Passage

by Connie Willis

  He glared at her. “Not before she sank three carriers and won the war, she didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “All ships sink sooner or later. But not that day. Not that day. That day she looked like she was going to stay afloat forever. I never seen a more beautiful sight in my life.” He gazed past them, remembering, his freckled face alight.

  “I thought she was sunk, that I was never going to see her again. I thought I was done for, and here she was, plowing through the water toward me, her flags flying and every sailor on board leaning over the railing of the flight deck, all in their dress whites, waving their hats in the air and hollerin’ for me to come aboard. It was the best day of my life!” He beamed at Joanna, and then at Richard. “The best damned day of my life!”

  It took Joanna another ten minutes to get Mr. Wojakowski back on track enough to tell them the tunnel was really a passageway and that there was a door at the end of it, with a bright light and people dressed in white when he opened it. “The light kept bouncing off ’em till I couldn’t see a damn thing.”

  Joanna asked him how he’d felt during the NDE. “Felt? I don’t know that I felt anything. I was too busy looking at things. It was like when the Japs hit us that first time at Coral Sea. I remember thinking I should be scared outta my pants, only I wasn’t. Mac McTavish was standing next to me, and—” It took all of Joanna’s skill and another ten minutes to stop him from going off into another story, and they never did get an answer.

  “Sorry,” she apologized after Mr. Wojakowski finally left. “I didn’t want to risk asking him again.”

  “It’s too bad his account of his NDE couldn’t be as colorful as that story about the Yorktown rescuing him,” Richard said.

  “He actually told us quite a bit,” Joanna said. “His being reminded of being attacked by Zeroes indicates he did feel some fear, even though he said he didn’t.”

  “He was also reminded of the best damned day of his life,” Richard said. “He commented that the light was brighter than last time. Did Amelia Tanaka say anything about comparative brightnesses or radiance in her NDEs?”

  “I don’t remember. I can check her accounts,” she said and stood up as if to go to her office.

  “I don’t need it right now,” he said. “I was just wondering, Mr. Wojakowski’s endorphin levels were elevated this time, and I thought they might be producing the effect of the light.”

  “ ‘ . . . shiny white stuff the light kept bouncing off of,’ ” Joanna read from her notes. “That isn’t what struck me about his account. What struck me was that he opened the door.”

  “Opened the door?” Richard said, wondering what was extraordinary about that.

  “Yes, it’s the first time I’ve heard of an NDEer acting with volition. Every account I’ve heard has been a passive vision, with the NDEer seeing and experiencing things or being acted upon by other figures, but Mr. Wojakowski not only opened the door, he also stopped and listened purposely to the sound.” She started for the door. “I’ll check on the brightness.”

  She came back in less than an hour to report that there was nothing in Amelia’s accounts about comparative brightness, “so I called her and asked her, and she said the light was much brighter her first session. I also asked her about the feeling of warmth and love she’d described, and she said that was present in all three sessions and strongest in the first. Of course, you have to keep in mind that over ten days have passed since her first session, and four since her last one, so her memory may not be reliable.”

  But it matched the scans, which showed a much higher level of endorphin activity in the first session than the second, and the neurotransmitter analysis confirmed it. Higher levels of both beta-and alpha-endorphins in the first. Not only that, but NPK was present in the first and not the second.

  He compared it with the scans they’d just gotten of Mr. Wojakowski. Both NPK and beta-endorphins, and in greater amounts than either of Amelia’s. When Joanna came in for Mrs. Troudtheim’s session, he asked her if she could check the NDE interviews she’d done over the past two years for bright lights and warm feelings.

  She’d already started. “There does seem to be a correlation,” she said. “It’s hard to tell from secondhand accounts, especially since bright is a subjective word, but the subjects who describe the feeling as ‘enveloping me in love and peace,’ or, ‘overwhelming me in a sense of safety,’ also report a very bright light, and sometimes nothing but a light, as if the glare were so bright they couldn’t see anything else.”

  “ ‘I couldn’t see a damn thing,’ ” Richard said, quoting Mr. Wojakowski. “Interesting. We’ll have to see what Mrs. Troudtheim says on the subject.”

  But Mrs. Troudtheim didn’t say anything. And she wasn’t “our best observer yet,” as Joanna said right before Tish started the dithetamine. She was instead a huge disappointment.

  Not that she wasn’t every bit as sensible and matter-of-fact as Joanna had predicted. She undressed and climbed on the examining table with no fuss, repositioned the sleep mask herself when it didn’t fully cover her eyes, and recounted what she’d experienced with a clear precision.

  The problem was, there was no experience to recount. She didn’t enter the NDE-state at all. Instead, after five minutes in non-REM sleep, the scan pattern shifted abruptly to that of a waking brain. “What happened?” Richard said to Tish. “Is Mrs. Troudtheim all right?”

  Joanna looked down at Mrs. Troudtheim, alarmed, and Tish said, “Vitals normal.”

