"His coronary artery isn't like that. It's sort of caked and crusty.
And I think some of that coating has broken away in a couple spots,
and they are like scabs on the sores, only they aren't hard."
This was as close to a classic description of coronary clotting as I
figured I would get in nontechnical terms. What her words mean to me
was that Maragon's coronary artery, as in many men his age, was
somewhat choked with deposits of cholesterol. In a couple places the
deposit had broken away, exposing the raw surface of the artery. But
instead of scar tissue forming to heal the open spot, clotting had
taken place. And if either of those clots broke loose, and plugged one
of the minor arteries in the heart, we'd see a coronary attack as that
part of the muscle was starved for blood and died.
The information was useless, in a medical sense. There is no surgery
for the condition. There was, however, something untried that could
possibly be done.
"Where is it going to happen?" I asked her. "The heart attack?"
"In the hospital," she said.
"And what will I have you do?"
She frowned for a moment. "You want me to cure it," she said. "I'm not
sure I understand how."
"I do," I said. "That's enough. From here on I just want to work a
two-horse parlay. The old goat can't help but be convinced by the
demonstration you are going to give him. The thing that I want is for
him to agree that your PC powers exist at the same time. We'll whipsaw
him good."
* * * * *
In the morning, after the first surgery was over, I went downstairs to
the heart clinic. Doc Swartz was in his office. He's the best heart
man at Memorial, and I figured that Maragon would have gone to him.
"What's up, Lefty?" he asked as I came in to his office and shut the
door against some of the smells of the hospital. "How is your scalpel
work coming?"
"I'll be doing my own cutting any day now," I said. "I came on another
errand."
"So?"
"Did you give Maragon's heart a checkup in the last couple of weeks?"
I asked.
"None of your business," he smiled. "You know I can't talk about my
patients."
"This is Lodge business, Doc," I protested. "I know you aren't a Psi,
and thus aren't subject to our discipline, but I think it's time we
exchanged some information."
"Exchanged?"
I nodded. "You know--or do you know--that I've been working with a
girl, giving her some training."
"No," he said. "I don't hear much about the Lodge. You folks are
pretty tight-mouthed around Normals."
"Sure," I said, not wanting to appear uncomfortable about it. Doc was
all right--he never showed any resentment that he didn't have Psi
powers. Quite sensibly, he was satisfied with his own normal skills.
"Well, this girl is a very delicate telekinetic," I told him. "She is
the one who brought my right arm back to life. She's good."
"She must be," he agreed. "I know that stumped every neurologist over
here."
"Right," I said, "She has been exploring the insides of Maragon's
heart."
"What!"
"Sense of perception--light TK touch--anything you want to call it. I
can get her to demonstrate, if you insist. But you can take my word
for it. She can feel her way around inside your body the way you can
feel your way around the outside."
"And what is her diagnosis?" he said, irritated now. _He_ was the
heart expert.
I told him about the clots, and he nodded as he got the picture. "A
classic description," he agreed. "But what can we do about it? Clots
like that are next to impossible to break down. If they flake away in
too big a chunk, they can kill."
"I know," I agreed. "But there is more to the story. Pheola is a
precog as well. She says that one of the clots will break loose on the
nineteenth, and that Maragon will have an attack. I want to make sure
he is over here, in a hospital bed, with you on hand, when it
happens."
"You Psi's!" he said. "Do I have to take this seriously, that this
woman can tell the future?"
"Yes, you do," I said. "One of our other PC's confirms it."
"That just doubles the creepiness," he said. "How can I manage it,
even if it's true?"
"Tell the old goat that more detailed examination of his EKG makes you
want him in for observation. Even Maragon listens to doctors. Tell him
whatever it takes to get him to bed that morning. You might even bring
him in the night before."
Doc Swartz shrugged. "I guess I'll have to play your game," he
decided. "But this had better be good!"
* * * * *
I never did learn what Doc Swartz told the Grand Master, or how much
the old goat suspected. But I learned from my hospital sources that
Maragon was scheduled to enter the heart clinic the night of the
eighteenth for "tests."
I let Pheola set the timing for us, and we showed up at his room
around ten on the morning of the nineteenth, shortly before Pheola
predicted his heart attack would occur.
The old goat was sitting up in bed as he was being examined by Doc
Swartz and another sawbones. Leads from the EKG led from his chest and
wrists. He fired one scorching glance at the two of us.
"What is this?" he demanded. "Get out of here!"
I shook my head. "Not me," I said. "I'm an accredited surgeon at this
hospital."
"What about her?" he growled, pushing Swartz away from him. "Get that
witch out of here!"
