Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton Page B

dear.
Now that is
Isaac."
    I thought, well shit, so much for exploding
theories. I had been sort of toying with the notion that Isaac
Donaldson and Holden Summerfield could be one and the same person,
that neither of these young ladies was actually married to either.
After all, I knew only what I had been told. They could tell me
anything, for the sake of cover.
    Of course, they could still be doing
that.
    I asked her, "Who played
the title role in the 1930s Hollywood production of Gunga Din ?”
    She said, "Are we playing trivia now?"
    "It's a test," I told her.
    "Okay, I give up. I can see him very clearly
in my mind, but..."
    I said, "Same guy. Sam Jaffe. Many years
before Dr. Zorba."
    She said, "I'll be darned!"
    I said, "Yeah. I'm a little
surprised that you know about Zorba or Gunga Din. I mean, even Zorba is
going back quite a few years."
    "Not on my television," she
declared brightly. "I can see him any morning at three o'clock. And
I watched Gunga Din on videocassette at my last encampment, just
last year. But, gosh—well, you know, I do remember looking at old Gunga and
thinking there was something familiar in the eyes, something
..."
    Yes, that's what was bothering me. Something
in the eyes. I was looking into hers as I asked, "Who is Esau?"
    She blinked. "I introduced you Saturday
night."
    I said. "Yeah. Who is
he?”
    "He's... well he's part of our team."
    "What's he do?"
    "At the moment, for us, he is engaged in
spectroscopic studies."
    "And what are you engaged in?"
    "Living waves."
    "What?"
    "Well...biological energy studies."
    "Living waves sounds better," I told her.
"Let's stick with that. Find any inside me?"
    "You bet I did," she replied soberly.
    "Healthy?"
    “ Terribly."
    "What sort of radiation have I been exposed
to?"
    She hesitated briefly, then: "That kind,
yes."
    Her hands had slowly inched
along beyond my hips and were now pressing rather insistently
against my backside. I was terribly, warmly aware of her growing
pressure at my front side. My towel fell away. She nuzzled my ear
and whispered, " Jesus, Ashton."
    Before I could respond in any way whatever,
she pushed her way clear and hurried out of there without a
backward look.
    I retrieved the towel, tried to make it tent
back around me but it would not.
    I would, I decided, take that cold shower
now.
    I just wished that she'd turned back for one
more look. I wanted to see again if I'd seen what I thought I saw
in those deep, dark eyes.
    Something there, yeah, for sure...something
in the eyes.
    Only then did it register, her final
statement before the crazies started: "That kind, yes."
    What kind, damn it! We'd been talking about radiation and living
waves. That kind!
    I decided to take that back to the shower
with me, too, with "something in the eyes."
    "Living wave" radiation, eh? Fancy that.
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Thirteen: Making Waves
     
    I don't know if I have mentioned, yet, that
I am sort of a scientist myself. The largest problem in my life, I
guess, is that I am "sort of" many things. Guess I just have too
many interests. Never could seem to focus myself into any one
career-slot long enough to become expert In it. Then, too, I never
really felt the financial pressure—that hungry feeling, as some
have expressed it—which sometimes will keep one's nose to a
grindstone. I am fortunate—or unfortunate, however it strikes
you—to have come into a tidy little trust, funded in my behalf
before I was born or even conceived, which takes care of my basic
needs 'til death do us part— and I am not really a greedy person,
have no particular desire to amass a fortune of my own...so what
the hell, I kicked back a long time ago and decided to just let the
world come to me as it would.
    The navy time was my only
long-term commitment to anything—but I was actually set up for that
before my birth, too. It's the Ashton family tradition. Each male
son in the line is born with a silver anchor up his ass, and he can
take it out only upon