"The negative has become a positive!" Holden said delightedly.
Laura took his hand and declared, "And we're going to take care of this mismatch, aren't we."
He said, "Bully, ho, bully!" and tears sprang to his eyes.
Jennifer surged to her feet and strode away, left the room.
Isaac watched until she was entirely out of sight, then observed, "She is deeply troubled."
I asked the obvious question. "About what?"
He replied, "About the jinn. What it means. Where it is taking us."
I said, quietly, "You know where it is taking you, Isaac."
He said, as quietly, "Yes. We do, now. And that is the problem."
"Do we," Holden rumbled, "pull the hole back into our anthill? Or do we venture into the great unknown?"
Isaac said, "He means that quite literally. And we must make the decision very quickly, while the option is still there."
I gazed about the quietened room and decided, "But you've already made that decision, haven't you."
He gave me a warm smile and an affectionate pat on the shoulder and replied, 'To use your terminology, Ashton, the decision has made us."
I could see that. Yes. I could see it all around that quietened room.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Turnabout
I went looking for Jennifer and found her in the great room, at the window, staring into the night. The scene was exactly as I had last seen it—the geometric designs, the equipment still in place.
I went up behind her and touched her lightly on the shoulder with my lips. She shivered and said, "Bet you can't guess what I was just thinking about."
I told her, "Turn off the jinn and I'll give it a shot."
"I have been very frightened of you, you know."
"Shouldn't be. I seldom ever leave teeth marks."
"Worse than that, my love. You leave worse than that."
I said, "But that's not why you ran from me at Malibu."
"No. That was a challenge."
"It was?"
"Yes." Our eyes were meeting in the reflective surface of the window. "I decided if you were genuine then you'd find us. If not...who needed you."
I said, "Cold. That is very cold, Jen."
"I needed you, genuine or not. Still do. But, then, your authenticity has been resoundingly established, hasn't it."
“Has it?”
"Yes. You have the jinn."
"Or they have me."
She shivered. "It seems they have us all." Hollow laugh. "Difference between thee and me, my love—you've always known it. Pardon me if it takes me awhile to get used to the idea."
I pointed out, "By whatever name, you know, it's the same force. Same result."
"For you, maybe. Not for me."
"Why not?"
She turned and presented herself to me in a fashion model's pose. "What do you see, Ashton? A mature woman with one foot into her sixties? Hardly! But that Hale seduction story I confided to you happened thirty years ago. You were a mere child, yourself, at the time. My God, Ashton, I was twenty-seven years old and still a virgin! Bride of science, indeed! Well, I'm fifty-seven now and a virgin still, to all practical purposes. Never married, never bore a child, never loved a man so much that it made me ache inside."
I said, "I understand."
"Do you? How could you possibly understand? Wait thirty years, Ashton, then look back and tell me that you understand. How could you possibly understand?"
I shrugged, smiled, and said, "So, maybe I don't."
"No, maybe you don't. This is not a cosmetic job I'm wearing, you know. I'm ovulating again. I am at the very peak of life again. I have a second chance at it. Can you understand that? A second chance! I can do it all again! But, this time, with the benefit of mature viewpoint."
"I think that's great," I told her. "So why all the agonizing...?"
"Oh damn it, Ashton, you know I can't do it again!"
"Why not?"
She turned back to the window, brooding darkly onto the night. After a moment, she quietly declared, "This all means something, doesn't it. It has very deep meaning."
"Life's like that," I said.
"I mean..."
"I know what you mean. What you need to understand, though, is that nothing has changed, not really. Your perceptions may have changed. But the thing being perceived has not changed. Which reality do you want, Jen? Do you want the aching love, the house full of kids? Nothing wrong with that. Take it. And feel blessed. But don't feel damned by any alternative. Take what you need, Jen. Because what you need needs you, also."
"That is very profound, Ashton."
"It's just that kind of world, Jennifer."
She said, "Thank you. I love you. I could be your mother. But I love you."
She was not looking at me, though, not even at my reflection. Her arms were crossed at her chest, feet wide apart, head bent.
I told her, "That's the sweetest thing one person can say to another," and then I got away from there and left her to her own thoughts.
The timing was pretty good on that, too, because Greg Souza was at the front door. He pulled me outside, then into a car, saying, "Damn, it gets cold up here at night."
We lit cigarettes, cracked a window for ventilating the smoke. I asked him, "What's up?"
"Time," he replied.
"What does that mean?"
"I owe you this, because of—and don't ever say that I don't pay my bills. It's no breach, anyway, because I got this indirectly."
"So tell me what you got, Greg."
"This old Indian mission down here at the foot of the mountain..."
"Yeah?"
"It is now a staging area. Soldiers and equipment all over the place."
I said, "Okay. Is this a rerun, Greg? Didn't you already tell me they're declaring a military zone?"
"Yeh. But I told you eight o'clock."
"So now what are you telling me?"
