"It's not that awful," I said. "A lot of Psi's can do it."
"You _kissed_ me!" she said, paying no attention to my question.
"Sure," I agreed. "And you managed your first lift." I picked the
pith ball up in my fingers, showed it to her, and laid it on my palm.
"Feel my hand first," I suggested. "Then lift it over onto the desk."
She looked, wild-eyed, at the pith, shaking her head.
"I'll kiss you again," I suggested.
The little ball came away from my palm, floated erratically around,
crossed over to my desk and dropped with a soft smack to the teak. She
came to me like a tigress. I don't know why I expected a repetition of
our first innocent kiss--I knew she had been married once.
I claim good marks for getting her back to her own apartment
immediately.
* * * * *
For the balance of the week I saw very little of Pheola during the
day. The hospital kept me busy with TK surgery, and I was practicing
scalpel work with my newly-strong right arm, now that I had two hands
to use. I'd be something more than a TK surgeon yet.
Pheola had a couple more sneaky sessions with Norty Baskins in the
data-processing center, but for most of the time, she told me, she
wandered around the part of the building the Lodge had retained for
its own uses, meeting Psi's of various powers and more or less soaking
up the flavor of life in the Manhattan Chapter. In the evenings we
found a new place for dinner each night, and then came back to her
place or mine to practice with the weights. Pheola would never be the
bruiser that I was--so very few are--but she worked her grip up to
several grams, which is quite respectable.
By that time I felt she was ready for a course of sprouts in the human
heart. I used my drag at the hospital to bring her over with me for a
cram course. We had a plastic model of a heart there, about four times
life size, that was built in demountable layers for lecture and
demonstration purposes. By the end of the second week, Pheola was able
to work her sense of perception around inside my heart, based on what
she had learned from the model, in surprisingly good shape.
"I guess you are in good health, Lefty," she told me late one night in
her apartment. "Your valves feel just like the model, and your
arteries are clear and good. I'm so glad for you."
"Clean living," I assured her. "And careful choice of grandparents.
Now, my fat and sassy friend," I said. "I want some of your
witchcraft." That fat part was something of a joke, for she would
always be lean and rangy. But Pheola had put on a good ten pounds
since we had first met. The weight was going to some rather pleasant
spots to observe, and outside of her mess of buck teeth, she wasn't
turning out to be such a bad-looking chicken. For one thing, she had
race-horse legs, and that's never bad.
"Witchcraft, Lefty?" she said, getting up to go into her kitchen to
pour some more coffee.
"You said Maragon was going to have a heart attack," I reminded her as
I followed her in to where the cooking was done. "O.K., my skinny PC.
How soon? Exactly when?"
[Illustration]
She stopped pouring, set the percolator down and looked at me
solemnly. "In two weeks, about."
"Hm-m-m," I said. "But it won't kill him?"
She picked up her cup and led me back to the sofa, sitting down before
she answered me. "Not exactly," she said. "I don't want to talk about
it."
That's what all the witches say when you try to get them to do any
life-lining. "Have you told me all that you know?" I demanded.
Then she did a funny thing. She got up, went to the chest against the
wall where her purse lay, and got out her glasses, racking them up on
her long thin nose. She looked at me closely. "No, not all I know. And
I don't aim to," she said. She made no move to come back to sit with
me.
"I'm sorry," I said, "but this is Lodge business. I know that you're
not a member yet, but you soon will be, and you might as well learn
right now that you are subject to Lodge discipline. Tell me what you
know."
"No!"
They all have to learn it sooner or later. I rammed a good stiff lift
in under her heart, and saw her knees buckle. She gasped, and then the
lights went out.
Pheola was beside me on the loveseat when my consciousness started to
straggle back. Her hands were soothing my brow. That isn't where it
had hurt. She had struck back, only twice as hard as I had managed.
Fool around with somebody who had a good grip on my nervous system,
would I? I was lucky to be alive.