"A diagnosis is about to be made," I said, bringing Pheola to his
side. "And it would help if you shut up for a couple minutes."
He turned angrily to Swartz, but I had him pretty well cowed, and he
shook his head. "We could use some help, Mr. Maragon," he said. "There
are some anomalies in your EKG that this lady's Psi powers may help us
resolve. I should think that you, of all people, would want...."
"Oh, shut up!" he grumped. "You are ganging up on me. Go ahead," he
snapped at Pheola. "And get it over with!"
His gown had been pushed down from his shoulders for Doc Swartz's
stethoscope work, and the mat of graying hair on his chest was
exposed. Pheola laid a hand on his chest--she seemed to have a better
feel after a touch, just as I do with the weights. There was a dead
silence in the room as she stood there, eyes closed, and slowly ran
her fingers over his rib cage. After some minutes her eyes opened, and
she came back to my side.
"Still the same," she said. I nodded and looked over at Swartz.
"Well," Maragon growled, "have you ill-assorted characters agreed on a
diagnosis?"
"In a sense," I told him. "It's nothing that every doctor in this room
couldn't have guessed at without bothering to examine you. You're
sixty years old, and you've got sixty-year-old arteries. That's all."
[Illustration]
"Great," he said, reaching for the thin blanket that covered his
chunky legs. "Then I can...."
He stopped, and a spasm crossed his face.
It went away, and he slowly turned to face Pheola, a sort of angry
consternation coloring his features. "You witch!" he whispered. Then
the pain hit him much harder. "My arm!" he said.
There were doctors around him in a flash. He was still wired to the
EKG machine. "That's it!" the technician said. "The T-waves have gone
inverted!"
That meant damage--typical coronary damage. They chased us out, and we
sat in a kind of death watch in a waiting room, while Pheola cried
softly.
"Stop it," I said after a while. "Simply because you could foretell it
doesn't mean you caused it!" But it was no use.
In the afternoon Doc Swartz came out to tell us that the attack had
been mild. "Do you suppose Pheola could make another diagnosis?" he
asked. "We'd like to know exactly what is going on in there."
I looked over at her. Her eyes were red, and her pointed nose showed
too frequent use of her handkerchief, but she nodded, and followed us
back to Maragon's room.
Maragon was resting quietly, and didn't have a word to say as Pheola
ran her hands carefully over his chest. It was the only time I could
remember when the old goat hadn't had some sharp word for me.
Pheola opened her eyes and led us out into the corridor. "The smaller
bump is gone," she said. "The other one feels very soft. It sort of
sways every time his heart beats."
"Absolute quiet," was Doc Swartz's answer. "There's a chance that clot
will dwindle, erode, and harden up. But obviously we want to keep him
as quiet as possible to make that take place."
"You had better know," I said quietly. "Pheola predicts it will break
loose in a couple days and kill him."
"How accurate is she?" he said, looking sideways at where my witch
stood crying.
"We'll get some ideas on that yet today," I told him. "Evaleen Riley,
another one of our PC's, doesn't agree on the death part, and she's
pretty good."
I turned to Pheola. "We had better go over to see Norty Baskins," I
told her. "We _have_ to know if you're right or not."
"I'm right," she said, wiping her eyes.
* * * * *
Norty was ready for us. "Well," he said, as we came in, "Lefty was
right about you, Pheola. He said you were a rare one, and so you are."
"I _was_ right, wasn't I?" she said, beginning to feel good and bad at
the same time.
"Some of the time," Norty agreed. "When you are right, you are the
sharpest PC this lab has ever tested. But that's only a rather small
part of the time. When you're wrong, you're really wrong."
"So he may _not_ die!" I said. "What did I tell you?"
"Show me!" she demanded.
"All right," Norty said. "Take a look at this. You remember giving me
all those predictions about temperature and barometric pressures?"
"Yes," she said.
"We've drawn a couple moving weather maps," Norty explained. "Just the
pressures on these. They cover the thirty-day period for which you
PC'd. One of the maps shows the actual isobars as they were recorded
by the Weather Bureau. The other moving map is the same isobars as
predicted by you, Pheola. We'll run the two maps simultaneously on a
screen. The black lines are the actual readings. The red lines are
your predictions."
It was sort of like watching an animated cartoon. The map started with
an overlap of red and black and then you could see each high and low
pressure area work its way across the country and out to sea. But
there was a difference. After a couple hours, on their time scale,
Pheola's map differed from the actual, and the difference grew greater
for a while, and then narrowed. Suddenly the red and black lines were
identical.
The cycle repeated several times in the thirty-day period.
