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

by Pendleton, Don

  I believe that is the whole story of the flying saucers, whether they be no more than psychic images displayed for our edification or truly chariots of fire piloted by god-like beings who think of us as their future as we think of our own children as ours.

  They come to us from time to time, when the need is there or when the opportunity for growth is there—to teach, to inspire, to guide, or to give us a kick in the pants when that is needed.

  I believe that they are among us now in greater numbers and in growing interest because of our own intense development over the past sixty years. This could be a critical time for the planet called earth, a time for huge decisions and planetary commitments beyond any thing yet dreamt by the human mind, and it could decide the fate of our species.

  I believe all this because I believe that Donovan told it to me. Of course I am not one hundred percent certain that Donovan even exists except in my own mind, because I know that my mind creates its own reality. But if I think, therefore I am, then I am, therefore Donovan is— and the one thing encompasses the other, doesn't it.

  But I have gotten ahead of my story.

  Let's go back to Brentwood, as I think it existed on that third night of the California UFO flap...the night of the dolphins.

  I remember an incident from my Navy days when I was sailing a small sloop with a friend on Chesapeake Bay. I'd gone below to get a thermos of coffee, and when I poked my head back on deck we were passing directly under the bow of the U.S.S. Nimitz, one of our nuclear aircraft carriers which are the largest combat vessels afloat. I had never before looked at one from that particular point of view, but it was a view I would never forget. That ship is over a thousand feet long. It displaces close to a hundred thousand tons in full combat load. It carries three thousand men in the ship's company and another twenty-six hundred in the air wing. It is also a mobile base for ninety combat aircraft.

  Impressive as all that is, I give it only as an unimpressive comparison to the thing I found hovering above Brentwood at about one-thirty that morning.

  Donovan later told me that they could take the Nimitz on board if they so desired.

  It is mind-boggling just to see something like that hanging there in the sky with no apparent support, no motion, and in absolute silence.

  You get the feeling that it's just not possible; nothing that big could even get off the ground let alone hang there like that.

  We spotted the thing when we were about two minutes away from the house. It was no more than a hundred feet off the ground but it was showing no lights and I first took it to be a low cloud. In fact my mind leaped from that identification to the "fog" of the night before and I was playing with that idea when the various features began materializing as we drew closer, and I knew it was neither fog nor cloud but a vessel looming up as the Nimitz had done on Chesapeake Bay years earlier.

  It was a stunning sight and both I and my passenger were appropriately stunned by it.

  This was no flying saucer, understand, in the same sense that the U.S.S. Nimitz is not a Phantom jet.

  And of course you can rationalize a flying saucer until it disappears as swamp gas or a weather balloon, but no way can you con the mind into accepting something like this as anything but what it is: a huge physical mass stationary in the sky.

  Bransen gasped, "What the hell is that thing?"

  I muttered, "More to the point, why is it hovering above your house?"

  I had brought the Maserati to a halt atop a small knoll about a thousand yards from the house. We had a perfect profile view of the thing, with its lower edge just slightly higher than we were. Using the house as a scale, I guessed the hull area at several hundred feet deep and I could discern vague details of a superstructure above that. Bransen's house was dwarfed beneath the thing.

  I took my foot off the brake and eased ahead.

  "Where the hell are you going?" Bransen cried.

  I said, "They know we're here, pal. May as well take it all the way."

  He threw his door open and flung himself through it. We were moving no faster than five miles per hour so I was not all that concerned about him bailing out, and in fact I saw it only with my peripheral vision because all my attention was directed straight ahead, but I did become a bit puzzled when it dawned on me that Bransen was remaining in my peripheral vision even though the car was definitely moving forward. So I shot a quick glance that way and saw the guy standing in midair beside the car. Only then did I realize that the car, too, was airborne and moving at the same slow rate of speed directly toward the floating city.

  That is all I remember about that.

  I was standing at the oval window beside Donovan as he monitored the operations below. There was a great deal of activity down there and also in the airspace between house and ship. The entire area was brilliantly lighted, without shadows or relief of any kind. Small saucers were darting about, many of them, and I could see several on the ground behind the house.

  I said to Donovan, "I don't want to try to tell you how to run your show, but this thing must be showing up on radar screens clear to the Kremlin. Isn't there some way to do this in a less conspicuous way?"

  He gave me an indulgent smile as he replied, "Who

  would believe it?" Then he laughed and said, "We are opaque to such energies only when we choose to be, so don't be concerned about the radars."

  "Okay. But they can probably see your lights at LAX. Come on, Donovan, this isn't the wilds of New Mexico; it's Southern California. You can't pull an operation like this without terrorizing millions of people."

  "Then where are the interceptors?" he asked humorously. "Relax, my brother. We are seen when we choose to be seen, and then only."

  I said, "Then you're dammit not real. You are psychological phenomena."

  He chuckled. "What is not? If you are interacting with psychological phenomena, then are you inside or outside the phenomena?"

