Alexa Longford was a good-looking, middle-aged woman whose hair was maybe dyed just a bit too red and who was relying a little too much on her Botox treatments. When she smiled at Nick, her expression stayed strangely enigmatic.
‘What is it you do here exactly?’ Nick asked as they walked to her office, passing by laboratories and messy work cubicles.
She gestured vaguely. ‘The Exmare Institute is devoted to the study of chronobiology in general, but here, in this particular wing, we deal with sleep cycles. We’re especially interested in how sleep patterns may be linked to disease.’ She looked at Nick, her eyebrows raised. ‘Night-time can be perilous, you know.’
‘In what way?’
‘It’s as though the body goes overboard as it tries to defend itself. Fevers spike because the body escalates its defences during darkness and this can lead to inflammation. Another example is the body closing down its airways at night. This keeps out foreign intruders but, as you can imagine, is very dangerous for people with breathing problems, which is why so many asthmatics die at night-time. Most heart attacks and strokes take place in the early morning, but they brew at night. Why? We’re trying to find out if some of these incidents correlate with sleep cycles.’
Nick glimpsed a long, hospital-like corridor through a glass-panelled door. The door had a big forbidding ‘Keep Out’ sign prominently displayed.
Longford noticed his interest. ‘In there we run a lucid dreaming programme where we teach people how to take control of their dreams. Give them the ability to dream the dreams they want to, in effect.’
‘That’s possible?’
‘Oh, yes. Stephen LaBerge managed to induce lucid dreaming under laboratory conditions at Stanford University in the Eighties. Many psychotherapists now teach lucid dreaming to their patients as a way of helping them deal with past traumas.’
She suddenly turned a corner and gestured to an open doorway. ‘In here.’ Nick stepped into an office that was decorated in the determinedly feminine colours of peach and powder pink.
After they had both sat down, she said, ‘You said you’re a journalist and that you’re doing an article on Adrian Ashton.’
‘Yes. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me about him.’
‘I’d rather you talked to me than some of the other people round here. He was not universally loved.’
‘I gathered that. Did you know him well?’
‘We were colleagues, as well as friends.’
‘What did you think of him?’
‘A brilliant mind. Absolutely first-rate.’
‘I detect a “but” in your voice.’
Longford didn’t answer. Pushing a stack of papers neatly to one side of her desk, she said, ‘What exactly is it you want to know about Ash, Mr Duffy?’
‘What was he working on? Why did he leave here on bad terms?’
‘The answer to those two things is probably one and the same.’ Longford paused. ‘Mr Duffy, before we go on, you have to understand one thing. We’re a research facility and the people who work here are scientists. We’re supposed to explore new horizons. But the scientific community is not a lenient one and protocols are rigid. On the one hand, a good scientist is open to anything that comes his way. On the other hand, he should be ruthless about not giving credence to superstition and quackery. Science protects itself by sometimes weeding out new ideas that should probably have been allowed to flourish but, because they deviate so much from the wisdom of the great white fathers, they get rejected. Crucially, they don’t get the grants they need.’
‘The great white fathers?’
‘Newton. Descartes. Darwin. Einstein. De Broglie. Schrodinger. Even in the twenty-first century, their laws and insights still rule the world of biology and classical physics. None of them ever questioned Descartes’s edict that soul, mind and body are separate. But there are scientists out there who disagree. Ash was one of them. Some of his own ideas also jettisoned many of the sacred tenets of Western medicine. That never goes down well with your peers.’
‘Did you agree with his ideas?’
‘Truthfully? I don’t know. But let me put it to you this way: Western medicine is a powerful tool for healing. But it still has not discovered the body’s master computer. We know a great deal about the nuts and bolts of the body—bones, blood, enzymes, hormones. We value the brain and the heart above all else. But Western medicine has yet to discover the key to life itself. We still don’t know why we fall ill. How we think. Why your pinkie develops as a finger and your big toe as a toe even though they share the same genes and proteins. How one cell becomes a fully developed human being. What happens to our consciousness when our bodies die. In other words, what is the organising principle of it all.’
‘And Ashton thought he knew?’
‘He did.’
‘He thought it was chi?’
