He swung around in his chair to face her. "Young woman, someone has
told you how much the Lodge is interested in precognition. You
wouldn't walk in here claiming the power if you didn't know we want to
find it, and rarely can. But you certainly came ill-prepared. Going to
marry Lefty, eh? Why, you can't predict the right time!" He banged his
fist on the big slab of walnut. "You're a fake!" he said.
"I _ain't_ a fake!" Pheola protested. "We _will_ get married!"
"Drag her out, Lefty," Maragon said wearily, with a limp wave of his
hand.
"Come on, Pheola," I said, taking her arm with my right hand. I saw no
point talking with him any further.
"Lefty!" Maragon exclaimed.
"Yes?"
"You used your right arm! You can't _move_ it!"
"I can now," I told the old goat with relish. "Pheola told you she was
a healer. Well, she healed me a ... a couple days ago!"
He went for the jugular: "Have you ever done anything like that
before, Pheola?" he demanded.
[Illustration]
"Mostly small ailin'," she said, squinting and backing away from his
desk defensively. "Never nothin' as big as findin' the weak spot in
Billy Joe's haid. But I _told_ you I had the power of prophecy and the
gift of healin'."
I suppose her degree of humility decided him. "She can stay," Maragon
said. "Look into this healing thing, Lefty. But, for the love of Mike,
don't waste time with her precognition."
Pheola moaned, then keened, and waved her hands in front of her face,
as if to ward off a swarm of bees. "My healin' won't do you much good,
you nasty old man!" she said in a shrill voice. "You'll git a pain,
_sich_ a pain," she insisted, pressing her hand to her heart. "It will
like to kill you, and it nearly will!"
Maragon laughed at her again. "A young witch!" he proclaimed. "I'll
bet you scared half of Posthole County into fits with dark remarks
like that. Take her away, Lefty!"
* * * * *
Pheola didn't break her silence until I showed her into the apartment
adjoining mine in the Chapter House. The Lodge Building is a hundred
stories high, and most of it is devoted to offices that we rent out to
doctors, lawyers and the like. We only use a part of the place--there
just aren't that many Psis around--and save a few floors for
apartments for members permanently assigned, as I am, to Lodge duties.
Pheola stood stiff and unseeing in the apartment, her fists clenched
at her sides, plainly in no shape to appreciate her rooms. They were
in the usual good taste I always associate with a Psi decorator.
"How could I let you down, Billy Joe!" she said to me, as soon as the
door to the corridor had closed behind us.
"Oh, stop it!" I snapped, giving her a shake. "Weren't you ever wrong
in a prophecy before?"
She squinted to see me better. "Does it make you hate me?" she asked.
"Yes, I've been wrong lots of times," she admitted. "But not about
marryin' you. How does he know I'm wrong?"
"He doesn't," I growled. "He just doesn't believe in precognition.
What little we see of it in the Lodge is so erratic that you can't
count it as a proven Psi power."
"Then maybe I _am_ right," she pressed me.
"Not if I can help it," I said sourly. "I'm in no mood to get married.
Mostly I want to give you some advice. O.K.?"
She made cow eyes at me. "You know you can, Billy Joe," she said.
"Well," I snarled, "my first suggestion is that you cut out this
'Billy Joe' stuff. My name is Wally Bupp. You can call me Lefty if you
want to. I'm not your darlin' Billy."
"I tole the truth and you hate me for it!" she said hotly. "I was
afeered of that."
"'Afeered!'" I sneered. "All that corn pone and chitterlin's dialect!
You can cut that out, too, can't you? Wasn't that just part of your
local color?"
"Sort of," she admitted, switching to the neutral American dialect.
"Yes, I can cut that out, too, Lefty."
"Good. I'm willing to take a couple of chances with that old goat,
because I believe in you. I saw you in action in Nevada, and you sold
me that you have some Psi powers. We'll work on your healing, as
Maragon suggested. But I want to have your precognition tested. Just
keep your mouth shut about it here in the Lodge, do you hear?"
She nodded.