  I tried to focus on the question but the attempt dizzied me. Everything went black for a moment and I said, "Dammit, Donovan."

  With no apparent loss of continuity, then, I found myself on the ground beneath the ship and I was gazing up at it with awe and a trembly kind of excitement. The saucers were still flitting about and I could see now that they were flying in and out of a huge bay on the underside of the big carrier. But the mental comparative image I got was not that of a Navy carrier launching and receiving aircraft but of a colony of bees buzzing around their hive, with no apparent logic to their movements.

  There was much activity all around me on the ground, also. Many strange buglike "things" were scuttling about the pool, both in and out of the water. The human mind is not a simple plastic web, you know, it is not like a lens or a mirror that simply seizes what is out there; it is a highly complicated quantum quality that is constantly constructing and reshaping itself from billions of sense receptors all firing individual messages—so don't ask me to give you a calm and rational account of what was going on there. I did not know what was going on there because my mind did not know how to assimilate the evidence from the sense receptors. There simply was no model from my reality world which could serve the understanding. So the mind shorts out, in a sense. You either pass out or you pass over into a more limited scan of what is there, seeking shapes and forms that are more assimilable and perhaps more malleable.

  So I do not know exactly what I was seeing there. I know only what I was experiencing, and that was buglike objects running around like crazy all over the place while small flying discs darted about in their midst.

  The only comforting thing I "saw" in all that was a vision or an image of Penny Laker. She wore a silver bodysuit and she was in the pool between two dolphins, her arms around them as they swam leisurely along the surface of the water.

  Then Julie joined me and gave me a casual hug from the side as we watched Penny with her dolphins. I felt loved and loving but did not know why until Julie wiped a tear from her cheek and said to me, "Now that is love."
/>   And I knew that it really was.

  Chapter Twenty-eight: The Residual

  I am reasonably confident that most of what I have told you to this point is more or less true. From this point forward, however, I am not sure that any of it is true, or complete, or valid in any sense.

  What I have here now, I think, is like a residual of experience from which perhaps my own mind has drawn certain conclusions—yet at the same moment I can hear Donovan's voice narrating the story as I struggle to record it in a language that you and I can understand, so perhaps there is more here than any of us are able to comprehend at the moment.

  It comes to me that Donovan's people are extremely ancient. I have a sensing here of time beyond times or time beyond any meaning of time. Earth scientists now place the birth of the universe at some ten to twenty billion years ago. Certainly that is time beyond meaning for most of us since it is at least twice the age of our own solar system, and the time of life itself on earth, even microscopic life, is again about half the age of our planet.

  Yet I have images in my mind of a time when people like me, Donovan's people, watched with interest the birth of this solar system and its subsequent slow development as a new home for life in the universe, a development that required more than two billion years of processing before a life environment was achieved.

  And if other images are valid, then there is no need to wonder about man's wanderlust because we were born to it as a result of an incredible odyssey that predates all our concepts of time itself and lies before us still as an infinite spiral without a beginning and without an end. For Donovan's people—and we too are those people—are older than time and concepts of time.

  That means also, of course, that we are older than space-time matter itself, for time is the measure of that matter.

  Older than time, we are nevertheless bound to time by our interactions with matter and bound to the space-time universe by our involvement with life and its narrow band of environmental interactions. No single star can support our reach because our reach is eternal and the stars are not. Therefore the odyssey, and the constant search for home in an evolving and temporal universe.

  As the sensing of universal time infiltrates my model of reality, I find Donovan's people arriving on this planet the first time as a scouting expedition only.

  They found a breathable atmosphere and a hospitable ecosystem, an advanced stage of organic evolution and a profusion of higher life-forms, with the most successful forms adapted to the marine environment.

  This advance party established a base for scientific studies and performed various genetic experiments on several similar lines of the higher land-dwelling animals.

  They also studied marine species and concluded that the earth was a "water planet" and favored the evolution of life within the seas.

  It was much later when the first colonists arrived, perhaps one or two million years later, and they found a far different planet than the one cataloged during the earlier visitation.

  Various solar dynamics and planetary processes had combined to raise extensive new landmasses from the seas and the climate was generally inhospitable except for a narrow band along the equatorial bulge.

  Also a totally new species had appeared among the land-dwelling animals, and this new species was unsettlingly similar to themselves.

  They called this new development A’d’um and genetically traced its origins to the experiments conducted by the original survey team.

  Even more unsettling was the discovery that some 100,000 A'd'ums were scattered in small social groups throughout the land areas of the equatorial bulge.

  This presented a moral dilemma to the settlers, who were in far smaller numbers and with a precarious toehold on the planet.

  They could not possibly take on responsibilities for these primitive creatures, yet they felt responsible by virtue of the genetic endowment from them that lifted A'd'um definitely out of the unrealized pool of planetary life into the exalted self-knowing realm of universal intelligence.