"Oh, darlin'!" she gasped, as my eyes opened. "You hurt me so, and
before I knew it I had done it to you! Forgive me, Billy Joe! I'll
_never_ do that again!"
"Better not," I groaned, trying to get my breath. "They'll carry me
out in a pine box next time."
"I am so sorry," she said, beginning to cry.
"Then tell me," I said. "What else do you know?"
That only made her cry harder, but between sobs she got it out. "He
won't die the first time," she said sniffling. "But the _next_ attack
will kill him."
"Soon after the first?"
She nodded. "A couple days," she said. "I wish you hadn't made me tell
it."
"Good thing I did," I growled. "You're as nutty as a fruitcake.
Maragon won't die. I've got it on good authority."
"I'm _right_!" she insisted.
* * * * *
I took it to Maragon the next morning. The city was shrouded in a low
layer of cloud, and his glassed-in penthouse office was gloomy with
the morning. He motioned me to sit down. I dragged one of his Bank of
England chairs through the ankle-deep pile of his rug and set it down
next to his big desk.
"I have a progress report on Pheola, Pete," I told him.
"That skinny one you brought back from Nevada, Lefty?"
I nodded. "She's not quite so skinny, thanks to my expense account,"
I said. "And she's ready to qualify."
"Not on PC," he said, hot at once.
"That remains to be seen, Pete. The lab has been tracking her
predictions for better than two weeks now, and in a couple more weeks
Norty will give us some stix on her scope, range and accuracy."
He glowered at me, his bushy brows down about his eyes. "I thought I
told you to concentrate on her healing," he said.
"I have," I told him. "But I saw no harm in seeing what she is like
with precognition," I said.
"Flat on her face, that's what she's like," he said testily. "One of
these days I'll have to convince you that what I say around here goes,
do you hear?"
"One of these days," I said. "But not when you're being a sour old
goat. You're just sore at her because she said you'd have a heart
attack."
"Nonsense!" he bristled.
"I've had Evaleen Riley doing a little PC work on you, too," I
confessed, and saw his face get dark with anger. "Now hold your
tongue, you old goat. I'm trying to help you," I cut in, to keep him
from bellowing at me. "Evaleen is worried, too. But she's a little
more cheerful than Pheola. She doesn't think you'll die."
"Well," he growled. "That's nice. I won't write my will."
"Stop acting like an old goat, you old goat," I snapped at him. "I'll
give you a prediction of my own: You'll be sick enough to die, but
we'll find a way to do something about it."
"Well, now _you're_ a PC!" he huffed. I like to think I have a little,
now and then. It's ever so short in range, and highly erratic, but I
have had my flashes.
"Just one thing," I said to him. "As a surgeon who has done a lot of
heart work, I want you in the heart clinic on the day these witches
say you're going to be sick. It will certainly make a lot of us feel
better, and the worst that can happen is that you can tell both those
witches they don't know the right time."
I didn't get to first base. "Now I'll tell you something, Wally Bupp!"
he said loudly. "I was fool enough to pay attention to what that witch
of yours said, and I've had a complete checkup. The heart people can't
find a thing the matter with my heart. The devil you say! I won't go
near your hospital. Now get out of here and don't give me another word
about the PC powers of that fraud."
* * * * *
I let a week go by after that, not quite able to figure out what I
should do. One night, after a dinner that Pheola had cooked for me as
part of her transparent scheme to convince me she was God's own gift
to Lefty Bupp, I raised a question with her.
"You are still sure," I said, loading the dishwasher, "about Pete
Maragon?"
"Yes," she said. "He'll have a heart attack."
"All right. Exactly when?"
"The nineteenth. Thursday," she said.
"We've got to pin point this thing," I said as we went back to her
living room. "Do you think you are ready to do some serious
diagnosis?"
"Of the Grand Master?" she asked me.
"Sure. I can get you into his office without too much trouble. What I
want you to do is feel around inside his heart. The sawbones from the
clinic can't find anything out of line, and I think you can. Can you
PC that?"
She smiled at me. "Of course," she said. "You'll take me there in the
morning."