"All right," I said. "I'll have to make some arrangements, or Maragon
will have my scalp. In the meantime, why don't you fix up so we can go
out to dinner?"
She gave me a look of adoration that would have curdled fresh milk.
"Oh, Lefty, I'd love that." And then her face fell. "But I don't have
a thing to wear!"
I don't think she was exactly a moocher. She _didn't_ have anything to
wear, when I thought of it. "Sure," I said more mildly. "Well, that's
the good part of getting some training here. The Lodge will take care
of your needs. Just call the girl on the desk and say you need some
clothes. She'll send somebody over from one of the department stores."
Pheola's eyes grew round. Ordinarily she squinted when she wanted to
see anything. "What should I get?"
"Start from the skin and work out," I told her. "Tell the department
store you'll be working in an office, and that you'll need a couple of
cocktail dresses and wraps for evening, too. Get lots of shoes. O.K.?"
Was it ever!
I had an idea that clothes would be quite a change for Pheola. I had
met her only three days before, in a Nevada gambling house. She'd made
for me like a lode-star, called me her Billy Joe and announced that I
would be her next husband. I'll tell you, that was a shocker. I'm not
about to marry anybody. She was as tall as I was, which isn't so very
much for a man, skinny to the point of emaciation, wearing a
"borrowed" dress that didn't fit, and had that unmistakable slatternly
look that you associate with white trash. On top of that, she was vain
enough about her bucktoothed and pointed-nose features to keep her
glasses in her purse, and as a result she went around peering at you
from a distance of eight inches to make sure you were the right guy.
But she had Psi powers. She had been hot as a firecracker predicting
the roll of dice on the gambling tables, the very dice that I was
tipping with telekinesis. Much more important to me personally, she
had announced that she was a healer, and on my dare had "laid hands"
on me, and brought my dead right arm to life.
My obligation as a Lodge official was to bring her to the Manhattan
Chapter for measurement and training, no matter what the Grand Master
felt about the reality of her powers of precognition. Maragon had been
about as obstreperous as I had figured. We have a lot of trouble
working together, probably because he resents my TK powers. He's good
at it, but I'm a good deal better. That's why I'm a Thirty-third
Degree member of the Lodge.
* * * * *
Leaving Pheola's new home, I went next door to my own apartment and
checked in by phone with Memorial Hospital. Fortunately, I was not on
call, and could take a few steps to find out how much PC Pheola really
had. I went down to the forty-third floor, where we have our
laboratories, and let myself into the data-processing center.
They don't like me to do that. That place is under full temperature
and humidity control, and every time an outsider barges in the whole
system does nip-ups.
Norty Baskins came scurrying away from a card sorter. "What's this!"
he exclaimed. "Oh, it's you, Lefty." His face went solemn with his
effort, and I felt a twinge in my ear lobe. I returned the grip,
tweaking his ear the same way. He began to smile, realizing that I had
felt his lift and was returning it.
"You shouldn't be in here, Lefty," he said. "You know the rules."
"And I know this is the time to break them, Norty," I said. "I've got
something really rare for you."
"Rare?"
"This time I've really got one," I insisted. "A precog who can call
things with pin-point accuracy."
"Not again, Lefty," he said, disgusted. "Aren't you getting a little
tired of striking out on that prediction? You've brought half a dozen
flops in here in the last year."
"Not Pheola," I said. "Listen, Norty, I want this girl measured."
"I thought you said she was pin-point accurate," he sneered. "And what
does Maragon say?"
I waved a hand at him and walked over to sit on one of the lab stools.
He went to the sorter and pulled cards from the bins, joggling them up
into one solid stack that he put back in the hopper. But he did not
press the "start" button.
"You know, Maragon," I told him. "This girl is hot, and then she's
cold. But there is so much accuracy when she's right that I think
there's some future to training her. What I want out of you is a
measurement of how great her accuracy is."
Norty snorted. "When Maragon doesn't believe it?" he said. "No
thanks." He started the card sorter, filling the room with its
clatter.
I drew a pair of dice from my pocket. I'm never without the ivories.