He consulted his wrist, said, "It is now five minutes past two. In fifty-five minutes, a big government jet will land at the air base up by Riverside. It will disgorge a large contingent of civilian and military scientists, whose mission is to lock up everything here—I mean seal it—audit and pack up all the data that has been developed by Donaldson's team, and haul the whole thing back to Washington for analysis—Donaldson and his people included."
I said, "They'll have a hell of a time packing up the jinn."
He said, "The what?"
"Private joke," I said. "I take it our scientists have no vote in the matter."
"You take it right. No more vote than any other draftee."
"Like that, eh?'
"Yeh, exactly like that. And they're not waiting for eight o'clock. They'll be coming here by choppers from Riverside. Soooo...I figure, what with the usual milling around and all on the ground at Riverside, maybe an hour. They could be here by four. So if you would like to avoid all that..."
I said, "They'd take me, too?"
"Hey, you're on my list, pal. But who's to say what they'll think if they find you cozying up, here. They might decide to just, uh, what the hell, debrief you too."
I said, "Okay. Thanks, Greg."
"I'll be right out here somewhere. Keeping things in sight. You know. So, when you're ready... Just present yourself. I'll come collect you."
"I'll want my car."
"Give me the keys. I'll move it. I have a hunch nothing will move out of that gate after these guys arrive. Pentagon bunch. You know them."
Yes, I knew them. Had been one myself, once, as had Souza. We both knew them.
I gave him the keys and told him, "Be gentle, please."
He chuckled. "Yeh, I know, she bruises easy."
I told him, "We were wrong about Jennifer Harrel, though."
"Yeh?"
"Yeah. It will seem crazy but it's not. She's who she says she is. And I'm not so sure I want to miss any of this, Greg. I want to see some Pentagon faces when they know what I know."
&
nbsp; "What is this you know?"
I gave him a long look, then told him, "Naw, naw, you'd never believe it."
"Hey, come on, don't do this to me, Ash."
But I was doing it to him. And happily. I stepped out of the car and closed the door tightly behind me.
Everyone, now and then, has to pay his tab. Scenario Souza was now even.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Jinnesis
I had better explain a couple of things before you get the idea I'm doing to you what I did to Souza. What exactly are the jinn and what kind of bull is this about the fountain of youth and all that.
Let me assure you, first, that it's no bull. These people were actually "rolled back" in biological time to a moment when their élan, or life force, was at its most vigorous. But note that I said "biological" time, not calendrical. They did not lose the years, or the experience, or anything whatever in real time. What they lost was biological decay.
How account for that?
Well, I am shooting in the dark again—and this is no easy explanation, at best. It has to do with what life really is and what a living cell really is and how life itself asserts domain in an entropic reality. If that sounds like double-talk, I'm sorry. I will try to make the talk as singular as possible...but you will have to bear with me, once again, while I discuss these very singular ideas.
First of all, etropy. The word was coined by a nineteenth-century German physicist, man named Clausius, to describe a thermodynamic principle in nature: the observation that a certain amount of energy is unavailable for useful work in any system undergoing change. The universe itself is such a system, and it has been postulated and experimentally demonstrated that entropy (disorder; useless work) always increases and available energy always diminishes at a steady rate in our physical reality. What this means, essentially, is that our universe is steadily decaying and has been doing so since the big bang which supposedly began our race through space and time. There will come a time when it all runs down, when there is no further energy available for useful work—such as star-building and the formation of dynamic matter. Our entropic reality, then, is a dying universe in which the natural tendency is toward further and further disorder.
Upon this scene strides man, carried on the back of countless generations of other life forms from the amoeba to protoman. The miracle of life is that it is here, at all. Life gathers together, unto itself, the energetic particles of a decaying universe and infuses them with purposeful activity. That is a powerful idea. Even the lowly amoeba is a majestic miracle of purposeful activity when considered in company with a band of lifeless molecules. The molecules are steadily decaying and giving up energy while the amoeba absorbs that energy and grows with it.
Still with me?
Consider, then, that the amoeba is built of essentially the same particles of matter that built the lifeless molecules. They all started together in a star, somewhere, the erupting product of nuclear fusion and the building of complicated atoms, flung out into cold black space to drift and coagulate into congealing lumps of matter which somehow in time found a space for itself in orbit around the star that built it—and the same debris that built the decaying molecular planet built also in its dust—or vapors, whatever pleases most—a vehicle by which quite another force, not encountered in any free form anywhere in creation, began purposeful activity.
That is what life is. And that is how, to the best of human understanding, life began on this planet.
That understanding, however, is woefully inadequate at the present stage to answer the deeper questions about life. It does not answer, nor attempt to answer, even, the question of how "purposeful activity" arose in a lump of lifeless matter. Most scientists today would avoid the question by saying it is not in the province of science to answer such questions. That is pure bullshit. It most definitely is within the purvey and the province of science to ask as well as to answer every question bearing on the nature of this reality we all inhabit. So don't let them get away with that.
