The Right Time Read online

goneinverted!"

  That meant damage--typical coronary damage. They chased us out, and wesat in a kind of death watch in a waiting room, while Pheola criedsoftly.

  "Stop it," I said after a while. "Simply because you could foretell itdoesn't mean you caused it!" But it was no use.

  In the afternoon Doc Swartz came out to tell us that the attack hadbeen mild. "Do you suppose Pheola could make another diagnosis?" heasked. "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 showedtoo frequent use of her handkerchief, but she nodded, and followed usback to Maragon's room.

  Maragon was resting quietly, and didn't have a word to say as Pheolaran her hands carefully over his chest. It was the only time I couldremember when the old goat hadn't had some sharp word for me.

  Pheola opened her eyes and led us out into the corridor. "The smallerbump is gone," she said. "The other one feels very soft. It sort ofsways every time his heart beats."

  "Absolute quiet," was Doc Swartz's answer. "There's a chance that clotwill dwindle, erode, and harden up. But obviously we want to keep himas quiet as possible to make that take place."

  "You had better know," I said quietly. "Pheola predicts it will breakloose in a couple days and kill him."

  "How accurate is she?" he said, looking sideways at where my witchstood 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'spretty good."

  I turned to Pheola. "We had better go over to see Norty Baskins," Itold 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 wasright 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 atthe same time.

  "Some of the time," Norty agreed. "When you are right, you are thesharpest PC this lab has ever tested. But that's only a rather smallpart 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 meall those predictions about temperature and barometric pressures?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "We've drawn a couple moving weather maps," Norty explained. "Just thepressures on these. They cover the thirty-day period for which youPC'd. One of the maps shows the actual isobars as they were recordedby the Weather Bureau. The other moving map is the same isobars aspredicted by you, Pheola. We'll run the two maps simultaneously on ascreen. The black lines are the actual readings. The red lines areyour predictions."

  It was sort of like watching an animated cartoon. The map started withan overlap of red and black and then you could see each high and lowpressure area work its way across the country and out to sea. Butthere was a difference. After a couple hours, on their time scale,Pheola's map differed from the actual, and the difference grew greaterfor a while, and then narrowed. Suddenly the red and black lines wereidentical.

  The cycle repeated several times in the thirty-day period.

  "What you see," said Norty, "is that she is right for a few hours andthen wanders off, sometimes for several days, but wanders back andgets right again. The timing of when she is right is ratherrandom--there's no regular periodicity to it, and as a result, wecan't see how to predict when she is going to be right and when she isnot."

  "I have a thought for you," I said, when Norty had shut off theprojection. "It's sort of like two sine waves that intersect now andthen. One of them has bigger amplitude than the other, or theirperiodicity is different. Can't you feed this dope to your computersand find out what kinds of curves would represent the coincidences?"

  He gave me a suffering look. "Don't you suppose I tried that? I getindeterminate solutions--the machine can't find any curves that answerthe data."

  Pheola got her own answers out of that. "Then you don't know whether Iam 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 allshaken up. I'd like to be alone for a while. Will you come and get mefor dinner?"

  "Sure," I said.

  * * * * *

  Pheola was in better spirits by dinner time, and didn't exactly pickat her food. At any rate, she was ready to talk when we finally gotback 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, andher trig was too far behind her for quick recollection of what sinewaves were.

  I drew some sketches of overlapping sine waves for her to explain whatI 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 thetwo paths cross, the events that you predict and actual events are thesame, and at those times you're right."

  "I know," she said. "I thought about it all afternoon. I didn't wantto say it to Norty, but when I was giving him all those numbers, therecame 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 besure again."

  "Can you explain the fuzziness?" I prodded.

  She shrugged. "It's like a fork in the road," she said, holding hertwo index fingers next to each other. "And there are _two_ picturesfor a while."

  You may not have noticed it, but your index finger is not straight. Itcurves in toward your middle finger so that you can hold all the tipstogether if you want to. And when Pheola laid her two index fingerstogether, they curved away from each other at their tips. I got aflash and went immediately to my phone.

  "Hello," I said to the O-operator cartoon. "Get Norty Baskins. If he'sasleep, wake him."

  Norty was quite upset about being awakened.

  "I have a suggestion for your machine," I said to him. "Try it inthree dimensions. Instead of sine waves, visualize it as two coilsprings that are all snarled up in each other. Each has a differentpitch, perhaps different diameter. But at certain points the coilstouch 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 themsensible questions. It took us nearly until dawn to get the questionright. And then we got a very sweet answer. There were two helices allright, as an explanation of how Pheola could be right and then wrong.I had my own idea about what the helices signified, but that wasunimportant beside the fact that we were now able to predict at whattimes in the future the helices would coincide. It was at the time oftheir intersection that Pheola would be right in her predictions.

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

  "I'm sorry ... oh, I don't mean that!" she apologized. "But I did sowant 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 confidencein what I want you to do at the hospital today."

  * * * * *

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

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

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

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

  "Yes."

  He turned to me. "Pheola," I said. "Now the question is whether youcan