Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  * * * * *

  I let a week go by after that, not quite able to figure out what I should do. One night, after a dinner that Pheola had cooked for me as part of her transparent scheme to convince me she was God's own gift to Lefty Bupp, I raised a question with her.

  "You are still sure," I said, loading the dishwasher, "about Pete Maragon?"

  "Yes," she said. "He'll have a heart attack."

  "All right. Exactly when?"

  "The nineteenth. Thursday," she said.

  "We've got to pin point this thing," I said as we went back to her living room. "Do you think you are ready to do some serious diagnosis?"

  "Of the Grand Master?" she asked me.

  "Sure. I can get you into his office without too much trouble. What I want you to do is feel around inside his heart. The sawbones from the clinic can't find anything out of line, and I think you can. Can you PC that?"

  She smiled at me. "Of course," she said. "You'll take me there in the morning."

  I did, of course.

  Maragon gave us an appointment when I assured him that I wanted to show him some aspects of Pheola's healing powers and that PC wasn't going to enter into the discussion. His spooky clairvoyant let us in with a knowing smile and we found the old goat pouring over some papers in front of him on the big slab of walnut.

  He was really quite nice to Pheola. "Well, well, young woman," he said, "Lefty tells me that you are coming along."

  "I hope so, Mr. Maragon," she said.

  "Well, Lefty," he said, after he had shown us both into the handsome chairs he had drawn up in front of his desk, "you were going to have Pheola give me some kind of a demonstration."

  "Sure," I said. "First off I want you to know that she can qualify as a TK. Her healing powers are a subtle form of that. But as proof, she'll give a demonstration with weights."

  I drew the carrying case from my pocket and laid four pith balls on his desk, as well as a ten-gram standard TK weight.

  "Ten grams?" he said, interested.

  "Maybe," I grinned. "We haven't tried this outside our own company. Pretty big emotional quotient here, you know."

  He shook his head. "It has to be reproducible, Lefty," he said, but in a kindly tone. "Let me see it, Pheola."

  She was really pretty good, and the pith balls behaved quite well. The first time around, the ten-gram weight stopped her cold, but by laying it on my palm, she got a good grip and thereafter was able to make it perform.

  "Very nicely done," the old goat grumbled. He hadn't expected anything of the kind. But I was only half through with him.

  "Now," I said. "The more important part of the demonstration. Do you object to a little minor pain?"

  "I certainly do," he growled, bringing his bushy brows down.

  "Well, the only way you can tell that Pheola is able to employ her TK within you is to give you a little sensation. It will only be some twinges," I said.

  He wanted to argue about it, and I dragged the conversation out until I felt a little tug on my ear. Pheola had completed her scan of Maragon's heart.

  "Oof!" he said as she hit him lightly in the diaphragm. Then she made his hands jump, first one and then the other. None of it felt real good, I could see, from the flinching and lip biting that was going on across the desk.

  "That's enough!" he exclaimed as she went to work on his throat. His hand flew up to massage his larynx. "Quite convincing, young woman. But what is it good for?"

  I laughed at him. "What are most Psi powers good for?" I asked him. "All that we require for membership is that a person be able to display them under standardized conditions."

  "Yes," he agreed. "Yes, I guess that's so. Well, I gather you'll be ready to go into your act at the next Chapter Meeting, then?"

  Pheola nodded. "I hope so," she said.

  "I do, too," the old goat agreed, getting in the last word. "It would be nice if you could figure out what to do with your ability to snap my nerve-strings!"

  * * * * *

  We were silent in the ride down the elevator to our apartments. I took the chance that Pete wasn't having us peeped, and spoke as soon as we were in my study.

  "What did you find out, Pheola?" I asked her.

  "I could feel something, Lefty," she said. "When you had the heart model over at the hospital, you showed me the coronary artery, you remember?"

  "Yes."

  "There are two little bumps in his artery, one about three times as large as the other."

  "Bumps?" I said, frowning. "I'm not sure I know what that means, Pheola."

  "Well, remember how I told you that your own arteries were nice and clear?"

  I nodded.

  "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.
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  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."

  "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 f
or 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."