Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (24 page)

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 for 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.

Alison would help in that, whether she
wanted to or not. I was sure of that. Her head was apple pie to me.
I could go in whenever I damn well pleased. I knew that now. But I
was still very reluctant to do so. And I was resolved to give her
every chance to come forward on her own.