Free Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton

appetizers: "Major premise, all fire engines
are red; minor premise, Russians are reds; therefore...
?"
    Pierre the Lunatic flared his eyes as he
declared, "The major premise is flawed. Not all fire engines are
red."
    "Used to be," insisted John. "So backdate
the conclusion."
    Karl the Magnificent guffawed and decided,
"Therefore all firemen are communists."
    "Excellent reasoning," congratulated Hilary
the Fanatic.
    "Not all communists are firemen!" squealed
Catherine the Impudent, for another conclusion.
    "Bravo!" said Hilary, applauding.
    But John frowned and said,
"No, no; that won't do. You must reason from the major to the minor
to produce the conclusion."
    Catherine screwed her face
up and burst forth with another gleeful try: "All reds are great
in bed!"
    "No, no," John protested. "You don't have
the right—"
    "I like the way she does it," Hilary
protested.
    'Try it on your noble
divinities, then," John suggested. "Major, All is God; minor, God
is Love; therefore...?"
    "All is love," said Hilary quickly.
    "Oh no, no no—you have to do it Catherine's
way," John insisted.
    She said brightly, "God is
great in bed?'
    "Jesus Christ!" said the priest.
    "Him, too?" the whore asked, hopeful.
    "I think I am going to throw up," said
Rosary the Nun.
    See? This is the cast of
characters at Pointe House. The piano player did not come in to
dinner, so I presumed that he was one of the shadow people like Hai
Tsu and her helpers.
    It was a most revealing
dinner. We had escargot and artichokes, then vichyssoise and tough
bread, later squab and mint jelly and something I was told was lamb fetus and
fresh raw garden vegetables; after that sherbets and spumone and
cannoli, then brandy and coffee—altogether a total debauchery of
the taste buds and distender of intestinal boundaries. But the
revelations came from the diners themselves. It was, as I said, a
nutty bunch—but they were having fun, and I tumbled to the fact
very quickly that these were brilliant personalities, one and
all.
    The piano player came in
after dessert. He had brandy and a cigar with us. I learned later
that he never ate with the others, but he was the most brilliant of
all. He held me spellbound for twenty minutes while discussing the
nature of nature with the chemist and the engineer, all the while
playing at syllogisms with the logician and naughty repartee with
the whore.
    His name was Valentinius...or whatever. His
friends just called him Val—and that was good enough for me
too.
    But I suspected that he was really St.
Germain. And I was beginning to understand Valory's problems with
names.
     
    I doubt that I have ever
had such a pleasant evening as that one at Pointe House. The
conversations were both stimulating and enthralling and the range
of interests was literally unbounded. We talked history and
physics and art and politics, metaphysics and magic and human
psychology, architecture and plumbing and ecology and geophysics,
and on and on with one subject blending into another without pause
or jumps—the theory of music drifting naturally into a discussion
of I Ching , and
that into Confucianism en route to cosmology and Indeterminancy,
then back to Renaissance art and monarchy and classical philosophy
and on and on.
    The scope of wisdom displayed was always
superior and often astonishing. These people were dropping names
like Hollywood agents and inside info like congressional aides;
like, "No no, Beethoven understood perfectly well that..."
    “ Of course the conflict
with Robespierre was simply due to...”
    "He couldn't have possibly understood plate
tectonics. Good lord, even Newton thought..."
    "Now Brahe,
see... that one,
see, would have made a fine court astrologer, but..."
    “ Of course they were not
mad! Was Dali mad when he...?”
    Not sophomoric either—no pedantic posturing
or empty displays of learning—these people were dissecting the meat
and potatoes of life, and each was a chef with a surgeon's
scalpel.
    Later we gathered around the