  “She’s awake,” Richard started to say, and Mrs. Troudtheim’s voice cut across his with, “Are you ready to start?”

  It developed, on Joanna’s close questioning of her, that she had nodded off for a moment and “awoke” to feel Tish’s hand on her wrist, taking her pulse. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ll try to stay awake next time.”

  “Do you remember the point at which you feel asleep?” Joanna asked.

  “No, I was lying there, and it was so quiet and dark . . . ” she said, clearly making an effort to remember. “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t usually doze off like that.”

  “Did the quality of the silence or the dark change at any point?” Joanna pressed. “Did something wake you up? A sound?” But it was no use. Mrs. Troudtheim had told her everything she remembered.

  “I’ll be happy to try it again, and this time I promise to stay awake,” she said.

  Richard explained to her that they couldn’t send her under again so soon. “This doesn’t disqualify me, does it?” she said worriedly.

  “Not at all,” Richard said. “There’s usually some trouble getting the dosage right at first. I’d like to schedule you for another session this week. Can you come in day after tomorrow?” That would give him time to look at the scans and the data and see what the problem was. It was probably simply that Mrs. Troudtheim required a higher dosage to achieve an NDE-state. It was too bad, though. He could have used another set of scans for comparing the endorphin sites.

  “I just thought of something,” Joanna said after Mrs. Troudtheim left. “She had oral surgery the day before yesterday. Could the anesthetic she’s getting for her oral surgery be interfering with the dithetamine?”

  “It shouldn’t be,” he said, but he had Joanna call and ask her what she was getting, which turned out to be short-term novocaine and nitrous oxide, neither of which should have stayed in her system for more than a few hours, but he checked her neurotransmitter analysis anyway and then called up Mr. Wojakowski’s, and then Mr. O’Reirdon’s.

  He spent the rest of the day analyzing them for endorphins. Both showed the presence of beta-endorphins. Alpha-endorphins were present in Mr. Wojakowski’s, but not Mr. O’Reirdon’s. Tish came back at five to collect a scarf she’d forgotten and to ask him if he wanted to go to dinner at Conrad’s, “a bunch of us are going,” but he wanted to go over the rest of the analyses before A
melia’s session, so he told her no.

  “All work and no play,” Tish said, and then, coming closer to look at the screens, “What do you see in those things anyway?”

  Good question. There was no NPK in Mr. O’Reirdon’s analysis either, and when he checked Mr. Sage’s, he didn’t show any, and no alpha-endorphins. He did, however, show the presence of dimorphine. And high levels of beta-endorphins, which must be the key.

  He did some research. In laboratory experiments, beta-endorphins had been shown to produce feelings of warmth and euphoria and sensations of light and floating. He called up the scan of Amelia’s third session again, the one after she had uttered the famous “oh, no,” and looked at the beta-endorphin receptor sites. As he’d expected, they showed lower levels of activity. The majority of the sites registered yellow rather than red, and two were yellow-green. In addition, several receptor sites for cortisol, a fear-producing neurochemical, were lit.

  Could Mrs. Troudtheim need a higher dosage of dithetamine to generate those endorphins? He went over her analysis, but her waking and non-REM sleep endorphin levels were within the normal range and her scans on entering non-REM sleep looked identical to both Amelia Tanaka’s and Mr. Wojakowski’s. When Joanna asked him the next day if he’d found out what had gone wrong, he said, “Not a clue.”

  “I still haven’t been able to get in touch with Mrs. Haighton,” Joanna reported. “She was at the Women’s Networking Seminar or the Women’s Investment Club, I forget which. And there’s a problem with Mr. Pearsall. He couldn’t come in tomorrow or Thursday, so I scheduled him for today after Amelia.”

  “Good,” he said. If Mr. Pearsall’s NDE showed the same beta-endorphin levels—

  “Sorry I’m late,” Tish said, coming in. “I was at Happy Hour till after midnight. You should’ve been there, Dr. Wright.”

  “Umm,” Richard said, and to Joanna, “Have any of your subjects used the word floating to describe the out-of-body experience?”

  “Nearly all of them,” she said. “Or hovering.”

  “Do you know if there’s a correlation between out-of-body experiences and a blindingly bright light?”

  “No, I can check.”

  “Hi, Dr. Wright,” Amelia said, coming in. She shrugged out of her backpack. “I’m sorry I’m late. Again.”

  Tish handed her a folded gown. “I’m Tish,” she said. “I’m going to be prepping you today.”

  Amelia ignored her. “I got a B-plus on that biochem exam, Dr. Wright!” she said. “And an A on my enzyme analysis.”

  “Great,” Richard said. “Why don’t you go get dressed, and we’ll get this show on the road,” and went over to the console to look at the scans again while Tish prepped Amelia and started the IV, and then went over to the examining table.

  “All set?” he asked Amelia.

  She nodded. “Can I have a blanket first, though? I’m always so cold afterward.”

