The Right Time, John Berryman [ebook and pdf reader .txt] 📗
- Author: John Berryman
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"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 fiancé?" 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."
"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.
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