Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  I have to say that this young lady lived well. The apartment was spacious, stylish, beautifully put together with lots of blooming plants and miniature potted trees—also very sensuous, with soft colors and softer fabrics that seemed to invite tactile involvement. I really hated to step onto the carpet with shoes on; it was white, ankle-deep pile, built for bare feet and maybe bare bodies. Alison was close to that. She answered the door chimes wearing nothing but bra and panties, greeted me with a soft kiss on the lips, apologized that she was "running late," bade me make myself comfortable, then quickly retreated to the interior.

  I found chips and dip and a small pitcher of vodka gimlets on the bar, cocktail glasses chilling in crushed ice, so I filled a couple of glasses and went looking for my hostess, found her in a queenly boudoir putting finishing touches to her makeup. She accepted the gimlet, sampled it, made an approving face, commanded me to amuse myself elsewhere.

  Which was what I had in mind, anyway. But first I satisfied my curiosity about the bedroom, took careful mental note of the decor, browsed on through the rest of the apartment. Soft music filled every room from concealed speakers. There was one other bedroom, a study or library in which was set up an artist's easel and a blank canvas, a guest bathroom, breakfast room, dining room. Kitchen, bar, and living room were combined in a flowing pattern that recognized the essential unity of functions there.

  Charming, yeah—beautifully sensuous while entirely functional—but something was missing. Identity was missing. This could be anyone's home—or no one's. It looked like something you might see in a magazine on interior design, an artist's conception. Nothing of a personal nature was evident anywhere—no memorabilia or family photographs, nothing to really tag or define the resident personality.

  I was not surprised by this. I had more or less expected it.

  I returned to the bedroom doorway. Alison had poured that lush form into a clinging black sheath and was fussing with her hosiery. I leaned against the doorjamb, took a sip of my gimlet, quietly observed, "Nice place. Fits you as well as that sheath.''

  She said dryly, "Thanks. Beat it, please. I want to dazzle you with the transformation, not with the process itself."

  I told her, "Consider me dazzled to the max. Lived here long?"

  She replied, "Just long enough to get everything the way I like it."

  "How long is that?"

  Our eyes met in her mirror. She said, "I came out a few months ago."

  "From where?"

  "Back East."

  "Uh-huh. Is that where you went to school?"

  She went to her closet, began searching for shoes.

  I repeated, "Did you go to school in the East?"

  "Yes."

  "Me too. Ivy league?"

  "Nope."

  "Where?"

  "None of your darned business. Or when, thank you."

  I told her, "I have to make it my business, Alison. Where did you go to school?"

  She turned to face me, a shoe in each hand. "I went to several schools. Do you want undergraduate or postgraduate?"

  "I just want to know who you are," I replied quietly.

  She made it a joke, showed me her tongue, said, "I'm happy to be whoever you want me to be, Professor Ford. Do you really want to go out for dinner? Or would you just as soon hang out here and explore my person?"

  I said, "No dice, Dr. Saunders. You're too pretty and warm to have hatched from an egg. So where did you come from six weeks ago?"

  She said, "You know, I resent the hell out of this."

  I said, "Don't blame you. But I still need to know. Where were you born? When? What is your father's name? What does he do? Where did you get your education?"

  "What the hell are you talking about?" she inquired lightly.

  I told her, "I'm talking about the application for employment you filed with the County of Los Angeles. Good thing for you they haven't gotten around to checking it out. Because I did. And it does not check out, kid. All of your qualifications are false. Even your name is false."

  She laughed, sat on the edge of the bed, angled a sharply oblique gaze at me, put on a shoe, said, "Maybe you'd better explain the rules of this game to me. I don't understand it. What am I supposed to say now?"

  I replied, "You're supposed to tell me who you are and why you're posing as someone else."

  She put on the other shoe, stood up, went to look at herself in the mirror, adjusted the dress. Only then did she respond. "Does this mean you're not taking me to dinner?"

