I came onto a canal and strolled along its bank for a while before noticing that the water was totally transparent yet I could not see anything representing a bottom in its depths. The other bank was forty feet or so distant and though the canal wound through the landscape, it seemed to hold that same width for as far as I could follow it with my eyes. I could see things moving deep beneath the surface but they were so far away I could not identify definite shapes or patterns to the movements.
I stopped and sat down close to the water's edge and lit a cigarette. It tasted terrible. I tried to poke the cigarette into the water to put it out, but it would not penetrate the surface. It was like trying to shove a finger into stiff Jell-O.
I was thinking how very weird that was, yet I accepted it without even reaching for an explanation. It was simply water that could not be penetrated from its surface.
But then I very quickly received a demonstration that the water was not solid like Jell-O. I saw a form approaching leisurely from the depths; it grew larger and larger on a direct approach to where I sat until finally I recognized the object as a dolphin—well, sort of a dolphin.
It broke the surface no more than three feet from where I sat, only its head projecting from the water although I could see clearly the entire body as though it were suspended in air before me. This dolphin had very humanlike eyes and its face was highly expressive.
I did not see its mouth move but I distinctly heard with my ears a very pleasant voice speaking in my language, incredibly gentle and melodious.
"I thought I saw something up there. Hello. What are you called?"
Now I know this must sound to you like Alice in Wonderland or some such, but it only made me wonder again where Lewis Carroll got his idea for that story in the first place. I mean I had a divided consciousness here. I knew that it was a bizarre experience, but at the same moment I was going along with it as though it was perfectly natural and commonplace. I mean, you know, talking to a dolphin.
I replied, "I am called Ashton Ford. Who are you?"
"Ashton Ford," the dolphin repeated. "That is a pleasing sound. I am called Ambudala." This is a phonetic approximation. It was a definite four-syllable sound but with musical components that do not translate into writing.
I said, "Pleased to meet you. I seem to be a little lost. I thought Penny Laker lived here but I can't seem to find her house. Do you know Penny?"
Ambudala replied, "Perhaps I have heard the name but I would not know her if she is a house-dweller. If you would rest a moment, however, I will consult the Knowledge and seek a solution. Will you wait?"
I said, "Sure. Thanks. I'll be right here."
Ambudala slipped back beneath the surface. The water simply closed on him. There were no waves or ripples, no disturbance whatever at the surface to mark his point of departure. But I saw him streaking into the depths until he was too far away to see with the unaided eye, and a moment later I saw him returning at a slightly different angle. He moved with incredible swiftness. If he'd been in a tank at Marineland, moving at that speed, he could have jumped hundreds of feet through the air when he reached the top. But he came to a smooth halt, again with only his head exposed.
He was a bit breathless, though, as he reported to me, "Yes, Penny Laker is a house-dweller but not in this domain. You have obviously broken the harmonic. The Knowledge respectfully requests information as to how you accomplished that."
I countered with a curiosity of my own. "Can you distinguish that I am a different species of life than you?"
He immediately replied, "Oh, more than that, Ashton Ford. Yes, yes, much more than that. Can you not distinguish that you are an entirely different reality than I am?"
I said, "I'm getting that impression, yes. Do you see many like me come through here?"
“Time to time, yes," the dolphin replied. "Will you provide the requested information?"
The thing still seemed entirely real to me.
I told Ambudala, "Sorry, I don't know a thing about it. You'll have to ask Donovan."
"Oh, oh, oh," the dolphin replied, highly impressed and seemingly in some kind of rapture over the very sound of that name. "You are sent by Donovan?"
I said, "Well..." and was trying to think of some way to respond to that question when Ambudala again returned to the depths. This time he was a mere streak through a crystal medium. And he did not return.
But that was okay. Because moments later I caught another motion, this one in the purple sky, a flashing like lightning inside a cloud except there was no cloud in that region of the sky, and the motion became an approach as a small disclike object hurtled in from the horizon. It came to a smooth halt at about a thousand feet directly overhead then began a wobbling descent and landed beside me.
It was rounded on the bottom and flat on top, like a cantaloupe cut in half, made of shiny metal with a bright sheen like chrome. No more than three feet across, with a shallow cockpitlike scoop in the very center—again, like the cantaloupe after you've cut it and scooped out the seeds. The cockpit was padded and lined with a soft material, almost like automobile upholstery. There were no instruments, and there was nobody I could see controlling the thing.
But Donovan's voice came from it and told me, "Get aboard, Ashton."
I stepped aboard and sat down. A clear dome came up from the periphery of the cockpit and closed an inch above my head. There was no sound and not even much sensation of motion as the disc lifted off and tilted into an incredible climb.
I had a perfect view of everything around me, above me and even below me, and it seemed that I was putting the purplish atmosphere behind me.
I was streaking through space, in total darkness now in less time than I can relate it, among the stars, one of the stars myself as far as I knew.
I could hear sounds like tinkling glass, and they even began to take on a form and substance like orchestrated music.
