The Right Time Part 8

"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.

"h.e.l.lo," 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."

"In the morning?" he said weakly, rubbing his eyes.

"Nonsense," I said. "We'll meet you down there."

The trick in getting decent answers out of computers is to ask them sensible questions. It took us nearly until dawn to get the question right. And then we got a very sweet answer. There were two helices all right, as an explanation of how Pheola could be right and then wrong.

I had my own idea about what the helices signified, but that was unimportant beside the fact that we were now able to predict at what times in the future the helices would coincide. It was at the time of their intersection that Pheola would be right in her predictions.

We did a little extrapolation. "Well," I said to her, "it's nice to know that you're going to be wrong tomorrow and the next day. Maragon isn't going to die."

"I'm sorry ... oh, I don't mean that!" she apologized. "But I did so want to be right, and now I know I'm just what he said, a fake!"

"Not all of the time," I reminded her. "But this gives me confidence in what I want you to do at the hospital today."

We grabbed a little shut-eye. Fatigue cuts into TK powers as much as it cuts into any other human ability, and I wanted Pheola to be at her best. But around lunch-time we dropped over to see Doc Swartz, and I explained to him what I thought Pheola could do for Maragon.

"I doubt that clot has had time to get any better," he said. "If Pheola examines him now and finds it as big as ever, and still soft and flexible, I think we should entertain your idea."

Pheola made a trip up to Maragon's room, and returned. "Just the same," she said. "He looks so tired."

"He's not so bad, better than he looks," Swartz said stoutly. "And you can still feel the clot?"

"Yes."

He turned to me. "Pheola," I said. "Now the question is whether you can help break it up. Maragon's blood stream is not eroding the clot.

Perhaps it has a sort of envelope of firmer fibrin around it, something that keeps it from breaking down. The question is whether you are sensitive enough, and have enough control, to get a good grip on the clot, and start breaking it up by tearing away at its surface.

It certainly has very little mechanical strength, and you have several grams of TK in the lab. What do you think?"

The whole idea scared the devil out of her, but we went back to Maragon's room together, where she felt for the clot with a new outlook on the problem. After some minutes she nodded, and we went out in the corridor to put our heads together.

"I think I can do it, Lefty," she said. "But what if something goes wrong?"

"It won't," I said. "Evaleen Riley says that he isn't going to die, and I believe her."

"O.K.," said 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 hus.h.!.+"

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."