One scientist who did not try to get away with it was the guy I mentioned earlier, the late astrophysicist Gustaf Stromberg. It is a pity that this man did not have access to recent findings in the still-infant science of microbiology. The postulates he did come up with, while microbiology was still a primitive science, would have been Nobel material had he not been so far ahead of his time. As it was, he was largely ignored or pooh-poohed by his contemporaries, who perhaps were embarrassed by this scientific lapse into what surely was regarded as mysticism.
Well, maybe that isn't fair. Einstein himself wrote a glowing cover blurb for one of Stromberg's books, The Soul of the Universe, in which he sets forth a brilliant theory of life processes.
Stromberg, you see, though an astrophysicist, apparently became intrigued by what was happening in microbiology during the second quarter of this century. And he was fascinated by the research being done into basic life processes, particularly that having to do with the embryonic development of a living creature, or embryogenesis. Considerable spade-work had already been done by various eminent biologists, including De Beer and Huxley, to show that embryonic development occurs within an "organizing field," and the German biologist Gurwitsch had published a study in 1922 in which he stated, "The place of the embryonal formative process is a field (in the usage of the physicists) the boundaries of which, in general, do not coincide with those of the embryo but surpass them. Embryogenesis, in other words, comes to pass inside of the field. What is given to us as a living system would consist of the visible embryo (or egg, respectively) and a field. The question is how the field itself evolves during the development of the embryo."
Which brings us full circle back to the jinn.
Gurwitsch's "field" (in the usage of the physicists) is an electromagnetic field and it posits the existence of "an organizing field" of electromagnetic energy in which the embryo is embedded.
Stromberg envisioned "living wave systems" which he christened—are you ready for this?—genii. It is patently unfair to do so, but I will try to sum up, for quick consumption here, Stromberg's conclusions by quoting a single paragraph from his book, Soul of the Universe:
"Matter and life and consciousness have their 'roots' in a world beyond space and time. They emerge into the physical world at certain well-defined points or sources from which they expand in the form of guiding fields with space and time properties. Some of the sources can be identified with material particles, and others with the living elements responsible for organization and purposeful activities. Some of them exist in our brain as neurons, and some of them have a very intimate and special association with their ultimate origin. They are the roots of our consciousness and the sources of all our knowledge."
Mr. Stromberg was describing, I believe, the jinn, although his own terminology was genii.
I also believe, however, that Stromberg's genii were in a high degree of organization, since he was speaking of embryonic life fields, which would presuppose greatly specialized and sophisticated living systems.
Our jinn are not quite in that category, as you shall see.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Adventure Begins
The cleanup had begun, in the study. Isaac was erasing the chalk marks from the blackboard. Others were rounding up computer prints and stuffing them into boxes which, in turn, were being carried away by Pala braves. Books were being carefully returned to library shelves. Holden stood to one side, absently watching the activity, now and then leaping to assist a Pala position a heavy box in his arms.
I watched Holden for a few minutes, wondering about that delighted and delightful old man and trying to picture him as he would have looked fifty years earlier, decided he was a hell of a man at any age.
Funny, you know, how you can project a "process" forward or backward in time and still identify the result of it. Life appears to be a process. A process of what, I can't say—but it seems that all of us begin as a gleam in our father's eye and then something inexorable takes over to proj
ect us into the matrices of space-time and then to keep us moving through a flow of experience from which we may never withdraw until it is time to escape space-time. That which occurs between gleam and withdrawal is a process of some sort, meaningful work lending itself to purposeful activity in a process conceived by a far greater intelligence than mine.
Holden had said that we take it with us, all of it—and I was wondering what it was that he would be taking with him, what net result of his own personal processing. Suppose that he was bringing it to me and that I existed in that other world, somewhere outside space and time: what would be the gift from Holden that could be built nowhere but here? Joy, perhaps, delight, a rare appreciation for experiential magic, a sense of generosity, a sense of purpose, a sense of...
Yes, senses of things, not the things themselves.
So...was that what "life" was processing? If life had come to the space-time universe to find something of value which could not be built in that other universe, could sensory experience be what it is all about? And what was being built behind the matrices from these space-time processes? What would Holden bring as a gift of value to that endeavor? He'd called this earth a crucible. So what had he built, here, of his own life processes, for that other world?
I was just wondering, with no expectation of finding an answer. But maybe I found one, just the same. Because when Holden spotted me standing there, and turned to me with that delighted grin and hurried to me with that boundless enthusiasm—at the age of seventy-five, no less—I found myself responding in kind and I knew what it was that men like Holden built for that other world. And, yes, in his case, one plus one most certainly equals infinity. If I ran that other world, I would not shut this fellow down, not ever.
"The adventure begins, Ashton," he announced with a delighted shuffle of eyebrows.
It had begun quite a bit earlier, for me, and I was not sure I could take much more, but I told him, "That's bully."
"Yes, damn right it's bully." He hugged me and I hugged him back without a trace of embarrassment. "See here, my friend," he said, after the embrace, "I have been authorized to invite you to stay with us. It was a unanimous vote. We'd all like you to be one of us."
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