The Right Time Part 4

"Then we'll try one more thing, baby," I said. "Come on next door to my place. There's some stuff over there I want you to work with."

I thought Pheola might boggle about going into my apartment, but she came readily enough. I guess a PC has some pretty strong notions about what is going to happen next.

Just to keep the mood the same, I turned on my hi-fi and drew the loveseat up in front of the desk in my study. Pheola found a way to sit closer to me than I would have imagined possible while I fished a set of weights out of a drawer and laid them on the polished teak.

"Here's how it goes," I said to her, and TK'd the weights off the wood one at a time. Anybody else would have gotten bug-eyed, but Pheola just squinted to see better. Finally I made the big weight cross the room, go behind us, and then come back to its place on the desk. She had never seen a demonstration of trained ability, and to her it was so much magic.

"You've been doing the same thing, Pheola," I told her as I put an arm around her shoulder. "Only you've been doing it first to my nerves and later to my insides. Now let me see you do it to this little ball."

She looked at the little sphere of pith, similar to the ones that Evaleen Riley had used for practice, but nothing happened.

"I can't feel it," she protested, "It ... It isn't you, Lefty. I'll never feel anything that isn't _you_!"

"Don't get mystical," I snapped. "You did some healing before you met me, and I don't suppose you were in love with every one you helped, were you?"

"Of course not."

"Try again."

"Nothing," she said, and the pith ball did not budge.

"Now watch this," I said, and popped the little ball into my mouth.

"Feel for it," I insisted, pushing it into one cheek where it did not interfere with my speech.

She closed her eyes. "Where is it?" she demanded. "Did you swallow it, Lefty?"

"I either swallowed it or I kept it in my mouth," I said. "Feel for it!"

"There!" she gasped. "It's in your mouth!"

I rolled the piece of pith on to the top surface of my tongue and opened my mouth so that she could see it. "Agh!" I said, pointing at my tongue. I gestured again, and her face paled as the little ball left my tongue and floated in the air before my face. Suddenly her lift broke and it fell wetly onto my hand, in my lap.

I leaned over, put an arm around behind her neck and kissed her. It was a most sedate embrace. "There," I said, "that performance alone will get you into the Lodge. Now do you believe you're a TK?"

She gave a little shriek. A ladylike "Eek!"

"It's not that awful," I said. "A lot of Psi's can do it."

"You _kissed_ me!" she said, paying no attention to my question.

"Sure," I agreed. "And you managed your first lift." I picked the pith ball up in my fingers, showed it to her, and laid it on my palm.

"Feel my hand first," I suggested. "Then lift it over onto the desk."

She looked, wild-eyed, at the pith, shaking her head.

"I'll kiss you again," I suggested.

The little ball came away from my palm, floated erratically around, crossed over to my desk and dropped with a soft smack to the teak. She came to me like a tigress. I don't know why I expected a repet.i.tion of our first innocent kiss--I knew she had been married once.

I claim good marks for getting her back to her own apartment immediately.

For the balance of the week I saw very little of Pheola during the day. The hospital kept me busy with TK surgery, and I was practicing scalpel work with my newly-strong right arm, now that I had two hands to use. I'd be something more than a TK surgeon yet.

Pheola had a couple more sneaky sessions with Norty Baskins in the data-processing center, but for most of the time, she told me, she wandered around the part of the building the Lodge had retained for its own uses, meeting Psi's of various powers and more or less soaking up the flavor of life in the Manhattan Chapter. In the evenings we found a new place for dinner each night, and then came back to her place or mine to practice with the weights. Pheola would never be the bruiser that I was--so very few are--but she worked her grip up to several grams, which is quite respectable.

By that time I felt she was ready for a course of sprouts in the human heart. I used my drag at the hospital to bring her over with me for a cram course. We had a plastic model of a heart there, about four times life size, that was built in demountable layers for lecture and demonstration purposes. By the end of the second week, Pheola was able to work her sense of perception around inside my heart, based on what she had learned from the model, in surprisingly good shape.

"I guess you are in good health, Lefty," she told me late one night in her apartment. "Your valves feel just like the model, and your arteries are clear and good. I'm so glad for you."

"Clean living," I a.s.sured her. "And careful choice of grandparents.

Now, my fat and sa.s.sy friend," I said. "I want some of your witchcraft." That fat part was something of a joke, for she would always be lean and rangy. But Pheola had put on a good ten pounds since we had first met. The weight was going to some rather pleasant spots to observe, and outside of her mess of buck teeth, she wasn't turning out to be such a bad-looking chicken. For one thing, she had race-horse legs, and that's never bad.

"Witchcraft, Lefty?" she said, getting up to go into her kitchen to pour some more coffee.

"You said Maragon was going to have a heart attack," I reminded her as I followed her in to where the cooking was done. "O.K., my skinny PC.

How soon? Exactly when?"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

She stopped pouring, set the percolator down and looked at me solemnly. "In two weeks, about."

"Hm-m-m," I said. "But it won't kill him?"

She picked up her cup and led me back to the sofa, sitting down before she answered me. "Not exactly," she said. "I don't want to talk about it."

That's what all the witches say when you try to get them to do any life-lining. "Have you told me all that you know?" I demanded.

Then she did a funny thing. She got up, went to the chest against the wall where her purse lay, and got out her gla.s.ses, racking them up on her long thin nose. She looked at me closely. "No, not all I know. And I don't aim to," she said. She made no move to come back to sit with me.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but this is Lodge business. I know that you're not a member yet, but you soon will be, and you might as well learn right now that you are subject to Lodge discipline. Tell me what you know."

"No!"

They all have to learn it sooner or later. I rammed a good stiff lift in under her heart, and saw her knees buckle. She gasped, and then the lights went out.

Pheola was beside me on the loveseat when my consciousness started to straggle back. Her hands were soothing my brow. That isn't where it had hurt. She had struck back, only twice as hard as I had managed.

Fool around with somebody who had a good grip on my nervous system, would I? I was lucky to be alive.

"Oh, darlin'!" she gasped, as my eyes opened. "You hurt me so, and before I knew it I had done it to you! Forgive me, Billy Joe! I'll _never_ do that again!"

"Better not," I groaned, trying to get my breath. "They'll carry me out in a pine box next time."

"I am so sorry," she said, beginning to cry.