They are the original instruments of my TK skill. That's how Maragon
found me, unconsciously tipping dice in an alley crap game. I threw
them out on the table next to the sorter, when the cards had gone
through and it fell silent. They came up with a four-three natural.
"Maragon!" I snapped. "You know he doesn't think enough of _your_ TK
to have your training extended. Well, you and I both know we have done
wonders for your grip. Just because he's Grand Master doesn't make him
right all the time. I want you to test this girl, and I think she has
as much right to the facts as you have to the training I've been
giving you under the table all these months!"
"Blackmail," he said sadly. "Extortion!"
"So I'm extorting some work out of you," I agreed. "The only question
is whether you will pay."
"What do you want?" Baskins asked glumly.
"I want you to make this woman predict a series, a number of series,
and I want you to use your computers here to tell me on what basis her
accuracy varies. You can do that, can't you?"
He nodded, staring at the dice on the table. "If I wasn't so sure you
can help me develop my TK, Lefty," he said, "I'd never do this. All
right, sneak her down here and I'll get her to PC some weather
information for a month or so."
"Weather?" I said. "Why the weather?"
"You'll see when I show the results," he said. "Roll those dice again.
I swear I felt your lift that last time."
* * * * *
I made a few other calls around the building to catch up on what had
been going on while I was in Nevada. Our formal organization is lousy,
because Maragon is a one-man show. You just have to rely on gossip,
what the CV's pick up and what leaks by telepathy, to know all the
internal politics of the Lodge. I wouldn't want you to think that
Psi's are more devious or Machiavellian than normals, but sometimes
they act it.
By the time I reached up to tap on Pheola's door, it opened in front
of me, and a stylishly dressed young lady came out, smiling, with
Pheola standing in the doorway behind her.
"Lefty!" Pheola said happily.
"Is this your fiance?" the girl said to Pheola.
"No!" I said. "I'm her chiropractor, and I'm about to straighten out
some vertebrae in her neck!"
Something about the way I said it made the girl from the department
store scuttle down the corridor. I glared at her back, went into
Pheola's apartment and shut the door.
"What were you telling her?" I started, and then I knew there was no
point to it. I waved an irritated hand and kept on talking.
"When will your clothes be here?"
"Some things for tonight in about an hour," she said meekly. "I got
quite a lot. Was that all right?"
"If you keep shooting off your puss about our getting married, you
won't last long enough to wear them all," I threatened. "Can you find
Room 4307, or will I have to take you down?"
"I can find it if you want me to, Lefty," she said.
I was sick of being her darlin' Billy. "Then find it," I said. "Ask
for Norty. Tell him you are my PC. Do what he tells you. I'll pick you
up around seven o'clock back here. All right?"
"All right."
"And stop telling people we're going to get married!"
She didn't answer that, so I let myself out and went to my own
apartment, sizzling.
* * * * *
The phone was ringing as I came in, and I walked over to press the
"Accept" button. The screen lit up to show me a lined and wrinkled
face framed in scraggling hair streaked with gray.
"Hello, Evaleen," I said to her.
"This is dynamite," she said in a graveyard tone. "In the gym, in
about ten minutes?"
I could feel my eyebrows rise. "Sure," I said, and before I could
foolishly ask her what it was all about, she cut the image.
It isn't that our phones are tapped. Maragon doesn't need that. But in
a building full of telepaths, any conversation is going to be peeped
if you carry it on long enough. And who can keep his mind closed while
he's talking? It's hard enough when you're silent.
I rode directly down to twenty and let myself into the locker room. By
the time I had changed into my gym suit, Evaleen Riley's ten minutes
had elapsed, and I went into the gym.
If she wanted to be careful about our conversation there was no point
going directly to wherever she was working out, so I wandered.
There was the usual dozen or so TK's there practicing with the
weights, as well as twice as many who thought they were TK's trying to
get the milligram weights to wiggle. About half of them were clustered
around one table where a member from one of the other chapters was
showing off by heaving at a two hundred and fifty gram weight. He was
seated in the classic position, his elbows on the table, his fingers
supporting his temples, and was concentrating fiercely on the weight.