I had the impression of dancing—dancing through outer space, a velvety nowhere—yet at the same moment aware that I was moving faster than anything ever thought possible within my mind—and I believe that I blacked out for a moment because I remember experiencing extreme physical stress, like you would get from great G-force, and I felt much more comfortable when I came out of the blackout though now the sense of speed was such that I wondered if I had broken the light barrier.
It was not undirected motion. I knew that I was streaking along a precise path and toward a precise goal but that was the limit of my "knowing."
And obviously not nearly as much time had transpired in the tiny saucer as I'd thought, because toward the end of that I suddenly realized that I was holding a lighted cigarette, and I knew that it was the same cigarette I'd tried to extinguish in the impenetrable waters of the canal in Ambudala's domain because I recognized the way it was bent from the attempt.
I tried to sample the taste of the cigarette but could not advance it toward my mouth. I was locked absolutely motionless within that hurtling sphere, could not move even a finger.
It came to me, then, that I was not breathing.
How could I not be breathing yet still be alive?
I was thinking, dammit, and thought occurs within time, doesn't it?—so how come I could get away with thinking and not breathing at the same time?
I experienced a sensation of slowing, then of standing still, then a gentle settling as a leaf falls from a tree. I was still in absolute darkness, and now in absolute silence.
I said aloud, "Where am I? What's going on?"
Donovan's voice came from somewhere inside my own skull: "You got lucky, pal. This is where you get out."
The dome opened.
I climbed out from utter darkness, feeling tentatively for a toehold with one foot still in the cockpit, and stepped down into swirling mists. I was in Penny's backyard, the wall of the carport directly behind me. I lifted the cigarette to my lips and took a deep drag and it tasted mighty sweet.
So where the hell had I been?
Where the hell had I been?
"Obviously you broke the harmonic," Ambudala had told me, as though it were not all that unprecedented an event.
I could not have imagined all that in the space of thirty or so paces from the curb to Penny's carport.
Could I?
Maybe so.
But I had good reason to think about it a while before coming to a decision.
That reason was in Penny Laker's swimming pool. It was much larger than I'd last seen it, and there was no more tennis court.
And a pair of unusual-looking dolphins were having a nice swim within its crystal waters. Where the hell had I been?
Chapter Seventeen: Friends and Lovers
They looked like regular dolphins to me. But I knew there was no way that the pool could have been enlarged by any conventional method since the last time I'd seen it, not unless Penny had help from a Navy Seabee battalion or some such. Even so, it would have taken that much time to add the water alone, never mind all the construction work. Actually it was an entirely new pool. The one I'd seen the day before was a standard cement pool, no more than twenty by fifty feet, with an ordinary cement patio surrounding it. This one was well over a hundred feet long, made of Plexiglas or some other synthetic material with built-in artificial boulders, surrounded by luxurious lawn, and it looked very deep throughout. Underwater lighting provided a uniform glow from end to end.
Just for the hell of it, I tried submersing the cigarette in it, then sheepishly looked for somewhere to dispose of the soggy butt.
The dolphins came over to check me out. I checked them out, too; neither looked like Ambudala but I figured I'd give it a try just for the hell of it. I smiled at both and said, "Ambudala?"
Both whished in reply and took a turn around the pool in opposite directions then came back for another look.
"What are you called?" I asked them. "Jambalaya? Crawfish Pie?”
They grinned at me and went away.
I was thinking that I would have grinned too, in their place. Must have thought I was some kind of nut.
Dolphins are highly intelligent, you know. Perhaps, it is said, more intelligent than man in many ways. I always get the feeling, around dolphins, that they are merely indulging our superiority complex. They know that we want them to be intelligent toys so that's the role they play, though all the while wondering how we could be so stupid as to believe that we are the smarter species.
I went over and sat in the darkness of the lanai, lit another cigarette, tried to pull my head together about the events of the past little while. According to my watch, I had just about had time to walk from my car to the lanai via the carport with a brief stopover beside the pool. About three minutes had elapsed.
But that could not be possible.
I could not have dreamed that much in three minutes.
So could it be possible to hallucinate such a vivid and elaborate experience in a single flash? I doubted it. And what about the pool? Could it have been built and filled and stocked with dolphins in less than a day?
I had a terribly sinking feeling at that point of my inquiry. I looked again at my watch. It's just a plain old-fashioned sweep-hand Timex without a calendar. So how could I automatically assume that only three minutes had elapsed since I left my vehicle? Maybe it had been twelve hours and three minutes, or twenty-four hours and three minutes; hell, it could have been days since...
If that spanking new pool could be a reliable measure of time, it could have been weeks.
"Lost time" is a common feature of UFO close-encounter experiences. And look at Ted Bransen, who'd been whisked from a Los Angeles street to Buenos Aries, car and all, in what appeared to him as a flash of the eye but turned out to be a matter of hours.