  "No."

  "Then let's go. I'm starved."

  I said, "You're not going to tell me about it, are you?"

  She said, "No."

  I sighed, said, "Then I have to think the worst."

  She smiled, said, "Tough."

  Tough, yeah. Take it or leave it. Like it or lump it. I did not want to take it or like it—but I could not leave it, so I had to lump it. For a while. Just for a while.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Mindtap

  I took Alison to a swank restaurant in Beverly Hills where the food was great, the service immaculate, and the prices unbelievable. This place is so "in" that it does not show its name and they accept neither cash nor plastic; you must be precleared for credit and you get your check in the mail. I do not frequent such places, but now and then is okay when the occasion is right. This occasion seemed right. Not that I was trying to impress the pretty psychologist. Actually I was hoping to divert her. This place is frequented by movie and television personalities. I have found that an "open mind is a diverted or mildly distracted one; open, that is, for my purposes. The willful penetration of an unwilling or guarded mind is a bit like sexual seduction; you may not simply overpower, as in rape, but you must woo and win; you seduce it.

  I was never especially comfortable with sexual seduction, as it is commonly practiced. It implies a basic deceit: on the man's part if he is trying to overcome moral resistance; on the woman's part if she looks to seduction as a moral loop hole; on both parts as the game is usually played. I believe that it belittles both as well as the act itself, so I usually do not play that game.

  As a general rule I also diligently avoid any deliberate invasion of another mind. People sometimes unwittingly "give" me knowledge. At such times I have no alternative but to accept it, but I usually also try my best to lose it as soon as received, unless there is some commanding reason to retain it. Usually such gifts have no value whatever. In a crowded room I will sometimes receive messages like God, look at those tits! and Oh, shit, either I've started my period or I just wet my pants!

  See, this kind of stuff is floating around everywhere. The reason we are not normally wired to receive it must be obvious. We could not function in that sea of thoughts from other minds, especially the static thoughts like Did I pay the phone bill? and I probably blew the promotion. The problem, you see, is that every mind is always at work. A mind at work means thinking, and thinking is an electromagnetic process that sends vibrations into the cosmic mind—what Jung termed the "collective unconscious." People like me with loose wiring in the belfry can suck those vibrations right through.

  Strange thing... Wait, I am not going to give you a seminar here on mental telepathy, but this bears mentioning. All the product of a given mind has a distinctive stamp that identifies it with its source. If we have ever known a person well enough to recognize the face or sound of the voice, then we will also recognize the purely mental product. And sometimes we can pair a thought with its producer, even though he or she is a total stranger but in view at the moment. Thus, in a crowded room I usually know from whom the random thought is emanating.

  But I do not like to invade. I emphasize that now because I certainly did intend to invade Alison's mind if I could. I had reason to believe, by then, that she was consciously on guard against that—because she had something to hide from me and because I had very early demonstrated an ability to tap her thoughts.

  How does one "guard" against mind-tapping? The parapsychology
labs work like hell to open the channels. I am not aware of any particular technique under study for closing them, lb understand what I was about with Alison, you need to know that there is more than one class of mind-to-mind transfer. There is the type I have been telling you about—the random collection—and another class most usual in labs, the target-concentration, send-and-receive type of transfer, used simply to prove empirically that it can be done. There is another large class that is much more common, almost ordinary—the so-called clairvoyant reception, by which the receiver suddenly "knows" something or gets a hunch; in this class are those people who always seem to know who is calling the moment the telephone rings or sometimes before it rings.

  My problem with Alison involved an entirely different class of transfer. This type of mind-to-mind does not rely on passive reception or clairvoyant knowingness. It relies literally on invasion. It involves the deliberate stimulation of another's memory—an actual linkage between the minds by which I search her memory the same as I would search my own.

