cure."