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

"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 for 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."

"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