Free Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton Page A

finishing up here. Take a mirror off the wall—the little
hall mirror will do fine. Set it up on my desk in such a way that
we can study this graph in mirror image."
    She said, "Okay. But I
came in here to tell you ..." She again found her area of interest
on the graphic and again pointed it out to me. "I believe this is a
highway sign."
    I shot it a closely focused look. "You mean
a—?"
    "A route marker. I believe the numerals are
one-five- zero. It is repeated several times."
    “ Highway 150?”
    "Yes. I know it well. Goes through my
favorite place in all the world. Ojai."
    I said, "That's—hell, that's..."
    "In the hills above
Ventura, yes."
    My excitement was growing.
"What's his name, uh ...?"
    "Krishnamurti."
    "That's the one! He has a place there, a
retreat or—"
    "Yes, I've been there," she told me. "I even
met Krishnamurti, shortly before he died."
    Alison went on telling me about her meeting
with the respected mystic, but I really was not listening to her
now. My head was starting to burst with a swirl of kaleidoscoping
visual patterns, and I knew that I was hooked on this case, locked
into it for good or for bad.
    Worse, it seemed that Jane Doe was locked
onto me. Mind to mind, as it were. And she was painting like crazy
in my right cerebral hemisphere.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Twelve: Of Shapes and
Patterns
     
    Alison called in and
arranged for someone to cover for her at the hospital for the day.
We worked on Jane's graphic until ten o'clock. One of the things we
discovered was that the "ideas" presented in this strange form of
writing were not only rendered in reverse image but were also in a
sort of, reverse contrast, if that makes any sense—somewhat like a
photo negative. I tried some computer enhancement on selected
trial areas of the graph and that helped a bit, but it was damned
slow going.
    The large problem was that there was no
linear sense of movement in the "scenes," if you can call them
that. There was no logic to the spatial separation of events. Like,
if you take a comic strip and cut it up into frames, then remove
the borders from the frames and mix them all together without the
speech balloons into a disorganized montage, it would be a bit
difficult to recapture the cartoonist's original idea. Then if you
add to that montage some dream sequences or flashbacks or
whatever, the picture really gets jumbled.
    I felt that I was working with something of
that nature.
    Add to that, then, the problem I was having
with Jane in real time. I kept getting these color bursts in the
head, which I took to be continuing communication from wherever,
and it was very distracting.
    I decided that the best
way to tackle the job, from the crypto-analytical point of view,
would be to assign each element of the montage a computer key,
then try some reassemblies with a random-number generator and look
for correspondences, but I really did not want to put that kind of
time into the puzzle at this point.
    You see, certain elements
had emerged from the jumble—recognizable elements—and I was
experiencing a strong compulsion to pursue those elements. Like,
faces in the crowd. Oh, yes. Many faces were buried in that
kaleidoscope of images. Mine was there. Alison's was. Jim Cochran
was there. All entirely recognizable when the contrasts were
worked out. There was an interesting group portrait in there too.
Sort of a family shot. Starring Jim and Georgia Cochran and Vicky
Victoria.
    Alison, of course, had never had occasion to
meet Cochran's family. She was positive that Jane Doe had never
seen them, either. And she agreed with me that Vicky looked an
awful lot like a young Jane Doe, even in this computer-graphics
rendering.
    So we elected to leave the
crypto-analysis for a more leisurely moment, and we sallied forth
into the real world of space and real time. I have to say, though,
that it took me a few minutes to reorient to that world. It all
seemed different now, somehow. Shapes and patterns took on