‘Yes. And he was obsessed with gaining physical control of it. Ash was inspired by Robert Becker’s research on energy medicine and Fritz-Albert Popp’s experiments on biophoton emissions coming from humans. One of the things Popp studied was the kind of light that is present in a person who is severely ill—for example, cancer patients—and in each instance he found that the biophoton emissions were off. They had lost their natural periodic rhythms and coherence. You can imagine the implications this might have for the field of medicine.’
‘And Ashton?’
‘Ash was fascinated by Popp’s studies. Machines have been built that can measure human light emissions, you know, and Ash had his own light emissions studied and his periodic rhythms established. He called them his energy numbers, if I remember correctly. He spent years on this.’
‘And?’ Nick prodded.
‘Well, what excited Ash in particular was that when Popp ran his tests on volunteers, he noted that their light emissions could be correlated by day and night and by week and by month—as though the body followed not only its own biorhythms, but also those of the world. Ash was excited. He interpreted Popp’s research as our energy being in sync with the energy of the world around us. Being Ash, of course, he took the even more extreme view that this energy can be controlled and exchanged.’
‘Exchanged? I don’t follow.’
Longford cocked her head and looked at him quizzically. ‘Ash believed that people can exchange their chi. Your energy can influence mine and my energy can influence yours—for better or for worse.’
‘That sounds very New Age.’
‘Ash looked at it scientifically. His theory was that we are all receivers and transmitters of energy in a quantum world.’
‘Oh, right.’
She smiled faintly. ‘According to quantum physics, once subatomic waves or particles are in contact with each other, the actions of one will always have an impact on the actions of the other one. It doesn’t matter if they separate and it doesn’t matter how far they go in different directions. Physicists found this very upsetting at first, you understand. Even Einstein did not like this long-distance communication—he called it “spooky”. But it has been verified numerous times: the universe has memory. We most certainly do live in an interconnected universe.’
Nick frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand how this relates to people actually being able to exchange their energy with one another.’
Longford sighed. ‘Well, this is where Ash broke ranks with other scientists and why his work was so controversial. Quantum physics, as it is understood today, is considered only relevant to dead matter at the micro-scale and definitely not to human bodies and consciousness. Ashton believed our bodies also operate according to the laws of the quantum world. Why, he asked, should quantum physics only affect the small and the inanimate and not the large and the living? If the particles from which we are made exchange energy and retain memories, why would there be no consequences at the macro-scale?’ Longford looked at Nick as though expecting a response.
‘And this put him at loggerheads with his colleagues?’
‘Well, yes. Ash insisted that quantum theory could also be applied to biology: that human beings are a network of energy fields that interact with our chemical cellular systems. But what really set the cat among the pigeons was Ash’s insistence that we are all plugged into a vast psi-space called the Zero-Point Field, which allows us to interact and exchange our energy, even our consciousness.’
Nick said slowly, ‘I can see that this idea might have created problems for him.’
‘It was bad enough that Ash was going round saying quantum physics has effects in a single human being,’ Longford continued. ‘Imagine his colleagues’ reactions when he suggested connections between humans.’
‘Do you believe in the Zero-Point Field yourself?’
‘Of course.’ Longford nodded emphatically. ‘The Field itself is not a controversial concept. It is merely an infinitely large space filled with energy. Where Ash goes off the rails, according to his peers, is his insistence that the Zero-Point Field provides the scientific explanation for chi and its link to human consciousness and the light shining from our own bodies. Chi, after all, is described by the Chinese as the energy of the universe, connecting to the energy within us. Just as the Zero-Point Field is all-pervasive, so chi is all-pervasive. Ash even insisted that the Zero-Point Field could explain paranormal activities like remote viewing and remote healing.’
Remote healing.
‘Mr Duffy?’
‘I have a friend who claims to be a long-distance healer. She believes she can use her own vital energy to protect another person.’
Longford’s gaze was keen. ‘Ash would have been very interested in your friend. Ash believed there are those among us who are intuitives—people who have a great natural ability to tap into the psi-space. He called them gifted innocents.’
‘So Ash got into trouble because of his theories about psi-space?’
‘And for claiming to have discovered a way to access it.’
‘How?’
‘Through dreams and meditation. What’s more, he claimed he had managed to pull it off.’
‘So he got fired because he was lying?’
‘No—because he was not.’