"What you see," said Norty, "is that she is right for a few hours and
then wanders off, sometimes for several days, but wanders back and
gets right again. The timing of when she is right is rather
random--there's no regular periodicity to it, and as a result, we
can't see how to predict when she is going to be right and when she is
not."
"I have a thought for you," I said, when Norty had shut off the
projection. "It's sort of like two sine waves that intersect now and
then. One of them has bigger amplitude than the other, or their
periodicity is different. Can't you feed this dope to your computers
and find out what kinds of curves would represent the coincidences?"
He gave me a suffering look. "Don't you suppose I tried that? I get
indeterminate solutions--the machine can't find any curves that answer
the data."
Pheola got her own answers out of that. "Then you don't know whether I
am right about Maragon or not."
"We know that you may not be right, that's something," I reminded her.
"Come on up to the apartment. This calls for some thinking."
Pheola protested that. "Please, Lefty," she said, "this has got me all
shaken up. I'd like to be alone for a while. Will you come and get me
for dinner?"
"Sure," I said.
* * * * *
Pheola was in better spirits by dinner time, and didn't exactly pick
at her food. At any rate, she was ready to talk when we finally got
back to my apartment.
"Did you understand what I said to Norty about the sine waves,
Pheola?" I asked her.
She shook her head. Her education had not proceeded to calculus, and
her trig was too far behind her for quick recollection of what sine
waves were.
I drew some sketches of overlapping sine waves for her to explain what
I thought was going on. "You are making predictions on this one path,
and actual events are on another path, do you see?" I said. "When the
two paths cross, the events that you predict and actual events are the
same, and at those times you're right."
"I know," she said. "I thought about it all afternoon. I didn't want
to say it to Norty, but when I was giving him all those numbers, there
came times when it was a little fuzzy, and I wasn't so sure."
"And what did you do?"
"I guessed--because it would clear up right after that, and I'd be
sure again."
"Can you explain the fuzziness?" I prodded.
She shrugged. "It's like a fork in the road," she said, holding her
two index fingers next to each other. "And there are _two_ pictures
for a while."
You may not have noticed it, but your index finger is not straight. It
curves in toward your middle finger so that you can hold all the tips
together if you want to. And when Pheola laid her two index fingers
together, they curved away from each other at their tips. I got a
flash and went immediately to my phone.
"Hello," I said to the O-operator cartoon. "Get Norty Baskins. If he's
asleep, wake him."
Norty was quite upset about being awakened.
"I have a suggestion for your machine," I said to him. "Try it in
three dimensions. Instead of sine waves, visualize it as two coil
springs that are all snarled up in each other. Each has a different
pitch, perhaps different diameter. But at certain points the coils
touch each other, and at those times she is right."
"In the morning?" he said weakly, rubbing his eyes.
"Nonsense," I said. "We'll meet you down there."
The trick in getting decent answers out of computers is to ask them
sensible questions. It took us nearly until dawn to get the question
right. And then we got a very sweet answer. There were two helices all
right, as an explanation of how Pheola could be right and then wrong.
I had my own idea about what the helices signified, but that was
unimportant beside the fact that we were now able to predict at what
times in the future the helices would coincide. It was at the time of
their intersection that Pheola would be right in her predictions.
We did a little extrapolation. "Well," I said to her, "it's nice to
know that you're going to be wrong tomorrow and the next day. Maragon
isn't going to die."
"I'm sorry ... oh, I don't mean that!" she apologized. "But I did so
want to be right, and now I know I'm just what he said, a fake!"
"Not all of the time," I reminded her. "But this gives me confidence
in what I want you to do at the hospital today."
* * * * *
We grabbed a little shut-eye. Fatigue cuts into TK powers as much as
it cuts into any other human ability, and I wanted Pheola to be at her
best. But around lunch-time we dropped over to see Doc Swartz, and I
explained to him what I thought Pheola could do for Maragon.
"I doubt that clot has had time to get any better," he said. "If
Pheola examines him now and finds it as big as ever, and still soft
and flexible, I think we should entertain your idea."
Pheola made a trip up to Maragon's room, and returned. "Just the
same," she said. "He looks so tired."
"He's not so bad, better than he looks," Swartz said stoutly. "And you
can still feel the clot?"
"Yes."
He turned to me. "Pheola," I said. "Now the question is whether you
can help break it up. Maragon's blood stream is not eroding the clot.
Perhaps it has a sort of envelope of firmer fibrin around it,
something that keeps it from breaking down. The question is whether
you are sensitive enough, and have enough control, to get a good grip
on the clot, and start breaking it up by tearing away at its surface.
