I said, "I understand that there was some sort of beam covering only the Palomar area, another in the Caucasus mountains of Russia."
"That is true, yes, if you qualify the term beam as defining a particle stream within definite boundaries. However, these beams are composed of particles at extremely low density. They do not seem to interact with ordinary atmospheric matter in any manner sufficient to announce their presence in our atmosphere. On the other hand..."
I said, "That other hand is..."
"The nature of the particle itself, the jinn. As I said, hardly any interaction whatever with ordinary matter. With biological matter, however—and, in particular, with nerve tissue—the interaction can be quite spectacular, even in the finely diffused form. The interactive rate is in direct proportion to density, though, which is quite on the low side, so that the effect is rather weak. By refocusing the collective energy and thereby effectively raising the density, then, the interactive rate is naturally increased rather dramatically and so is the effect."
I took a shot. "Your new wrinkle with the electron microscope, then, is..."
Esau smiled. "New wrinkle, yes, that is good terminology. Our jinn irradiates the nerve cell from within the cell itself. And it emerges in a state which I like to characterize as 'highly colored.' We can read those color bands. They give a rather interesting account of the processes occurring within the cell from which the jinn emerges."
I guessed, "But you could not use this microscopy anywhere except..."
He said, "Exactly. At our present level of understanding, we cannot produce these particles ourselves. And, of course, we cannot store the free ones in a box and carry them about with us. We can only refocus what is naturally present and—"
I said, "Naturally present?"
He smiled. "Surely you would not wish that I characterize the jinn as supernaturally present."
"But if the beams are intelligently directed..."
"Well," he said, with a look of total dismissal, "there is nothing unintelligent about natural processes. Matter of semantics, I trust."
I did not trust that, at all. And my jury was sort of "hung," once again, on the whole matter. But I definitely was wavering, and tilting toward these people, once again. After all, these guys obviously did not intend to blow up the world. At least not within the next day or two. Surely I could string along for another...
I said to Esau, "There are a number of troubling things on my mind but I guess they can wait, for the moment. I am very disturbed that no one has produced Isaac for my inspection, though obviously he is the center of this program. I am disturbed, also, about Jennifer. There are several questions there. Most notably among them, the book she published twenty-two years ago—at the age, I presume, of eight to ten. And I am disturbed about something I think Holden let drop to me in a conversation awhile ago—something to do with wanting to 'go back' somewhere but failing some sort of qualifications. I would like—"
"Dear Holden," Esau said quietly. "The finest man I have ever known, and that needs no qualification whatever. He has been the very soul of generosity and moral support in this endeavor. All our material needs have been met, thanks to him. He has literally spent a huge fortune these past few months, setting us up, providing the necessary tools and equipment. We would have been lost, utterly lost, without him. But, Ashton..."
"Yes ?”
"Do not invest undue credulity in anything Holden may say."
I said, "He hasn't slipped that far."
"I'm afraid he has. It is regrettable to see such a fine mind become so disarranged, but it does happen and it has happened to Holden."
I said, "I'll just reserve judgment on that, if you don't mind, along with the other items."
He said, "I can understand why you took your little walk. I just hope you can understand that we desperately need your support, especially now, and that you can understand why we wanted another opportunity to recruit you. I gave the Palas severe instructions that they were not to harm you in any way, nor even to place hands upon you. I trust that they obeyed those instructions."
"Oh sure," I replied breezily. "I even bought them a beer. Why am I so important to you, Esau?"
"We need your gift."
I told him, "I don't use it. It uses me. I can't make it happen. I have failed every scientific test ever devised for me. I can't promise that—"
"We think we know how it uses you, Ashton."
That rocked me back, a bit.
My eyes strayed toward the study as I replied to that. "Is that a 'jinn' equation in there?"
He laughed softly. "Oh yes. And quite a bit more. We just don't have the final solution."
"But you think I can help you get it."
"Yes. We are almost positive about that, now."
"Then why don't you just knock me out again and take it away from me?" I inquired lightly.
He said, "I suppose we deserve that. Again, I apologize, for the team as a whole."
"But you did not answer the question."
"We cannot take it from you, Ashton. We need your active cooperation."
I said, "But something is bothering you about that."
"You are quite perceptive. Yes. Something is bothering me."
“And that is...?”
"There is a certain element of danger involved."
"For me?"
"Yes. For you. Perhaps for all of us."
"Do you want me to invoke the djinn for you, Esau?"
He laughed, but not very convincingly.
And that is precisely what he wanted. Yeah, he wanted that.
Chapter Nineteen: Mutant
I told Esau, "I need to use the telephone."
He said, "Certainly," and slid it toward me.
I called Souza's office and told Foster, "It's Ford. Put Souza on, quick."
Foster replied, "Sorry, sir, he is presently un-available."
I said, "Foster, you recognize my voice."
"Yes, sir. But Mr. Souza is presently out of reach."
