Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (18 page)

Meanwhile I have to
struggle along with my own vague insights to theorize a
possible state
of
consciousness
in which we may focus upon
two separate points in space at the same time and
perceive the orange both resting at the bottom
and hovering at the top of the basket
in a
larger view than that afforded under the common reality. And I take
that as the fundamental axiom of a loose, working hypothesis that
allows me to maintain a sense of sanity while confronting an
obviously insane experience. All I need do now is supply the
various terms that might explain the what, the how, and the why of
the experience. It will require the rest of the story to do that,
so be patient with me.

For now, just understand
that I was confused, scared, and exhilarated all at the same time.
My sensory probes were somewhat disoriented. I began regaining
"this-world" awareness within a pile of naked bodies. This pile was
so confused that I could not immediately determine who I was
connected to. I figured a fifty-fifty chance for either Alison or
Jane Doe Senior, and I definitely recognized Alison’s soft little
moans issuing from somewhere in the tangle. Even after I found her
head I could not be sure.

Awareness was apparently
reorienting through-out that pile. I heard many confused comments
and queries, a few groans of dismay.

It is not that I did not remember, I
remembered every soaring sensation, the whole mind-blowing range of
quivering rapture. But there was the disorientation noted above, a
feeling of unreality: you remembered, but you did not necessarily
believe that what you remembered actually happened.

I was hoping like hell
some of it did
not
happen.

Evidently some others were having the same
problem.

The pile was moving, disentangling. There
were moans, sighs, groans. Someone withdrew a leg from the small of
my back; someone else was trying to extricate an arm from between
my legs. It was a hairy arm; I shivered and let it go.

Alison, yeah, was connected at the hips. The
rest of her found its way to me. She clasped her arms behind my
back and sighed into my ear. I asked her, "You okay?"

She moaned, "Oh, God."

I persisted. "Does that mean okay?"

She replied, small-voiced, "A thousand
orgasms is okay enough, I guess. Is this what you call cosmic
sex?"

I told her, "I don't know what the hell to
call it."

"Just call me next time you're ready for
it." She sighed.

I said, "Hell," and raised to an elbow for a
look around.

It was rather dark on the
mound. All the torches were extinguished. Looked like a carpet of
bodies, stretching out in all directions. Alison and I were at
mid-circle, or
there
. I was able to discern several familiar faces nearby, but I
did not see Oom or the senior Jane Doe.

I lay there wishing for a cigarette, too
comfortable to go looking for one. I was still joined to Alison,
and that was mainly the source of comfort, I guess. She was moving
languidly against me—said, with a shy smile, "First time for me in
public. How 'bout you?"

I said, "Yeah," and slowly
withdrew because it was becoming too damned comfortable, all over
again, and there were other things requiring attention. Alison made
a sorrowful little sound as I rolled away and got to my knees. I
reminded her, "You said a thousand was okay enough. We have
business here. Let's go find out what it is."

I helped her to her feet
and we carefully struggled off the mound, found and retrieved our
clothing, which dangled from hooks conveniently placed on the torch
stands.

Two couples were ahead of
us. I watched them make their way around the side of the house and
disappear in the direction of the parking area out front. I heard
Hiawatha greet them—or I guess I should start referring to the guy
as Campbell. Anyway, that told me what I needed to know. I led
Alison around to the back door and we entered the house through the
kitchen. There was no sensing of presence inside that
house.

We found the bedrooms and
invaded the closets, searching for effects. I found what I was
looking for, all draped on the same hanger: the designer jeans and
blouse I had seen on Cochran's companion at Sportsman's Lodge. I
showed the outfit to Alison, told her, "Remember this. Fix it in
the mind so you can describe it later."

She took a clinical approach, examining the
manufacturer's labels and sizes, told me, "Got it. But what is
it?"

I said, "Just remember it."

"Poor girl has a very bare closet." She
sniffed. "I would call this a severely limited wardrobe, if it's
all there is."

It was, at that. I
probably would not have noticed it, not having that much experience
in ladies' closets. A simple dress. Two blouses. Two pairs of
jeans. One pair of spike-heel shoes, one pair of moccasin-style
sneakers.

There was only one other bedroom, obviously
Campbell's domain. In his closet, several pairs of Western boots,
couple of blazers, some silk shirts, two pairs of slacks.

"They live simply," Alison observed.

I said, "Well, what the hell, when you've
got buckskin..."

I heard movement, felt
presence inside the house. I cautioned Alison with a finger to the
lips, whispered to her, "How many people would you say live
here?"

"Looks like two to me,"
she whispered back. "What did you have in mind?"

I had a senior Jane Doe in mind, of course,
but there was no evidence of her here.

I took Alison's hand and led her into the
small hallway. Oom, in buckskins, was standing with arms folded
across her chest and staring at the floor in the middle of the
garden room. She looked up, startled by our sudden presence, said,
"Oh! Yes?"

I told her, "You're in big trouble, honey.
Let me help."

She did not ask but told me, "You enjoyed
the service."

"That what it was? I enjoyed it, yes,
whatever. You're still in trouble. You know who I am, don't
you."

"Yes. I know you, who you are."

Campbell, in loincloth, appeared in the
doorway from the kitchen. He was pointing a shotgun at me.

"So do I," he told me.
"Just stay loose there, citizen. You're kinda confused, aren't you?
You're the one in trouble."

I was still in the little
open hallway, to my left side, the living room, now dancing with
blue lights from an approaching police beacon, to my right side,
Hiawatha Campbell and his shotgun. And from upside or downside,
some side beyond space-time, another mind directly counseled
sensible behavior.
Be good. Be patient. It
shall be revealed
.

I gave Alison the keys to
the Maserati and told her, "See you later, kid. Keep the
faith."

