The Right Time by John Berryman (10 best books of all time txt) 📕

are the original instruments of my TK skill. That's how Maragon found me, unconsciously tipping dice in an alley crap game. I threw them out on the table next to the sorter, when the cards had gone through and it fell silent. They came up with a four-three natural.

"Maragon!" I snapped. "You know he doesn't think enough of your TK to have your training extended. Well, you and I both know we have done wonders for your grip. Just because he's Grand Master doesn't make him right all the time. I want you to test this girl, and I think she has as much right to the facts as you have to the training I've been giving you under the table all these months!"

"Blackmail," he said sadly. "Extortion!"

"So I'm extorting some work out of you," I agreed. "The only question is whether you will pay."

"What do you want?" Baskins asked glumly.

"I want you to make this woman predict a series, a number of series, and I want you to use your computers here to tell me on what basis her accuracy varies. You can do that, can't you?"

He nodded, staring at the dice on the table. "If I wasn't so sure you can help me develop my TK, Lefty," he said, "I'd never do this. All right, sneak her down here and I'll get her to PC some weather information for a month or so."

"Weather?" I said. "Why the weather?"

"You'll see when I show the results," he said. "Roll those dice again. I swear I felt your lift that last time."

I made a few other calls around the building to catch up on what had been going on while I was in Nevada. Our formal organization is lousy, because Maragon is a one-man show. You just have to rely on gossip, what the CV's pick up and what leaks by telepathy, to know all the internal politics of the Lodge. I wouldn't want you to think that Psi's are more devious or Machiavellian than normals, but sometimes they act it.

By the time I reached up to tap on Pheola's door, it opened in front of me, and a stylishly dressed young lady came out, smiling, with Pheola standing in the doorway behind her.

"Lefty!" Pheola said happily.

"Is this your fiancé?" the girl said to Pheola.

"No!" I said. "I'm her chiropractor, and I'm about to straighten out some vertebrae in her neck!"

Something about the way I said it made the girl from the department store scuttle down the corridor. I glared at her back, went into Pheola's apartment and shut the door.

"What were you telling her?" I started, and then I knew there was no point to it. I waved an irritated hand and kept on talking.

"When will your clothes be here?"

"Some things for tonight in about an hour," she said meekly. "I got quite a lot. Was that all right?"

"If you keep shooting off your puss about our getting married, you won't last long enough to wear them all," I threatened. "Can you find Room 4307, or will I have to take you down?"

"I can find it if you want me to, Lefty," she said.

I was sick of being her darlin' Billy. "Then find it," I said. "Ask for Norty. Tell him you are my PC. Do what he tells you. I'll pick you up around seven o'clock back here. All right?"

"All right."

"And stop telling people we're going to get married!"

She didn't answer that, so I let myself out and went to my own apartment, sizzling.

The phone was ringing as I came in, and I walked over to press the "Accept" button. The screen lit up to show me a lined and wrinkled face framed in scraggling hair streaked with gray.

"Hello, Evaleen," I said to her.

"This is dynamite," she said in a graveyard tone. "In the gym, in about ten minutes?"

I could feel my eyebrows rise. "Sure," I said, and before I could foolishly ask her what it was all about, she cut the image.

It isn't that our phones are tapped. Maragon doesn't need that. But in a building full of telepaths, any conversation is going to be peeped if you carry it on long enough. And who can keep his mind closed while he's talking? It's hard enough when you're silent.

I rode directly down to twenty and let myself into the locker room. By the time I had changed into my gym suit, Evaleen Riley's ten minutes had elapsed, and I went into the gym.

If she wanted to be careful about our conversation there was no point going directly to wherever she was working out, so I wandered.

There was the usual dozen or so TK's there practicing with the weights, as well as twice as many who thought they were TK's trying to get the milligram weights to wiggle. About half of them were clustered around one table where a member from one of the other chapters was showing off by heaving at a two hundred and fifty gram weight. He was seated in the classic position, his elbows on the table, his fingers supporting his temples, and was concentrating fiercely on the weight.

He wasn't really up to it. I could see sweat starting from his brow as I watched him over the heads of the others at the table. Suddenly he dropped back, exhausted.

"Not tonight, Josephine!" he gasped. The man at his right, another stranger, chuckled, reached over to touch the weight with his finger tips and then TK'd it cleanly off the Formica. It was nice work, for a middleweight.

I looked in at a couple other workouts before wandering over to where Evaleen sat by herself in a corner. She was concentrating on a series of pith balls the size of peas that weighed from a tenth of a gram up. She was either so absorbed in what she was doing, or pretended to be, that she gave no sign of hearing me come up behind her. One of the balls before her struggled off the table top, and I could hear her breath hiss with the effort. Cheating a little, I felt for her lifts and gave her some help. One after another the balls floated up and sank back. She was utterly charmed—or pretended to be.

"Great going, Evaleen," I said, but she swore at me in Gaelic, an affectation, because she comes from Minnesota.

"You'd slip up behind me and help, eh?" she said hollowly.

"Get a touch, Evaleen," I suggested. "Have you tried it?"

"No," she said sullenly. She's good at that. Her dark hair is streaked with gray. She lets it hang down straight and whacks it off with hedge shears or something when it bothers her. Her face is lined and wrinkled far ahead of its time, and I swear, from the color of her teeth, that she chews betel nut. Somehow or other these PC witches have to act the part.

"Go ahead," I insisted. "Touch the first ball with the tip of your finger, Evaleen." I showed her what I meant by leaning over her shoulder. "That's right. Now lift!"

The pith ball rose smoothly several inches, and she held the lift for ten seconds or so.

"You were helping," she accused me in her best graveyard tones.

"Never," I said, truthfully. "Don't feel that it's cheating to get tactile help. I just saw a two hundred fifty gram middleweight over there at the other table run his fingers down a weight before he lifted. We all do it. It helps the grip."