He wasn't really up to it. I could see sweat starting from his brow as
I watched him over the heads of the others at the table. Suddenly he
dropped back, exhausted.
"Not tonight, Josephine!" he gasped. The man at his right, another
stranger, chuckled, reached over to touch the weight with his finger
tips and then TK'd it cleanly off the Formica. It was nice work, for a
middleweight.
I looked in at a couple other workouts before wandering over to where
Evaleen sat by herself in a corner. She was concentrating on a series
of pith balls the size of peas that weighed from a tenth of a gram up.
She was either so absorbed in what she was doing, or pretended to be,
that she gave no sign of hearing me come up behind her. One of the
balls before her struggled off the table top, and I could hear her
breath hiss with the effort. Cheating a little, I felt for her lifts
and gave her some help. One after another the balls floated up and
sank back. She was utterly charmed--or pretended to be.
"Great going, Evaleen," I said, but she swore at me in Gaelic, an
affectation, because she comes from Minnesota.
"You'd slip up behind me and help, eh?" she said hollowly.
"Get a touch, Evaleen," I suggested. "Have you tried it?"
"No," she said sullenly. She's good at that. Her dark hair is streaked
with gray. She lets it hang down straight and whacks it off with hedge
shears or something when it bothers her. Her face is lined and
wrinkled far ahead of its time, and I swear, from the color of her
teeth, that she chews betel nut. Somehow or other these PC witches
have to act the part.
"Go ahead," I insisted. "Touch the first ball with the tip of your
finger, Evaleen." I showed her what I meant by leaning over her
shoulder. "That's right. _Now_ lift!"
The pith ball rose smoothly several inches, and she held the lift for
ten seconds or so.
"You were helping," she accused me in her best graveyard tones.
"Never," I said, truthfully. "Don't feel that it's cheating to get
tactile help. I just saw a two hundred fifty gram middleweight over
there at the other table run his fingers down a weight before he
lifted. We all do it. It helps the grip."
[Illustration]
"_You_ never do," she accused me.
"On the big ones, Evaleen, sure I do. I'm a little sneaky about it,
but I usually get a touch. Try a bigger ball."
* * * * *
I looked around the gym while my encouragement helped her. No one was
paying us any special attention, and I saw none of the better known
telepaths in the room. That didn't mean too much, for any number of
the TP's in the Manhattan Chapter had good range.
Evaleen was getting good lifts on the one-gram ball when I slipped her
the question: "You said it was dynamite," I said, and closed my mind
to the thought.
Her lift broke. "I'm worried about the old goat in the penthouse,
Lefty," she said in a low tone. It didn't make any difference. She
might as well have shouted if a TP were peeping her. I took up for her
with the pith balls and had them hopping up and down discreetly, just
as though she were still working at her lifts with my coaching.
"You been life-lining again?" I hazarded, largely because of what
Pheola had said about Maragon's having a heart attack.
"Yes, and he's going to be sick--I feel it very strongly."
"Die?"
"He'll outlive me," she said, more glumly than ever. I knew she could
not predict past the span of her own life.
"And how long is that?" I needled.
"You can count my time in years, but not enough of them," she said,
irritated that I had asked her about her own span. I knew I shouldn't
have said it. She had read her own future and found it wanting. "But
death hovers close in it," she went on. "You know I don't get clear
pictures, Lefty, just a feeling. Death is very, very close. And you
are in it."
"And who else?" I pressed her.
"No one I ever met," she said, telling me another limitation of her
powers.
"Perhaps I can cure that, Evaleen," I said, letting the last ball
drop. More loudly I added: "You get better every day. You could
qualify for the second degree if you can do as well under standardized
conditions."
"Yes," she agreed. "We've talked enough. You will act on it?"
"Oddly," I said, "I already have. You confirm what another PC says.
I'll have you meet her."
"You will not," she said. "I can't stand PC's!"
"Now try that big one," I said, pointing to a small brass weight of
two grams on the table.
