Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven:
 
Night of the Dolphin

In any other context, Ted
Bransen's vicious little crimes against his wife would have warranted a story
all their own. In the context given, they are hardly worthy of a footnote—because
this is not a story of petty human greed and treachery but one of truly cosmic
significance.

I
do believe, you see, that these beings in their marvelous flying machines are
our gods and angels of all the world's myths and legends and holy scripts. They
have left their imprints and their promises on every genetic tracing upon the
planet earth, within every culture and society and race of man, and they are
part of us today as always in the past—because they are us in their roots and
we are them in our destiny.

I
mentioned earlier the technological advances possible in a mere two hundred
years of steady progress. Consider then if you will that these beings were
intergalactic travelers when the first man appeared upon the earth, perhaps a
million years ago. Virtually the entire story of mankind thus far has been
concerned with the need to dominate his environment; only when that was largely
achieved could this upstart species begin to reach beyond its own immediate
needs, and only in the present century has that reach become directed toward
other worlds.

The
human race has not yet been born into cosmos.

We
have become impregnated with the idea and the possibility, yes, but our
position in a cosmic society is still that of a remote aboriginal tribe buried
in its own ignorance, frightened and suspicious of the missionaries who come
from other worlds to encourage us in our reach. Our medicine men and shamans
jealously guard their own puny power and hurt their superstitions into our
midst whenever the missionaries are sighted, ridiculing and tarring and
banishing all who would notice them. But the missionaries do keep coming, and
the impressions continue to be made, and mankind does keep inching toward that
launch into the cosmic community.

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.