  Remember that these D'Ahnov'e'ns were a very ancient race even before our solar system was born. They possessed an almost godlike moral sense and an entirely responsible stance regarding the expansion of intelligent life in the universe.

  I have earlier picturesquely referred to them as "missionaries" but that is hardly an adequate term to convey their sense of oneness with the creative principle.

  Already they had come to think of themselves as God's partners and helpers in the spatial dimensions of time; perhaps they even regarded themselves as coexistent with the creative principle, and maybe they are.

  But there was no practical way to resolve the dilemma posed by the appearance of A'd'um. Thus a "tension" was forged between the two similar groups on earth, a relationship which modern mystics would characterize as "karmic." They were bound together not only by shared genetic structures but equally by moral responsibility.

  The D'Ahnov'e'ns could not directly manipulate A'd'um's world but they could not turn their backs on them either. Isolation was the only solution—apparent isolation, anyway, from A'd'um's point of view—with D'Ahnov'e'n remaining aloof yet cognizant and remotely supportive, A'd'um largely unaware of the other's existence except in startling moments of accidental confrontation.

  Thus developed the two families of D'Ahnov'e'n side by side on planet earth, separated more by time and circumstance than anything else, and thus they all prospered for thousands of years.

  But then came another time of solar upheaval and another crushing moral dilemma. The "gods" gave up their planet, leaving A'd'um behind to ride out the convulsive cataclysms of a world gone mad, where oceans invaded the continents and the continents exploded into new configurations invading the heavens, and the seas boiled.

  All to his credit, A'd'um hung on.

  To his everlasting shame and karmic debt, D'Ahnov'e'n left him to that chaos and to that hell. Together, however—and following the same principle of isolation that held before—they have been building a new heaven ever since.

  Time was coming into sync.

  D'Ahnov'e'n's time was becoming A'd'um's time.

  Time to time and hand in hand, the way was being prepared for them to go forward together into cosmos.

  I think that is all true.

  I hope that it is.

  The alternative, I fear, is the night of the dolphin.

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Future Perfect

  There were saucers of every size and description parked in the big vehicle bay or flight deck or whatever, several as large as fifty feet in diameter—which Donovan identified as "star craft"—and others no larger than a garbage can cover. I asked him about the tiny ones and he told me that they were "sensor scouts." He did not elaborate and it did not seem appropriate to question further because we'd reached the far end of the catwalk and he was guiding me into this other large chamber.

  In there, the lighting was soft like twilight and there was a hum in the air, not like machinery but like hundreds of voices doing a one-note mantra. Pictures were flickering on the walls in about fifty different patches and there seemed to be a hundred or so people intently engrossed at a variety of consolelike devices.

  "Operations Control," Donovan explained as we crossed overhead.

  "You run a tight ship," I observed.

  "Oh we must," he assured me.

  Then we went up a circular stairway and into paradise. I know no other word fitting to describe this place. It was like a beautiful park with low rolling hills, grass and trees and flowers, streams and small waterfalls. We'd come up almost into the center of it, yet it was difficult to see to the end of it in any direction. Obviously it took up one entire level of this floating city. And it was not a static scene. People were scattered throughout—playing, talking, reading, whatever people do anywhere to relax, and I saw children too. The formfitting bodysuit seemed to be standard but there were many different colors and even some in multicolors.

  I said to Donovan,
"This is very nice."

  "The swimming pools are over there," he said, pointing. "There are game courts at the peripheries." He smiled at me. "We have concerts under the stars in the evenings. They are very popular. Of course there are other diversions possible in the private quarters but we do encourage community to every practical extent."

  I was looking about, soaking up the delightful atmosphere, as I commented, "This could be any beautiful spot on earth."

  He said, "Or on any earth. Environments are very important, Ashton. Especially on long sojourns. And we cannot encourage our people to sample alien habitats."

  "Meaning no shore leave," I said.

  "Nothing is forbidden," he corrected me.

  "You've come a long way, baby," I told him.

  "To live in harmony is the greatest joy," he told me, the only platitude he ever gave me, and this one came not as a platitude but as an explanation.

  The Maserati was on a little revolving platform and a group of people were standing around admiring it, like in an automobile showroom, while another guy opened and closed the doors, the hood, and the engine compartment. He also honked the horn a couple of times and started the engine, shifted forward and reverse and crept along for a few inches in each direction, operated the headlights and the windshield wipers. During all this, the other people are smiling and nodding their heads and making comments back and forth.

  I asked Donovan, "Would you please ask the guy to be careful with the Maserati? She is my greatest treasure and truest love."

  He chuckled and replied, "Don't worry about your car, Ashton. It is in the very best of hands. But you really should examine your attitudes there, my friend. A machine is not worthy of love and it is the most perishable of treasures."

  'Well that one is worthy of my love," I argued, "and I'm going to be buried in it, so we'll perish together."

  Donovan just laughed.

  But I noticed that his people were really digging the car.