  So back to the question: How does one guard against mind-tapping? If the only worry involved the reading of thoughts, then obviously the best defense would be simply to keep the mind busy with junk thoughts; do not think about the information to be guarded. That can be very difficult, even self-defeating. In order to suppress a particular thought or idea one must conceptualize, at least, that which is to be suppressed. Try it; decide that you will not think of an orange, then note how often the orange bobs into the mind. Anyone who has ever dieted has known mental experiences of this nature. I once knew a paranoid CIA agent who had developed the habit of mentally reciting the alphabet continuously to avoid "inadvertent thinking" when his mind was not purposefully directed into a specific task.

  But what if you are a trained psychologist with an expert understanding of brain wiring and you therefore know enough to also be worried about manipulative invasion? You would want to think junk and also remain alert to a mind-touch from outside. And, yes, if you are sensitive, you definitely can feel another mind touching yours. Ever been in a restaurant or other public place and turned your head before you realized it to stare across the crowd into another's eyes? If so, then you have felt another's mind.

  My task, then, was to seduce and penetrate Alison Saunders. I knew that she was alert and wary. I did not know why she was therefore so willing to expose herself to my presence. I had given her ample justification for telling me to get lost. She had not done so. I had to believe, then, that she was in this for more than dinner and dancing herself. It occurred to me, of course, that I could be misreading the whole thing and that she had nothing of any particular importance to hide. But she had set this thing up herself through her own mystery. I had no alternative but to presume the worst.

  "Tough" for tit is also "tough" for tat.

  I was going straight for her head.

  "Pssst. Who is that? Isn't that.. .7'

  "Morgan Fairchild. Very pretty."

  "Yes. Who's the gorgeous hunk with her?"

  "Beats me. Next table over, though, to...your left..."

  "Oh! The Dereks!"

  "Yeh. Would you share an artichoke with me?"

  "I suppose it would be very gauche to ask for autographs in here."

  "Best way to find the sidewalk in a hurry. The artichokes here are very special. Would you like to... as an appetizer?"

  "Oh. Sure. Sorry. I guess, uh...would you recommend the lobster?"

  "Only if you're willing to look him in the eye first. They'll take you over there and make you pick one out of the tank."

  "Brrrrrr. Well, maybe I'll try..."

  One and one are two. Two and two are four. Three and...

  "Isn't that the guy—straight ahead of you—plays the doctor on—"

  "Yes! MacDonald Carey! He looks great! Doesn't he?"

  "Handsome mm, yes."

  "Well, let's see..."

  Twelve and twelve are twenty-four. Twenty-four and twenty-four are forty-eight. Forty-eight and forty-eight—beautiful eyes—ninety-six. Ninety—wonder if he's still— sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two—bet he is—sixty-four and sixty-four—maybe the sirloin tips—no prices on this menu —twelve, twelve, the twelve—oops, one and one are two— the twelve—two and two are tips, sirloin tips, the twelve—

  "Guess I'll have the sirloin tips."

  Three and three are twelve. Four and four are twelve. Stop that. Five and five are ten. Ten and ten...

  "Do you watch Miami Vice? Recognize the guy over there?"

  Oh, my God! It is him!

  "No, I... what do you think of the tips?"

  "Good choice. I'll go with that too. Nice guy. Played tennis with him once, pro-am."

  "Do you mingle a lot with the Hollywood crowd?"

  "Not exactly a crowd anymore. I've done some work in the community. Generally a nice bunch. Of course, there's always the asshole, in any group."

  "Yes, I suppose..."

  Twelve and twelve are twelve, the twelve, the ten and ten are the twelve and twelve, assholes everywhere, twelve assholes everywhere, pricks and pricks are twelve, pricks everywhere, lurking under tables everywhere, ha ha, how many pricks are under cover here? Six and six are twelve, eight and eight are twelve, oh, dear; one and one are two...

  "Ashton, what are you doing?"

  "I said the beef tips too."

  "No, I—you know what—get the hell out of my head—that is despicable, that is..."