A few minutes later I was
in handcuffs and headed toward the Ventura County jail. The common
reality was once again in full sway.

Chapter Twenty-Five:
Jigsaw

Incarceration can be a bit
numbing to the mind. I found that it produces a sense of loss of
the self, like becoming a nonperson. Never mind how gently or even
respectfully it may all be accomplished, we are all wild beings
beneath a thin layer of sophistication, so the whole gestalt of
capture and confinement strikes some deep terror within these
animal hearts, a terror not significantly unlike that of any wild
thing that has been chased and caught and caged.

So I spent a substantial part of the early
going just trying to deal intellectually with the experience. Then,
from the numbness I began to fashion a whole new view of the
situation and my place within it. And I began to see where I had
gone wrong. I had been working the thing from the wrong side of
reality.

I had to call back into use my real-world
training of the past. There was a saying at the Office of Naval
Intelligence: "We do not gather intelligence; we develop
intelligence."

The word is much overused
and greatly misunderstood. In common, everyday usage it simply
means the ability to understand. Spy novelists and newswriters have
managed to convey the idea that intelligence work is largely a
cloak- and-dagger game of stealing secrets from an enemy. That's a
distortion. I have known a lot of "spies" who are not particularly
intelligent. I have seen many "secrets" that also have no
particular intelligence in and of themselves.

The business of an intelligence agency is to
develop intelligence—that is, understanding—of a particular
situation or event. We develop that understanding in pretty much
the same way that any individual might approach the task of
learning something new. We gather all the facts we can and study
them. From that study we "develop" certain understandings. Often
an understanding of fragments will not provide a coherent whole,
so we have to "leap the mind," or synthesize connections between
the fragments. As an intellectual exercise, this is the opposite
of analysis, which involves breaking up a whole and examining the
pieces. The first employs inductive reasoning; the second,
deductive.

Synthesis was one of my
specialties at ONI. Say, for example, that we want to know when a
certain vessel will depart from a certain port. We have several
facts at hand. One-fourth of the ship's company have been granted
ten-day leaves. An engine is under repairs that should be completed
in about ten days. A rush order for provisions must be fulfilled
within ten days. This is an over- simplification, of course, but
with these few facts at hand we could reasonably surmise that this
vessel will not be rejoining the fleet within the next ten days.
The actual job of "intelligence gathering" (misuse—should be called
"information gathering") may involve such commonplace items as a
date for the captain's planned liaison with his mistress or a
dental appointment ashore. That is synthesis.

For the other side of the coin, say that it
all begins with the fact that our crypto people have broken the
enemy codes and they give us a radio message ordering the vessel to
rejoin the fleet in ten days. We wish to confirm that this is not
a dummy message, planted to deliberately mislead us. So we send
people into the field to "develop" the confirming data; i.e., the
particulars given above that established our synthesis, only now
these particulars are part of a confirming analysis of a picture
already formed.

But, see, there is nothing really esoteric
about any of this. It is merely an extension of the way the human
mind functions, anyway. Every time you solve a problem for
yourself you are examining, synthesizing, and analyzing in one
combination or another, and this process develops understanding
for you.

I had been doing that, too, but I had been
working the wrong side of the street. I'd become so fascinated by
the otherworldly implications of the experience that I had
neglected the this-world basics.

That was my illumination, ensconced there in
the Ventura County jail awaiting transport to the Los Angeles
jurisdiction. The guys at Ventura treated me okay. I was not
pushed around or insulted or otherwise abused in any way. Thank
God, most law-enforcement agencies in this country today have
distanced themselves from the dark-age practices of the past when
any prisoner was fair game for any sadistic tendencies of his
jailers. I got no feeling of personalities there, no judgment or
condemnation; they were just guys doing their job, and I happened
to be part of their job at the moment.

I was deposited in a
little holding cell that was comfortable enough, private—as good,
I guess, as any cage could be for a free spirit. But it was very
sobering, and it did induce me to think rationally about the
case.

Say that you have a
sackful of facts. They are just tossed into the sack, disparate
pieces of information that, in and of themselves, establish only
that a certain event occurred at a certain time, each fact covering
only a specific event. These are your "facts of the case." Each is
undisputed. It happened. You need to know why and how it happened,
by whom or through whom it happened, and how it is related to the
other facts of the case.

So now visualize your sack
of facts as a jigsaw puzzle. You do not have all the pieces to the
puzzle in the sack. But you wish to place each piece in its proper
place—you need to lay them out in such a way that you might be able
to guess at how the missing pieces would complete the picture if
they were there. This can be a disheartening exercise, of course.
But you do have certain clues to help you begin this exercise in
frustration. If a certain piece has a straight edge, you might
reasonably see it as a bordering piece. A piece with two straight
edges should represent a corner of the picture. So you start
pushing the pieces around, arranging and rearranging and trying
for some coherence.

That is what I was doing during those hours
in Ventura. Valdiva's guys arrived to pick me up at eight o'clock
and we were on our way back to L.A. by nine. Great guys—a Sergeant
Thompson and a Patrolman Olivas. Olivas was driving. Soon as we
pulled away from the jail, Thompson removed my cuffs and gave me a
cigarette. We stopped at a Denny's at the edge of town and had
coffee and pastries. Thompson told me that Valdiva had "rethought"
the charges and was conferring with the D.A. about "reframing."
See, these guys play with jigsaws too.

It was a pleasant enough trip to L.A. It's
only about thirty-five miles between the city limits of the two,
then add another hour into the interior of Los Angeles; we were
downtown by eleven. Valdiva was there waiting for us. I'll say this
for the guy: He's not weak on follow-through; he commits himself. I
could believe his earlier warning about tracking me down. Kind of
guy who'd dog you to hell's doorstep. That's okay; he's my kind of
guy.