So where had Bransen been during those missing hours? Forget Buenos Aires. Where had the guy been during the transit? I had assumed that they'd loaded him car and all into a big saucer and carted him down there. But maybe that was too mundane an explanation. Maybe those big saucers moved interdimensionally; maybe they didn't need to use our space at all except for minor corrections for spot locations. Maybe they did not even need the saucers for their hocus-pocus.
I had not been in a big saucer. Had I? Hell no. I stepped through the fog and straight into another world.
But wait a minute!
It only looked like fog. How the hell could I know what I stepped into? Maybe I stepped into total oblivion, momentarily, and I simply had no memory from the one step to the next. Maybe it all had been a dream—even a very long dream—and that was the only memory available to bridge the time gap.
So where had I been?
I think I was really hoping for a time gap as an explanation of the experience, but there was no time gap. I discovered that very quickly. The lights in the lanai came on, I heard the patio door open, and Julie Marsini stepped out with a revolver in her hand. She was pointing the gun at me so I sat very still until she identified me.
"Oh God!" she cried. "I'm glad it's you! I don't know what I would've done if I'd found a strange man in the lanai."
I muttered, "Nice to see you, too. What day is this?"
"What?"
"Did you and Penny leave my house just a short while ago? Or was it a few days ago?"
She carefully deposited the revolver on the table, sat down across from me, and fiddled with her robe as she peered closely at me and said, "Don't tell me. Now it's happening to you."
I said, very quietly, "Not just me. Have you seen your new pool?"
She said, "What?"
"Pool." I jerked a thumb over the shoulder. "Check it out."
She checked it out from where she sat. Formerly the lanai had marked the transition from pool-patio to tennis court. Now it was all pool. She gasped and rose out of her chair, dropped back into it abruptly, said not a damn thing.
I was waiting for her verbal reaction, so I said nothing, too. We sat there quite a while saying nothing. Finally I asked, "Where's Penny?"
"Asleep," Julie whispered, still gazing toward the new pool.
"Sure about that?"
She looked at me then as she replied, "I just looked in on her. Why?"
I said, "Because someone delivered her dolphins."
"What?"
I said, gently, "Get it together, kid. You know what I said and you know what I'm talking about."
"There are dolphins in the pool?"
I nodded. "There are."
She said, "Ashton, this is crazy. I was out here just a little while ago. None of this was here."
"Has Penny been out here?"
"No. She slept all the way home, in the car. I had a hard time getting her out of the car and into bed. Why?"
"Did she tell you how she got into my house? Where she'd been? Anything at all?"
"No. I told you, she slept all the way home. Why?"
I growled, "Hell, I don't know why. Don't expect brilliant questions from me in the face of all this. I just know that I was here yesterday and heard you and Penny talking about getting dolphins for the swimming pool. You told her it couldn't be done because the pool didn't meet the standards, or something silly like that. So now there's a new pool and a pair of dolphins in her backyard. I guess I am still trying to find something sane in all this. I desperately need to find that."
Julie had been all but dumbstruck from the moment she became aware of the new pool. But now she laughed and lightly said, "I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation. You know Penny, when she sets her mind to something."
I said, "Uh-uh. Not in our reality, Julie, there is no logical explanation for that pool. Even supposing some whirlwind contractor came out and somehow did this job overnight, there would be some evidence of all that work. There is no such evidence. And hell, it would take days to fill that hole with water, even using fire hos
es. No. Here is one we cannot explain away."
"Are there really dolphins in it?"
I took her hand and led her to the edge of the pool. Jambalaya and Crawfish Pie came racing immediately to the spot and did a spectacular leap for us.
I said, "There you go."
Julie said, very quietly, "We're in big trouble. This is against the law, I know."
I said, "That's the least worry. Did you see the fog?"
"Sure I saw the fog. Drove all the way from Malibu in it. Why?"
I said, "Not that fog. I mean the one that settled over this house a short while ago. The one that brought the dolphins."
Julie took a step backward, gave me a rather detached stare, and replied, "Why are you doing this?"
I viciously shook my head, hoping that would clear it, and asked her, "Exactly what am I doing?"
"All these questions, this third degree. You know perfectly well why the dolphins are here."
I said, "Then I guess I forgot. Why don't you refresh my mind."
"Just thinking it doesn't make it so."
I said, "Julie, what the hell are you talking about?"
"Thinking it's not doesn't make it not."
I said, "Hey..."
"Just accept what you have to accept and let it go at that!"
"Julie...”
She was walking slowly back toward the house, tossing these little aphorisms at me over her shoulder. But I'd already seen the explanation in her eyes, that glassy stare which I had noted there before. God only knew what this girl had been through already to test her sanity. I was just a new kid on the block, still wet behind the ears—what could I know of sanity tests? So maybe this was her way of handling it. They were not aphorisms; they were more like pressure valves, vents for the mind—or maybe simple affirmations that all is well despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Whatever, she was walking out on me.
Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series Book 6) Page 9