I told him, "Make every effort to reach him. At the very earliest. Tell him the Code Red was a false alarm. Tell me you understand that."
"Yes sir, I understand, the Code Red is a false alarm."
I said, "This is for real, Foster."
"I understand that, sir."
But I had the feeling that he did not. I told him, "I mean that this cancellation is for real. Greg is to undertake no action, repeat no action, on my behalf. Tell me that you understand that."
"I understand that, sir. No action on your behalf. I will relay the message at the first opportunity."
I said, "It is very important that you do that."
I hung up and slid the phone back to Esau, smiled, told him, "That's to keep the marines off your back. If I know Souza like I think I know Souza... Pain in the butt, sometimes, but a loyal pain in the butt."
Esau said, "Thank you, Ashton," in that strangely ponderous speech.
The elderly Pala woman brought ham and cheese sandwiches, gelatin desserts, coffee. We had lunch right there at the bar, with very little conversation. Esau seemed absorbed in his own thoughts and I had a few of my own to massage.
It was nearing one o'clock on Monday afternoon when Esau took me to Laura's private lab. It was located in one of the small outbuildings and was outfitted with what appeared to be cryogenic equipment. Cryogenics is, literally, the science of cold temperature phenomena, has to do with the liquification of gases such as hydrogen and helium, which reach the liquid state at supercold temperatures.
But Laura was not studying cryogenics. Such equipment, here, was utilized purely as a tool for biological experiments. A number of those appeared to be in progress. Fully encapsulated "culture dishes" lined several shelves and overflowed onto a workbench area.
Esau left me at the door and returned to his own work. Laura took my hand with a warm smile and led me to her "bench," sat me down, produced a thick stack of 8 X 10 glossy photographs, said, humorously, "At least, now,
Ashton, you can prove that you have a brain."
I asked her, "Are these pictures of it?"
"Bits and pieces of it, yes," she replied. "Cerebral cortex area."
Before I looked at that, though, I wanted to know about those other "bits and pieces." I was looking at the culture dishes as I asked her, "They are all still inside my head, I hope."
"Be assured of that," she replied soberly. "The culture studies are all done using fetus specimens."
I blinked at that and asked, "Human fetuses?"
"Yes. The mitotics are much more dynamic at that stage of development, so..."
I asked her, "Where do you get your specimens?"
"From aborted fetuses, Ashton," she explained, rather brusquely, and quickly moved on to another subject. "Now these photographs are—"
But I was hung up back there with those aborted fetuses. "So you have to be right there Johnny-on-the-spot to get dynamic specimens," I pursued it. "These are living cultures, I take it."
"Yes, of course, we are maintaining and encouraging cell replication and studying the process. But if you mean—no, Ashton, really. We are not Johnny-on-the-spot. A commercial lab supplies the flash-frozen specimens. Now these pictures—"
"Somehow that seems downright cold-blooded."
"How else do we progress through science, Ashton?"
I understood the argument. I'd been through it before, inside my own head, many times—not in this particular application but in similar ones—and I'd had to draw certain lines. After all, Dr. Frankenstein had been doing his all for "progress through science." But there were limits, and I'd found mine in lesser trespasses.
Don't get the wrong impression here, though. Laura's laboratory was nothing like Frankenstein's. These were not whole fetuses, not even anything recognizable; it was just a snip here and a snip there, so to speak. Still...
"All entirely legal, I'm sure," I growled.
It burned her. "Of course it's entirely legal! What do you suppose we are running, here? My gosh! Use some objectivity, Ashton. It's waste enough that a life is aborted in the first place. Compound that waste by casting the entire effort into a furnace or dissolving it in acid, or whatever they do with the poor things, and—well, thanks, but I like to think I'm doing something more positive than that!"
Our gazes clashed for a long, silent moment, then I shrugged and told her, "Of course it's more positive. So what are you learning?"
She sat down beside me, riffled the stack of photographs, said, very calmly, "We are learning that the life process is far more magical than the cold heart of science would like to admit. We are learning that the organizing processes appear to be obeying a pattern initially established beyond matter and perhaps even beyond the ordinary concepts of space and time."
"What do you mean," I asked musingly, "by beyond...?"
"Outside of."
I said, "Sheer energy, then."
She said, "Beyond that, even, as we presently understand the term. Energy can be defined as a certain state of space and time."
"This cannot? This...whatever...cannot be... ?"
"In the ordinary concept, no."
I asked, "What would be an extraordinary concept?"
Laura replied, "It can be hypothesized that the life force, whatever it is, is not indigenous to this universe of space and time."
I chewed that for a moment, then observed, "You know what you are saying, don't you? What you are implying?"
She said, "The implications are rather stupendous, yes."
I said, "You are back to special creation."
"In a manner of speaking, I suppose that could be.,."
