"John Dalmas - The Puppet Master" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

was a lot different than anything she’d done before, but she had the right attitude—she was a skeptic who liked a
challenge. And it seemed to me she had the tools.
Then, independent of that, I went to Pasadena and hired a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Cal Tech, to check
the same stuff from the viewpoint of an astronomer. I’d met him at Carlos’ place that summer, at supper. He was
a friend of Carlos’ son, Keith. It seemed to me he’d be reasonably open-minded. He was an ex-member of the
“New Gnus”—the Church of the New Gnosis—and you had to be damned flexible to even consider that one.
I also visited the Santa Monica High School library and looked through the 1968 and ’69 yearbooks. I got a
list of students who might have been personal friends of Aldon Ashley, kids who’d been in the same student
activities. Then I did essentially the same things with the UCLA yearbook for 1973. After that it was back to the
State Data Center for locations and phone numbers—the drudge work of investigation. Nearly half the people I
was interested in had died in the plagues of ’99 and 2000, but phone calls still got some information.
The most productive was a friend of both his high school and college days, who still exchanged
Christmas/Hanukkah letters with him. They’d see each other every five or ten years. The guy lives in
Minneapolis, so I didn’t talk to him eyeball to eyeball, but a telephone call was useful.
For one thing, I learned why Aldon Ashley had changed his name, and there was nothing discreditable about
it. The same weekend he’d graduated from UCLA, he’d gotten in some kind of fuss with his sister-in-law, whom
this guy characterized as a real bitch. Eldon, Ashkenazi’s twin, got upset listening to it, and left to drive around.
And smoke dope, something Eldon was into. He ended up losing an argument with an overpass abutment, which
is how he became a brain-damaged cripple.
The sister-in-law told their father that the reason Eldon had done this was, Aldon had insulted him. And for
whatever reason, the father believed this, and raised hell with Aldon. Told him it was his fault his brother’s life
was ruined. Apparently overlooking the daughter-in-law, the dope, and Eldon’s decision to drive recklessly.
So Aldon left home, and that summer changed his name. Something his father wouldn’t learn about for years,
the break was that complete. When Aldon’s grandfather was young, he’d resigned from being Jewish, and
changed his name to Ashley. Aldon, as a sort of resignation from being his father’s son, had switched back to
something about as Jewish as he could find. He even learned to speak some Yiddish. It was his Methodist
mother, though, who secretly helped him through grad school at Arizona. She’d inherited money of her own.
All of which was interesting, but didn’t seem to lead anywhere. It occurred to me that maybe I should write
that article about Ashkenazi, or a whole damned biography. Make a truthful man of myself.
Something else Ashkenazi’s buddy gave me was the name of a woman Ashkenazi had gone with for years, in
their middle age. Again the Data Center gave me a location and phone number. After setting up an appointment,
I took a short airbus hop down the coast to Oceanside, rented a car, and interviewed her in person.
They’d dated for several years, she said, and she’d liked him a lot. But she liked to travel and entertain, and
had money of her own. While Aldon liked to stay home, read, walk, and play with his computer. “Arthur’s idea
of a night out,” she told me, “was to take his portable telescope and we’d drive up to Pine Mountain Summit, in
the Sierra Madre above Ojai. To look at stars. Our most typical dates were pleasant drives along the coast,
stopping to walk on the beach. Then have a nice meal at some expensive restaurant, followed by a movie.”
Which she’d enjoyed, she said, but they weren’t enough. She’d ended up marrying a widower who also liked
to travel and entertain.
She also told me about Ashkenazi setting up a trust fund for his brother, with his hostile sister-in-law as
payee. Something I’d already verified through the Data Center. Ashkenazi might or might not hold grudges, but
apparently he could set them aside when it seemed right to him. A mensch all right. I was getting to like him
better all the time, and Pasco less.
I also talked to a guy who’d known him pretty well in grad school at the University of Arizona. The scene
there was a set of grad students with a lot of attention on the problems of getting jobs once they graduated.
People who spent so much time on their studies and assistantship duties, they’d hardly had any left for social life.
Aldon never did get a job in astronomy. But in the process of getting his degrees, he’d gotten well trained in
math, statistical analysis, and computers. So he took a job with a Santa Monica firm called Spectronics. Within
two years he was an independent software consultant and troubleshooter, and built a successful business.
Meanwhile investing. Successfully. Another interview with the Minneapolis buddy got me the information that