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 in