I said, "Hand it to a Billy Sunday and see what he does with it: You are back in his camp, now. He will say that he has been telling you this all along. God created the heavens and the earth. Presumably, then, God was somewhere outside the thing being created when he did this. You can't climb into your own test tube, can you. So he created this universe and all the things to put inside it. But he was over there, somewhere—outside, somewhere. He created all the living things, saving Adam for last, a special creation into which he blew his own breath, his own very special life force, and put Adam in charge, here."
She said, very quietly, "Yes. I get the picture. But it does not change anything. I have compelling reasons to believe that the life force is not indigenous to this entropic system of expanding space and time."
I pushed the photographs away and told her, "I really do not want to see these, Laura."
She explained, "They are merely microscopic studies of—not actually 'pictures' but representative images of—"
I said, "I know what they are. I don't want to see them."
She showed me a rather bemused smile, said, “A pet superstition, or...?”
"Call it whatever you like," I replied. "I just don't want to become too self-conscious of my mental processes. I have a hard enough time, as it is, trying to..."
After a moment, she said, "Please. Trust me not to laugh at you. Stay open with me."
"I'm staying open," I growled. "And you can laugh all you please. I could tell you a thing or two, Dr. Summerfield, about ordinary concepts of space-time. And you'd laugh like hell at me, I'm sure, forgetting that you'd promised not to."
"Why don't you try me," she suggested soberly.
"It's purely an intellectual concept," I growled.
"What is?"
"Space and time. Space-time."
"Oh,"—softly.
"'Oh' is exactly right. We are, all of us, sitting here in the very lap of a mind-blowing phenomenon. It was not mind-blowing before there were minds to blow, but now that man has come into the scene with his oversized brain—and all that mind power—now, suddenly, it's a-mind-blower. So we try to limit the size of the explosion, we try to find a handle, a tool of some kind, to de-phenomenize the experience. We intellectualize it. In that effort, we squeeze all the magic out and try to reduce the whole thing to a series of mathematical equations. That is what space-time is, and that is all it is."
"But there is an objective world, Ashton."
"Sure there is. And we're trying to understand it. But the world, in itself, is basically incomprehensible. We never touch that world, Laura, except with the mind. Therefore everything perceived is no more than a mental construct, a mental specimen, damn it, of reality. We don't interact with this phenomenon. We simply observe it."
She said, after a moment, "You will note that I am not laughing, Ashton."
I said, after another moment, "What have you observed in my brain cells?"
She replied, "In a word, mutations."
"Great. That's really wonderful, Laura. That explains the psychic angle? I'm a mutant?"
"We are all mutants, Ashton. Thank God for that. Otherwise the world would be populated entirely by amoeba."
"So much, then," I said sourly, "for special creation."
"Oh it is still very special," she assured me. "The process involves complementarity, a whole range of it. 'Mutation' is simply a convenient description of the process. One of your 'intellectual constructs,' say."
I said, "Okay. What sort of mutant am I?"
"We're still working on that. One thing is sure, however. Certain neurons of your cerebral cortex have developed receptors which cannot be correlated with what is known about neurotransmitters in the cortex. I characterize these as mutations simply for want of a better name. But there is something decidedly different about your brain, Ashton. And we believe that we know, now, why your brain interacts with the strange energy we have been studying."
I said, "With the jinn."
Her eyes flared and she replied, "You know about that, then."
I said, "Esau told me. He wants me to 'interact' in some controlled manner, I gather."
She replied, eyes downcast, "Yes. We have devised an interesting experiment."
I said, "Esau also told me that there is an element of danger in that experiment."
"I would say, a very s
mall element."
"What kind of danger?"
She raised those dark eyes to mine as she replied, "There is some small concern about the interaction itself. You mentioned the noise, and the dizziness."
"Yes?"
"From just momentary interaction?"
I said, "Momentary, yes, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it an interaction. A perception, maybe."
She said, "With the jinn, Ashton, all perception is interaction."
"How do you know that?"
"All perception, Ashton, is caused by an excitation within certain nerve tissue, produced by an external source."
I said, "Okay."
"Therefore, perception is interaction. The nerve tissue is sampling its environment. It responds within a very narrow range of possibilities, and usually in direct relationship to the nature of the stimulating force."
"Okay."
"You have already interacted with the jinn. Perhaps you have been doing so, in some finer way, throughout your psychic lifetime. This could account for your ability to receive perception without using the five common senses. But this would be a very fine, let me emphasize that, a particularly fine, interaction, as compared to the particulate stream now being experienced. In the experiment, moreover, we shall be refocusing that stream into a more concentrated target zone."
"My brain."
"Yes."
"Okay. I'll think about that."
"Another factor should be an important part of your consideration. You have every right to know this."
I said, "Okay."
"It is entirely possible that the differences noted in the neurons of your cortex—remember those?—the mutations?"
I said, "Yes, I remember those."
"It is entirely possible that those almost insignificant differences are a direct result of your presence here at Palomar."
"You mean, I wasn't like that before I came here."
"There is that possibility. Since we have no way to correlate the present findings with what obtained last week or last month or last year...well, we can only say, there is that possibility."
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