Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (15 page)

Irradiated?

Was not that the very term Jennifer had used
in describing... Yeah. "Palomar Mountain is being irradiated from a
point in space..."

I went over to the
bookshelves to find a dictionary. Wanted to refresh my
understanding of
irradiated
. Found the dictionary and
found the word though not a lot of comfort from the various
definitions, deciding my own understanding was the scientific usage
having to do with an energy beam.

But then as I was returning the dictionary
to its place on the shelf, my eyes brushed past a slender volume
just above it. It was a university press collection of articles on
astrophysics by none other than Jennifer Harrel. I pulled it down
and leafed through it, found nothing really remarkable.

Then, for some reason, I drifted back to the
front matter, found the copyright page, stared at it unbelievingly
for a frozen minute or two.

You know how, sometimes, you can get this
chill clear through your body, from the top of the head to the
soles of the feet and along the branches in between, as though the
whole nervous system has become sympathetic to something very
strange occurring in the brain?

And something very strange, indeed, was
occurring within my brain.

The collection of essays by Dr. Jennifer
Harrel had been published twenty-two years earlier.

Which meant that she was
somewhere under ten years old at the time. Quite a prodigy. Except
that the introduction, by another scholar, spoke glowingly about
the good Dr. Harrel's long list of contributions to the world of
science, far too many to fit any ten-year span.

I stood right there at the
library shelf and read the entire introduction and preface, then I
very carefully returned the volume to its place above the
American College Dictionary
and went back to the equations on the blackboard.

I did not know who this
lady was. I'd bathed with her, made love with her, spent a
delightful day with her. But I did not know who she was. I just
knew that she was
not
Dr. Jennifer Harrel.

Chapter Seventeen: Ten Big Indians

Well now it was really shot to hell—torn,
everything, all of it. Not only was I on a mountaintop with a group
of strangers who all could be lying to me; I could not be sure,
even, that any of them were who they said they were.

Actually, only three had even come with full
names— Jennifer Harrel, Holden and Laura Summerfield. There was at
least some evidence—22 years old, but evidence—that there actually
was or had been someone named Jennifer Harrel. As to the
Summerfields, though... Well, okay, yeah, the custodian over at the
observatory—Fred?—had given me a map to the Summerfields' house—so
probably there did exist, or had existed, someone named
Summerfield.

But how could I be sure
about Fred, himself? Or any of those people over there? Hell. I
have seen all those movies, same ones you saw, and the things on
television, where the aliens quietly slip in and replace all the
humans, take their identities, prepare the way for a full-scale
invasion from that other galaxy. And there is always a clue, at
least one good clue that gives the aliens away. Either they all
have four fingers or they can't walk and chew gum and sing "Stars
And Stripes Forever" at the same time.

I never saw any in the
movies that
scintillated
but that should be as good a clue as
any.

I am not saying that this
is exactly where I was at, but I was not far away from there. I
considered the possibility, soberly, for all of two or three
seconds before I began to feel foolish. And yet every other
conceivable scenario was even more ridiculous.

See, the problem was one
of credibility. Whether we realize it or not, all of us inhabit a
very credible reality. We get these very reliable sense perceptions
that tell us if we are right-side up or upside down, if we are
standing still or moving, if it is night or day, winter or summer.
Along with all that, we tend to be more or less gullible. We will
take it on faith that the can in our shopping basket is beans and
not squash simply because it is labeled beans. And we will drive a
hundred miles into the wilderness with no food or water in the car
because we believe our gas gauge and the mileage ratings for our
car.

We take more of this world on sheer faith
than most people ever stop to realize.

But then if I get home with the can of beans
and it turns out to be squash, which I cannot stomach, I lose a bit
of faith. And if I drive out to Death Valley that same day and run
out of gas in the midst of desolation, I lose a lot more faith. If
no one will stop to lend assistance, when obviously I am going to
die out there without help, I lose a hell of a lot of faith—and
when I am crawling along the pavement with my tongue dragging in a
mirage that has every appearance of cool, clear water—well, yeah,
you get the picture, I don't believe anything anymore. This reality
has lost credibility for me.

That
is where I was at, atop Palomar Mountain that beautiful
Monday morning.

I was in an incredible reality.

You see, Jennifer—or the
person who was answering to that name—had told me that Saturday on
the hillside at Griffith Park that she was the first female in her
family ever who had even completed a high-school education, she was
the first career woman in the line, and it had been so important
for her to make it because everyone in her family was so sure that
she was not going to do so. So I could not say to myself, upon
finding the 22-year-old publication, that Jennifer was following in
the footsteps of her mother or grandmother or whomever—and it would
simply be grabbing for too much coincidence to believe there had
been an unrelated female astrophysicist with the same name who'd
published a book that found its way into this incredible little
reality.

No. There comes a time for all of us when we
dig in the heels and balk like hell—we will travel no farther along
this road—it is the wrong way.

My every action of the
previous forty-eight hours had been predicated upon a totally false
set of assumptions. First, I had assumed that there was, indeed, a
missing scientist whose name was Isaac Donaldson. True or False? At
this point, I did not know. I did know that such a scientist had,
at one time, lived and worked and published in this country. But I
had only Souza's word, and the now highly questionable word of the
person calling herself Jennifer, that this scientist was even still
alive—and, if so, mysteriously missing from his usual
haunts.

Souza himself had only the word of the
mysterious entity who had retained him. He had never met Donaldson,
had never seen or heard of him until retained to find him.

