t 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 assured her. "And careful choice of grandparents.
Now, my fat and sassy 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?"

[Illustration