She touched it and it lifted. She cried out in pleasure. "That's my
best!"
"You were never that mad when you were lifting, I guess," I said. "Big
emotions make big lifts. Fall in love--you'll do better still."
"First decent argument for getting tangled with one of you men I've
heard yet," she lied. Wild as her looks were, she'd been a favorite
around the Chapter for years.
I patted her on the shoulder and went back to the table where the big
weights were being lifted and showed off for a couple minutes. The
inevitable hour of shop talk and demonstrations followed as soon as
the out-of-towners found out who I was. They don't meet a Thirty-third
every day, and face it, I'm a TK bruiser.
* * * * *
After enjoying some slaps on the back, I took my shower, changed back
into my clothes and went to find Pheola.
She had just finished her shower and had gotten dressed as far as her
slip when she let me in.
"What an awful man!" she greeted me.
"Norty?"
"Yes! He doesn't believe in me a _bit_!"
"I don't either," I grinned. "Remember, you're the fake who says we're
getting married."
"We are, too!" she said, sulking. "He made me tell him a thousand
things," she added, going over to her couch where three dresses were
draped. "What should I wear?"
"The blue one," I said. "Blue-eyed blondes should wear blue." I was
stretching a point. "What did he make you PC?"
"All about the weather," she said, somewhat muffled as she slipped the
dress over her head. I helped her with a zipper and a catch. "About
thirty cities, Lefty. He made me tell him the temperature and the
barometric pressure every hour for about a month! I never did anything
like that before."
"Um-m-m," I said, as she fooled around getting her hair in some sort
of shape with a clip. It was straight hair, and not much could be done
with it. "Were you right, though?"
"Yes," she said, convinced. "I was very sure. Lefty, I _want_ to do
it, for you!"
"Sure," I said. "Let's go."
The Lodge has good food, but you get tired of hanging around with a
bunch of Psi's, so we went on the town and found a good spot for
dinner. What with rubber-necking at the big city, it was some after
ten o'clock before we got back to the Chapter House and rode up to her
apartment.
Pheola was bubbling happily about our evening. As she keyed open her
door, I pushed her into her place and came in with her.
"For a couple who are going to get married," I said, grinning at her,
"it's time we made a little love, Pheola."
She squinted myopically at me, not sure if I were serious. "I thought
you weren't going...." she started.
"I'm not," I assured her. "I'm talking about our special kind of love.
Know what I mean?"
She shook her head doubtfully as I took her wrap and hung it in the
closet.
"Let's face a couple facts," I said, as I led her to the sofa and we
sat down. She squeezed up close to me, so that our knees were
touching. "I believe in you. I've told you that I have seen you
predict the future. More than that, I have felt you cure me. But
precognition is hard to prove, and if we are going to get you into the
Lodge, I think we had better stick to Maragon's advice and work on
your healing powers. It's Maragon you'll have to convince. He's the
last word."
"I know," she said, wriggling her skinny knees against me. "And it
scares me."
* * * * *
"Maybe it should," I said, trying to draw away a bit. "Your life won't
be your own once your have been admitted to one of the degrees. But
life in a Psi society has its compensations.
"Now, look at it this way," I went on. "Whether you meant to or not,
you have staked your reputation as a PC on a prediction that our Grand
Master will suffer a heart attack."
"He _will_!" she cut in.
"Sure. I even know a PC who agrees with you, in a misty sort of way.
Now, think. You're a healer. If you can heal what you predict, it
would make a big hit. Can you?"
Pheola's pointed features focused in a frown. "I'm sorry, Lefty," she
admitted, "I don't even know what a heart attack is."
"That's what I thought," I said, getting up to switch on the hi-fi. It
gave out soft music--lover's music, I guess it was meant to be. "But
I'm a surgeon, you know that, don't you? And I can teach you something
about hearts. The question in my mind is whether you can learn to
handle what you know."
"I don't understand, Lefty," she said, holding out a hand to draw me
back to her side on the sofa. I let her have me back.
