The Right Time Part 7

"Tell the old goat that more detailed examination of his EKG makes you want him in for observation. Even Maragon listens to doctors. Tell him whatever it takes to get him to bed that morning. You might even bring him in the night before."

Doc Swartz shrugged. "I guess I'll have to play your game," he decided. "But this had better be good!"

I never did learn what Doc Swartz told the Grand Master, or how much the old goat suspected. But I learned from my hospital sources that Maragon was scheduled to enter the heart clinic the night of the eighteenth for "tests."

I let Pheola set the timing for us, and we showed up at his room around ten on the morning of the nineteenth, shortly before Pheola predicted his heart attack would occur.

The old goat was sitting up in bed as he was being examined by Doc Swartz and another sawbones. Leads from the EKG led from his chest and wrists. He fired one scorching glance at the two of us.

"What is this?" he demanded. "Get out of here!"

I shook my head. "Not me," I said. "I'm an accredited surgeon at this hospital."

"What about her?" he growled, pushing Swartz away from him. "Get that witch out of here!"

"A diagnosis is about to be made," I said, bringing Pheola to his side. "And it would help if you shut up for a couple minutes."

He turned angrily to Swartz, but I had him pretty well cowed, and he shook his head. "We could use some help, Mr. Maragon," he said. "There are some anomalies in your EKG that this lady's Psi powers may help us resolve. I should think that you, of all people, would want...."

"Oh, shut up!" he grumped. "You are ganging up on me. Go ahead," he snapped at Pheola. "And get it over with!"

His gown had been pushed down from his shoulders for Doc Swartz's stethoscope work, and the mat of graying hair on his chest was exposed. Pheola laid a hand on his chest--she seemed to have a better feel after a touch, just as I do with the weights. There was a dead silence in the room as she stood there, eyes closed, and slowly ran her fingers over his rib cage. After some minutes her eyes opened, and she came back to my side.

"Still the same," she said. I nodded and looked over at Swartz.

"Well," Maragon growled, "have you ill-a.s.sorted characters agreed on a diagnosis?"

"In a sense," I told him. "It's nothing that every doctor in this room couldn't have guessed at without bothering to examine you. You're sixty years old, and you've got sixty-year-old arteries. That's all."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"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 b.u.mp 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?"