Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen:
 
National Anathema

Donovan had said to
me: "Why should we conquer you?" And he started to say more, as
though to answer his own question: "We already..."

"Already
what?" I'd asked.

"Already
love you," he replied.

Doesn't
really fit, does it. I call that a recovery from a near blunder. He almost told
me more than he wanted me to know.

So.
Already what?

Already
conquered us?

Already
own us?

Already
what?

I
was quietly pondering the question when Julie emerged from the bathroom wrapped
in a towel. The sight of that immediately tossed my mind back to that
 
encounter beside the pool with Penny Laker,
and I was mentally rehashing that weird experience when Julie playfully slapped
my bare bottom and pushed me toward

the
shower. She seemed totally collected, refreshed, in charge of herself again.

I
doubted that a mere shower could have that effect on me, but I definitely
needed the shower. I spent about twenty minutes under the stinging spray, by
which time I was at least beginning to think rationally, and I emerged to find
a Spanish omelet and scalding coffee awaiting me at the dining table.

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 astronomer 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."