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

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.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right Time, by Walter Bupp