"That's what I meant by our kind of love," I grinned at her. "Remember
when you cured my arm the other night? You said you found a weak place
in my head."
"That's what I did, darlin'."
"Can you find that place again, now that it's not weak?"
"Maybe," she decided.
"Try to," I suggested. I swung my feet around on the sofa and lay with
my head in her lap. Pheola bent down over me and stroked my forehead
with her fingers.
"Darlin' Billy!" she whispered. "Yes! _Yes!_ I _can_ feel it!"
I'll say she could. My thrashing right arm pretty near knocked her
buck teeth out, and she retreated from my nervous system.
"You know what you did?" I asked, when the pain inside my head
subsided.
"Not really, Lefty," she admitted.
"You have a kind of telekinesis. It's the lightest touch of all, but
you applied it directly to my nerves. Perhaps you have some
unconscious way of stimulating my synapses, making my nerve centers
fire. I can't figure it out exactly. But my question is this, can you
feel your way all around inside my body?"
She recoiled a little. "That sounds awful," she said.
"I thought you were in love with me," I insisted, looking up at her
down-bent features. "Do you really have reservations about me?"
"No, Lefty. I love all of you."
"All right," I said, reaching up to stroke her cheek in time with the
music. "See if you can feel your way--lightly, now--down the same path
in my left arm."
She could, but not quite as lightly as I would have liked. We played
with it until nearly midnight, by which time she had used what I can
only call her sense of perception to feel her way through a good part
of my nerves and viscera. Some of it was exquisitely painful, but from
observing my flinching when she hurt me, Pheola pretty quickly found
out how to ignore the synapses that fired pain through my brain.
At last I raised my head from her lap. "You're doing great," I said.
"Do you feel tired?"
She shook her head. "Just excited," she breathed. "What a funny way to
get to know you!"
"Then we'll try one more thing, baby," I said. "Come on next door to
my place. There's some stuff over there I want you to work with."
* * * * *
I thought Pheola might boggle about going into my apartment, but she
came readily enough. I guess a PC has some pretty strong notions about
what is going to happen next.
Just to keep the mood the same, I turned on my hi-fi and drew the
loveseat up in front of the desk in my study. Pheola found a way to
sit closer to me than I would have imagined possible while I fished a
set of weights out of a drawer and laid them on the polished teak.
"Here's how it goes," I said to her, and TK'd the weights off the wood
one at a time. Anybody else would have gotten bug-eyed, but Pheola
just squinted to see better. Finally I made the big weight cross the
room, go behind us, and then come back to its place on the desk. She
had never seen a demonstration of trained ability, and to her it was
so much magic.
"You've been doing the same thing, Pheola," I told her as I put an arm
around her shoulder. "Only you've been doing it first to my nerves and
later to my insides. Now let me see you do it to this little ball."
She looked at the little sphere of pith, similar to the ones that
Evaleen Riley had used for practice, but nothing happened.
"I can't feel it," she protested, "It ... It isn't you, Lefty. I'll
never feel anything that isn't _you_!"
"Don't get mystical," I snapped. "You did some healing before you met
me, and I don't suppose you were in love with every one you helped,
were you?"
"Of course not."
"Try again."
"Nothing," she said, and the pith ball did not budge.
"Now watch this," I said, and popped the little ball into my mouth.
"Feel for it," I insisted, pushing it into one cheek where it did not
interfere with my speech.
She closed her eyes. "Where is it?" she demanded. "Did you swallow it,
Lefty?"
"I either swallowed it or I kept it in my mouth," I said. "Feel for
it!"
"There!" she gasped. "It's in your mouth!"
I rolled the piece of pith on to the top surface of my tongue and
opened my mouth so that she could see it. "Agh!" I said, pointing at
my tongue. I gestured again, and her face paled as the little ball
left my tongue and floated in the air before my face. Suddenly her
lift broke and it fell wetly onto my hand, in my lap.
I leaned over, put an arm around behind her neck and kissed her. It
was a most sedate embrace. "There," I said, "that performance alone
will get you into the Lodge. Now do you believe you're a TK?"