The Right Time, John Berryman [ebook and pdf reader .txt] 📗

"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?"

She gave a little shriek. A ladylike "Eek!"

"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?"