It certainly has very little mechanical strength, and you have several
grams of TK in the lab. What do you think?"
The whole idea scared the devil out of her, but we went back to
Maragon's room together, where she felt for the clot with a new
outlook on the problem. After some minutes she nodded, and we went out
in the corridor to put our heads together.
"I think I can do it, Lefty," she said. "But what if something goes
wrong?"
"It won't," I said. "Evaleen Riley says that he isn't going to die,
and I believe her."
"O.K.," said Doc Swartz. "I'll put it up to him."
"I'd put it this way," he said to Maragon, when we had gone back into
his room. "We can keep you here in bed for a while, but sooner or
later you are going to feel well enough to leave, and we won't be able
to make you stay. The first time you do anything that gets your heart
going a little faster than it does lying here, that clot will break
loose and kill you."
"The big thing," I reminded him, "is that Evaleen can't find that you
are going to die. That argues that we are going to succeed."
"And this witch?" Maragon asked, moving his head slightly to indicate
Pheola.
"No reading at all for the next couple days," I said. "She's a
periodic PC."
"I'll bet!" he said. He was beginning to feel better. "Well, go
ahead."
Pheola went over to his side, carefully pulled the blanket down, and
with help from the nurse, drew his gown down from over his hairy
chest. She laid hands on him and stood there for many minutes with her
eyes closed.
"I'm doing it," she said at last. "I have sort of peeled off the top,
and I can shred it away, a little at a time."
"How long will this take?" Maragon grumbled, already beginning to
sound more like his old self.
"A couple hours," she said. "And hush!"
At Doc Swartz's suggestion I stayed there with Pheola. "She depends on
you, Lefty," he whispered.
Toward the end of the two hours they were giving Pete anti-coagulant
injections. "No sense letting another clot form just as soon as Pheola
breaks up this one," Swartz said. "This way we have a good chance that
the open wound will form some scar tissue. Sure, the artery will have
lost some flexibility, but the danger of another coronary will be
past."
They consider the first six days the danger time. At the end of that
period Pheola confirmed that the open sore was gone and that both
areas of clotting had been repaired by Maragon's body's own
restorative processes. They let him out of the hospital at the end of
another week.
* * * * *
I went to see him with Pheola the first day that he spent back at his
desk. He didn't seem in any way changed by his ordeal. I suppose, when
you live as close to all the manifestations of Psi as Pete does, that
very little can surprise you.
"Well, young woman," he said to her, getting up to bring her one of
his Bank of England chairs. "The sawbones tell me I have you to thank
for my life. And better than that, they feel there are a number of
delicate TK's around who can be trained in your diagnostic techniques.
This ought to be quite a thing in preventing coronaries."
"Thank you," she said. "I was so frightened that I would let Lefty
down a second time."
"A second time?" he said.
"I was wrong about your dying," she reminded him. "I'm wrong so much
in my predictions. I guess I'll just have to forget about that."
* * * * *
He looked over at me. "What about it, Lefty? Can we consider Pheola a
PC, or is she merely a TK?"
I grinned at him. "She is probably the most accurate PC in the Lodge,"
I said to him. His eyebrows went up, and Pheola shook her head.
"Accurate," I repeated, "if you'll let me define accuracy."
"Define it."
"According with some definite series of future events," I said.
"That's my definition."
"But I thought you said she's only right now and then," Maragon
protested.
"I said a 'definite series of events.' Unfortunately, the series of
events that Pheola predicts are in a different space-time continuum,"
I explained. "You have to consider that we are passing through time in
a helix. The events that Pheola predicts are in a different helix. The
two helices are all snarled together, and at certain times our coil of
time intersects her coil. Then she's right, because events in the two
continua are the same. We can predict when she's going to be right for
our helix, which is a small part of the time, but that part we can
use."
He gave me an owlish look. "Philadelphia lawyer," he said. "No other
PC is geared in to the same space-time continuum that Pheola predicts,
I suppose, so that means there is no way to test whether she was right
or wrong about events in that other time."
"None," I agreed. "But my theory is the only one that holds any water,
so far. It works. It permits us to predict when Pheola can predict. I
claim she qualifies for the Tenth Degree."
"Maybe so," he said. "Well, young woman, welcome to Membership in the
Lodge." He held out his hand, which she took. "Tell me," he went on,
"what's the next big thing you predict?"
Pheola smiled over at me. "Lefty is going to take me to the
orthodontist this afternoon," she said. "He wants me to have my teeth
straightened before we get married."
I'll say one thing for her, right or wrong, she never got off the loud
pedal on _that_ prediction.
* * * * *