  So what the hell. I'd gotten enough, anyway, for the moment. Twelve and twelve are not twelve.

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Twelve

  There is an old and persistent legend or myth dating from man's antiquity to the effect that a certain small and secret group of individuals are entrusted with a body of esoteric knowledge and incredible power. The legend takes many forms and is repeated in one form or another throughout all earthly cultures.

  I first heard of The Twelve at a naval war college, in a lecture by a visiting professor from Switzerland. This was, believe it or not, a lecture on Strategic Studies—or, more correctly, dealing with the history of military strategy. The professor brought up the Emperor Asoka, circa 275 b.c., grandson of the unifier of India. A devout convert to Buddhism, Asoka was sickened by the bloodiness of military conquest. It was his conviction that, anyway, the only worthwhile conquest was that of the heart. He launched a campaign to spread Buddhism throughout his empire and to end forever the horrors of warfare. He also decreed total secrecy in all areas of natural science, convinced that this was the only way to prevent mankind from inflicting evil via scientific achievement. This was, please note, more than two thousand years before atomic weaponry. And who knows?—maybe Asoka was one factor in the slow pace of technological development for all those centuries—incredibly slow-paced, actually, relative to the explosion of technology during this century.

  According to this story, Asoka founded the powerful secret society known as The Nine Unknown Men. These men were scientists, the most gifted and enlightened of their day. They were charged by Asoka with the responsibility of developing scientific understanding, to guard that knowledge, and to use it only for the greater benefit of mankind. Apparently there was a built-in mechanism for succession, each charged also with the responsibility to choose and train his own replacement. It has been suggested that the lamas of Tibet today represent this tradition, their science masked by religious forms as has been the custom since Asoka.

  But the professor from Switzerland had a scenario of his own. It was his thesis that the Nine have become Twelve as of the early Christian era, and that these Twelve (and their successors in each age) managed to keep a tight rein on turbulent humankind for nineteen centuries. The Twelve, according to my professor, were responsible for the decline of the wicked Roman Empire; they brought on the Dark Ages as a cool-down mechanism, then the closely controlled scientific pragmatism and creative flowering that ushered in the industrial age. They founded the United States of America. They are not responsible fo
r the atomic age; this was a screwup; it was not supposed to happen; The Twelve lost control.

  But their influence remains very strong. They possess incredible wealth and fantastic power. They live scattered about, among us, like us. One may be an academician, another an industrialist, still another a head of state. Some may be female. All have surpassing knowledge in a particular field. It is possible that one or all have by now mastered the secrets of perfect health and immortality. In the tradition established by Asoka, however, all knowledge is carefully guarded and delicately meted out.

  So much for the professor from Switzerland. He was not really buying all of that himself but using it to illustrate his thesis on the history of strategic deterrence.

  But the story kept popping up after that, a bit different in several of its parts now and then but basically the same story, and usually related by persons who do not normally deal in nonsense. I heard it lately at Big Sur, and a few days later at Virginia Beach.

  And now it had reared its head inside the guarded mind of Alison Saunders, kept popping out of her stream of protective junk. It is impossible to transcribe coloration of an unuttered thought. As I was experiencing this, the lurking Twelve came into the stream in a totally different hue than the other numbers. Mathematical concepts and formulations are typically mentalized in negative color. That is, the number six, representing no more than an unrelated quantity of something, is an emotionless formulation, while six times, denoting, say, that many continuous orgasms, comes with vivid color.

  Alison's Twelve was riotiously commanding, a power concept of about the same magnitude as God to the devout or ground zero at the Pentagon, possessing much more significance than the literal transcription.

  I knew I was on to something.

  I just did not know exactly what that was.

  We dined separately at the same table. I presume that Alison was continuing to concentrate on her mental junk. I simply allowed my own mind to roam free, going back over and over again the events of the past few days, trying to pull the pieces together and trying also to develop some plan of attack upon the mystery.