I had only "Jennifer's"
word that the police had ever been involved in any of this or that
anyone at all, anywhere, was concerned about any of it—except,
again, secondhand from Souza, who spent his whole damned life
embroiled in "scenarios," so how could I know how much Souza
actually knew about any of this and how much he had dreamed up in
his scenario cooker.

True—I had found a dead man
outside my house in Malibu. I'd had a run-in with two unknowns in
Glendale and another two at Palomar. So
something
was definitely cooking.
Again, though, how much of that could have been engineered through
nothing more than Souza's blundering about with fanciful scenarios?
In the "spook" world, it did not require a hell of a lot of solid
intelligence to produce overly-solid reactions.

Suppose, though, that there really was a
missing scientist or scientists and that the name of one of them
indeed was Donaldson and that everyone in the know in Washington
and other world capitals were truly concerned about his
disappearance. It did not necessarily follow that these folks atop
Palomar Mountain were friends or even allies of the missing man. He
sure as hell was nowhere in evidence with that group—and, if he was
indeed stashed somewhere in their midst, who was I to believe that
these people were protecting him and not, themselves, holding him
prisoner for whatever reason?

So the entire thing had lost credibility for
me. I knew only that I had met a beautiful lady and made love to
her, that I had "rescued" her from an attack in what was purported
to be her own home, that she had led me to Palomar Mountain, where
I had encountered some strange static on my extrasensory
wavelength.

Those were the facts, and they were the only
facts I had. It was a hell of a place to be. So I decided to get
the hell out.

Prisoner or no, though, I
obviously would have to walk out, if out it would be. A truck was
pulled in behind the Maserati, totally blocking any exit from the
parking space—and, thanks to the two vans hunkered in to either
side, I could not even get my doors open to get to my Walther. Two
young Indian men were sweeping the tarmac nearby but would not
respond to me in any way. The keys were not in the truck and the
transmission was locked, so I could not budge it.

So I figured, okay, and I went back inside
to use the telephone but could not get a dial tone to hold long
enough to even get the operator.

So I figured, okay, I could hoof it to the
national-park campground and find some help there. By now, though,
the Indian sweepers had moved to the top of the driveway and had
been joined by four more braves with picks over their shoulders. It
did not appear that they intended to let me pass—so I figured,
okay, what the hell, it could be a long trudge by highway, anyway,
so I dived through the bushes and took the fast way down, the very
fast way, straight down the mountainside, sliding through shallow
snow on the backside. I hit roadway a couple of layers of skin
later and kept right on boogying as fast as the feet would move me,
even though there was no sign of pursuit.

The long hours on the
tennis courts had conditioned me well and I was thankful for it
because I was breathing damned hard when I sighted the little
market at the crossroads. There was still no evidence that I was
being chased so I slowed it down and tucked some breath in,
smoothed the hair, shook loose the caked snow that had stuck to my
slacks during the downhill slide, and tried to look like any
intelligent city fella just out for a stroll along the mountainside
in blazer and slacks in the wintertime at five thousand
feet.

I certainly was not
feeling the cold, and the heated market just about did me in. A
customer was engaged in neighborly conversation with the lady I'd
spoken with briefly on the way up, Saturday night. Neither paid me
any attention. I went straight to the pay phone and used my card to
buy a call to Souza. Foster was not going to put me through until
he discerned the raw terror in my voice; but there was a brief
delay before Souza picked up, and, by this time, the "signs of
pursuit" were all too evident and crowding into the
market.

I said but two words to Greg Souza which, I
hoped, would suffice, given his affinity for the ridiculous. "Code
Red," I said, hung it up, and showed a sweet smile to the six
braves.

"Ran out of cigarettes," I told them. "Man,
I'd slide a mile for a cigarette when the pack is flat."

Not one of them smiled
back. I went on to the counter and bought some cigarettes then
decided to show some class, went to the cooler and selected a
six-pack of Heineken, paid for that, handed it to one of the
confused braves, and went outside with them. A pickup truck I'd
noticed earlier at Summerfield's was parked there; another one,
bearing four more deadpan braves was just pulling in.

I said, "Aw shit, thought I had you guys
covered. First there were six, now there are ten. Well, you'll just
have to share the damned beer, I'm not buying another damned
six-pack."

My humor was lost on these
guys, too. I wondered which galaxy they were really from, but not
too seriously. Two of them sandwiched me into the cab of the
pickup, the other four scrambled onto the bed, and we headed back
to Summerfield's—the second truck following closely.

"Thanks for the ride," I said.

"That's okay, thanks for
the beer," I said right back to myself.

The guy at the wheel grinned, but very small
and very briefly. Now, these guys knew how to be Indians. Shit,
they had me convinced.

Chapter Eighteen: The Djinn

Esau was seated at the bar
in the bubble room, still scintillating but obviously disturbed
also, absently holding the telephone handset about six inches from
his head and deep in thought. He replaced the handset onto the
pedestal as he became aware of my approach, swiveled to greet me
with a sober smile.

"Have a refreshing walk?" he inquired.

I had already decided to be cool about the
whole thing. "Great," I assured him. "Good air up here."

"Bracing," he suggested.

"Oh, all of that," I said.

I took a stool beside him. He said, "Perhaps
we should have our talk now and not wait for dinner."

I said, "Okay."

He said, "Our time grows shorter. I just had
a very unsatisfactory conversation with the man in
Washington."

I asked him, "Which man is that?"

He chose to ignore the
query. "Politicians are entirely too impatient. They tend to demand
instant solutions to the most vexing of problems. Ah well." He
showed me the charmer smile. "We have less than twenty-four hours
to complete the studies."