Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (8 page)

I replied, "Looking for Donaldson, I
guess."

He said, "Shit, that's a waste of time. He
hasn't been seen up here for months."

I asked, "So why are you here? And what is
this hot talk we need to have?"

"Just scouting," he
replied with a sigh. "I get a feeling the roof is falling in and
I'd sure like to know where I'm standing so I don't get buried in
it." He sighed again, produced a cigarette, lit it. "Something very
strange happened up here a few months ago."

I steeled myself for a Souza discourse and
lent myself to the game. "What kind of strange?"

"Don't know for sure, just
know...strange. Donaldson was in on it. He called the President's
science advisor, in Washington." A quick flash of the eyes, and:
"Yeah, that president. Quite a commotion got kicked up. I know the
National Security Agency got involved, also the Pentagon and the
CIA." Another flash of eyes. "Donaldson also made a few calls
outside the country, and it seems that he spent the next several
days flying around the country for very hush-hush conferences with
other scientists."

I said, "Very interesting."

"Yeah. But wait. It gets more and more.
Donaldson dropped out of sight, about that time. So did a guy from
M.I.T. and another from Yale. Both theoretical physicists. An
exobiologist from somewhere back there also has come up missing.
What exactly is an exobiologist? You know?"

I replied, vaguely, "Something about
extraterrestrial life, I guess."

"That's what I thought," Souza agreed.
"Okay. We also got a guy missing from somewhere out here on the
desert, one of those radio astronomers from, uh..."

"Socorro?"

"New Mexico, right. You know about
that?"

"Not much," I admitted. "It's called a VLA,
for 'Very Large Array.' It's a complex of, I don't know, a
couple-dozen large dishes linked together over a large area.
They're doing some kind of deep-space work out there."

"Military application?"

I shrugged. "What isn't, these days. Maybe
so. Star Wars ain't that far off, pal."

"Don't I know it," Souza
said glumly. "Well, listen..." He fixed me with a stem gaze. "Since
you and the beautiful doc have become so chummy...what did she tell
you about that incident up here?"

I smiled to myself as I replied to that.
"The only 'incident up here' that she mentioned had nothing to do
with the present problem, believe it."

"So why'd you come?"

I replied, "She came. I
followed, discreetly." I told him about the incident at Glendale
and the subsequent events at Malibu, finishing that accounting
with: "Looks like whoever it is had a watch on this place, too. You
said you were here for a couple of hours. Didn't you notice
anything out of focus?—no sense of...?”

Souza replied, "I think
those guys followed her from the office area. That's the first I
noticed them. She was definitely running. But why run from
me
? Why didn't she run
to me, for help?"

I said, "Maybe she was
just trying to get clear of everyone. I believe she expected to
find Donaldson out here. She didn't want to lead anyone else to
him."

He commented, "Well,
maybe. But I'd sure like to know what happened up here to get the
whole damned security apparatus of the nation excited."

"Maybe the flying saucers are coming back,"
I said, only half-joking.

Souza said, "Aw shit, Ash..

"Why not?" I asked, not really expecting an
answer.

He said, "Are you serious?"

"Would that really surprise you? You want to
know something, Greg? I have had my head buried in phenomena my
entire adult life. On the scale of things experienced—for me,
personally—I would say that a three-dimensional, hard-surfaced
alien vehicle in our skies would fall into the class of a very
minor phenomenon."

"You're serious as hell, aren't you," he
decided.

I was, I hated to admit even to myself,
serious as hell. I had done some UFO research in the past—pretty
extensively, in a couple of well documented cases; I had even
traveled to Europe and South America in the quest for truth in the
matter—and my jury was still out.

So I was not ready to buy anything regarding
the mystery of Isaac Donaldson. If the man had experienced
something strange enough at Palomar to inspire a telephone call to
the White House, and then telephone conferences with other
scientists around the world—and if a bunch of those learned people
were now "missing" with Donaldson...

Well, no, I was not buying anything, yet.
But I was not closing the door on anything, either.

Chapter Nine: Beneath the Eye

Please don't leap away
from me, at this point, if you feel that I am heading into an area
of interest which may offend your intellectual or emotional
sensibilities. I am trying to present the thing as it presented
itself io me—so just bear with me awhile, please, place yourself in
my shoes, and enjoy the adventure as I did, without prejudice.
Enjoy it, I did, most of it, thoroughly, and I believe that you
will, too, if you just give it half a chance.

Anyway, you should not be
too stuffy about your own conditioned reality unless lately you
have examined it close-up, from the inside out. A common failing
among we humans is a penchant for comfort at the expense of
something more important than comfort; like, it's easier to sit
down and turn the TV on and observe fantasy while dinner turns to
fat cells inside our bodies than to run a few laps around the
block. We do the same things with our heads, almost as a matter of
habit, because we tend to find comfort in the reality that is
conditioned by our daily routines.

I'm not saying that's bad:
it's probably good, and that is why we do it that way; who wants to
go around with his head buried in metaphysical puzzles all the
time? I sure don't, but I do try to keep some faint touch with the
idea that the sum total of my daily experiences is not nearly large
enough to approach anything resembling reality; I therefore live in
a conditioned reality which is primarily built of my day-to-day
routine.

It's like man's early
concepts of cosmology and cosmogony. Cosmology has to do with the
theory or philosophy of the nature and principles of the universe.
Cosmogony is involved with creation theory, and every religion has
one. There was a time, long ago, when the thing that we now call
"science" and the thing we call "religion" were one and the same
thing. The major schisms now, between science and religion, involve
these matters of cosmology and cosmogony—though mainly, I think,
cosmogony. But ever since men have been men, probably, there has
been this curiosity—innate, no doubt—about how the universe came
into being and how it operates.

