Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "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. "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?"

  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 repo
rt 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."