Early scientists (and I use the term in the
broadest sense) were also religionists. Their perceptions of
reality, then, usually became codified into a mass of
unquestionable dogma which could not be modified without doing
damage to the religious edifice—and, since most religions anchor
their influence into a good bedrock of divine infallibility, it
has been very difficult throughout most of the history of mankind
to "change the model" of cosmic reality.

It was the church, remember, that forced
Galileo to recant his cosmological theories (though we use those
theories to this day in our explorations of space) and it was the
church that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for refusing to
recant.

See, there was an
intellectual "comfort" in having the earth the center of the
universe, a very special creation, instead of being merely one of
countless billions of bodies hurtling through space headed God
knows where.

You don't have to return
to Galileo and Bruno, though, to find a very deep schism. At this
very moment, certain fundamental religionists are greatly concerned
over the teaching of evolution in the classroom; they do not agree
with the present cosmogonical/cosmological models favored by the
same scientific tradition that placed men on the moon. Some of
these people, indeed, would burn Darwin at the stake if they could
get their hands on him—but see, it's really a question of comfort
within a conditioned reality.

Quite a few generations of
scientists since Darwin have devoted lifetimes to a meticulous
study of that area of reality and consequently could find no
comfort whatever in the reality-model of "special creation" (the
biblical version). Quite a few generations of religionists since
Darwin have kept right on reading their bible and find no comfort
whatever in evolution theory.

For myself, I find no controversy there.
Science has not yet replaced the Book of Genesis. It has just
filled in the blanks—and pardon my ignorance, if that's the
problem, but I can see no real conflict between the two
accounts.

So I think what it boils down to, probably,
is a few diehards who simply find no comfort whatever in the
thought that they may be descended from monkeys.

I sort of like monkeys, myself, so...

Actually, the evolution model does not say
we came from monkeys. Monkeys, and all the other simians, if the
model is true, descended with man from a common ancestor—which
probably means something worse than monkeys, so what the
hell...

The only point I'm trying
to make is that a conditioned reality can be quite comfortable. We
move from one to another with the greatest reluctance, usually. The
sad part of that is the fact that most of us get our conditioning
by default—that is, from mommy and daddy and aunt julia and father
john and nbc/cbs/abc and the national enquirer etc.—instead of
sallying forth with an adventurous spirit and an open mind to see
what's really out there.

So please do not turn from
me in disgust unless you really know where your own reality is
coming from.

I would have given a bundle, believe me, to
have known where mine was coming from, there in the shadow of the
Eye. I am really a very ordinary guy, remember—but saddled with a
"gift" that I never asked for in the first place, and one that does
nothing but get me in trouble in every other place. So try to have
a little sympathy, please, as you watch me struggling through this
thing—and save your criticisms for the end.

I did not know what the hell was coming down
this pike. It started as a simple "missing person" case. I get a
dozen or more of those a year—very routine, even though sometimes
very sad as well—but routine in the sense that a common-logic flow
of cause/effect events may be tied together with the slightest
psychic insight, consisting maybe of no more than a "hunch"—but you
can build a great psychic reputation that way. This case began
where it should have ended, with the discovery of a corpse. It
exploded from there to geeks and spooks, a professional hitman
waiting patiently for my head at my driveway, the President of the
United States and the entire world intelligence community, a whole
gaggle of missing eminent scientists, a creation-physicist with
thunder in the valley and a frightened child between the ears, a
gun battle beneath the eye of God—and all this coupled to the
certain knowledge that this particular reality was expanding at the
speed of light because there was no gravitational mass to restrain
it.

So don't sneer at me, damn
it, for talking about flying saucers. A flying saucer is only
marginally more phenomenal than a phantom jet, anyway; it is a
difference, primarily, of performance capability, a matter of order
of magnitudes somewhat in the same class as the difference between
Orville Wright's Kitty Hawk experience and NASA's Space Shuttle. To
a Neanderthal, peering fearfully from his cave at a silver disk
hovering directly overhead: okay, yes, phenomenal as hell—but don't
smirk at me about flying saucers when I am standing beside a
telescope that sees the edge of the universe. The Neanderthal and I
do not, thank God, inhabit the same conditioned reality.

If you want to talk "miraculous," then let's
please move into the miraculous class. Let's talk about quasars and
pulsars, red giants and black holes; let's talk temperatures of 100
million million million million million degrees which, I am told,
accompanied the birth of this universe, and let's talk "energy" and
"matter" as interchangeable terms for the same stuff depending on
temperature. Closer to home, much closer, let's talk about
individual atoms created in stars yet used by an exploding ovum to
fashion a living being like you or me.

Then let's get down,
really down, and talk about a pastoral God who wallowed in the dust
of planet earth to bring forth Adam—the same dust, presumably, that
He built in the stars—and let us wonder, for just a moment, where
the ancients got these fantastic ideas. How did an ancient,
prehistoric man ever draw the connection between living flesh and
planetary dust? Who told him that? Who told him that there was
nothing before a moment of creation, when all around him was
abundant evidence of foreverness—and who told him that "the
spirit" moved across the flowing rivers of celestial hydrogen (two
atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, remember, makes water) and
separated them to bring forth the world, when clearly, to him,
water was water and air was air (firmament) and never the two did
occupy the same space at the same time.

You want to talk
"miraculous?" Let's talk, then, about an aboriginal tribe in Africa
whose oral history traces their origins to a binary-star system in
the Pleiades—and their "logo," apparently a star map depicting a
binary-star and created many hundreds of years before our own
astronomers with their powerful telescopes were able to determine
the existence of such a system in Pleiades. Who told them
that?