  “Were you just as cold both times?” Joanna asked. “Or were you colder one time than the other?”

  Amelia considered that. “I was colder last time, I think.”

  Which might mean that was an effect of lower endorphin levels, too, rather than lowered body temp. He had the nurse start the feed and then went back over to the console to watch Amelia’s NDE. Both the intensity of activity and the number of sites were greater this time, so the variation must not be due to a developed resistance.

  He looked over at the examining table. Joanna, who had looked anxious at the beginning of the session, had relaxed, and Amelia’s face had the same Mona Lisa smile as during previous sessions.

  Richard kept her under for four minutes. When she came out, there were no frightened murmurs, and, as he had expected, Amelia described the light as being brighter and “sort of shining out,” spreading her hands in a feathering motion to indicate rays. Definitely endorphin-generated.

  “Did you have a warm, safe feeling?” he asked, and felt a sharp kick to his ankle.

  “Can you describe the feelings you had during the NDE?” Joanna asked, her face impassive.

  “I felt warm and safe just like Dr. Wright said,” Amelia said, smiling at him, and he knew Joanna would accuse him of leading, but Amelia mentioned the warmth and the light several more times as she recounted what she’d seen, and when Joanna asked her, poker-faced, if she’d experienced anything that frightened her, her answer was a definite no.

  What she had seen was a long, dark room “like a hallway,” with an open door at the end of it, and people standing behind the door. “Did you recognize the people?” Joanna asked, and there was a pause before Amelia shook her head. “They were dressed in white,” she offered.

  “What happened then?” Joanna asked.

  Amelia pulled the blanket closer around her shoulders. “They just stood there,” she said.

  Joanna wasn’t able to get much more out of her except that she had heard a sound (which she couldn’t identify) as she entered the hallway, and that just before that, she had had a momentary sensation of floating.

  Definitely the beta-endorphins, Richard thought. He needed to look at the neurotransmitter analysis and the bloodwork, but if they were both higher than Amelia’s two previous sessions, then possibly all the core elements were endorphin-generated. Which would mean that the NDE might be what Noyes and Linden had thought—a protective mechanism to shield the brain from the traumatic emotions of dying and not a survival mechanism after all.

  If the endorphin levels consistently matched, and if increased levels produced more core elements. He needed more data to prove either of those premises, which meant sending Amelia under again as soon as possible, but scheduling her for another session turned out to be almost as difficult as scheduling Mrs. Haighton for an interview.

  “I’ve got a really big anatomy test coming up next week,” Amelia said, smiling apologetically at Richard. “Could we do it after next week?”

  “I’d really like to schedule it earlier than that,” Richard said.

  “Okay, Dr. Wright,” Amelia said, smiling at him, “but I want you to know you’re the only person I’d do this for, and if I flunk anatomy, it’ll be your fault.”

  By the time they’d worked out a time, Mr. Pearsall had arrived. After what had happened the day before, he was a little worried about Mr. Pearsall’s being able to achieve the NDE-state, but he not only achieved it, he was right on the mark. His scan matched the standard nearly as closely as Tanaka’s, and in the interview afterward, he reported five core elements, including an out-of-body experience.

  “I was lying on the table, waiting for you and the doctor to start,” he told Joanna. “I couldn’t see anything, of course, because of the mask and my eyes being closed, and then all of a sudden I could. I was up above the table, and I could see everything, the nurse checking my blood pressure, and you, holding a little tape recorder up to my mouth, and the doctor over at the computer. There were colored patterns on the screens, and they kept changing, from yellow to orange and from blue to green.”

  “You said you were above the table,” Joanna said. “Can you be more specific?”

  “I was all the way up next to the ceiling,” Pearsall said. “I could see the tops of the windows and the cabinets.” But not what Joanna put up on top of the medicine cupboard, Richard thought, and everything else he described he’s looking at right now or could have seen when he came into the room.

  He was impressed all over again at Joanna’s savvy. He shuddered to think what would have happened if he hadn’t asked her to work with him. Headlines in the Star: “Scientists Prove Life After Death Real,” with a testimonial from Mr. Mandrake and sidebar interviews with Dr. Foxx and Ms. Coffey the moon psychic. And no funding again ever, even from Mercy General. No credibility.

  Joanna gave credibility to the project just by being on it. Sitting there in her cardigan sweater and wire-rimmed glasses, she was an island of sanity and sense in a field full of cranks and nutcases. He would never pick up the Star and find she
’d decided the Other Side was real. And she wasn’t just sensible, she was intelligent, and an amazing interviewer. Without seeming to do anything at all, she elicited much more information than he’d been able to.

  “What happened then?” she was asking Mr. Pearsall.

  “I heard a sound, and then I was in a dark place,” Mr. Pearsall said.

  “Can you describe the sound?” Joanna asked.

  “It was a sort of . . . rumbling, like a truck going by . . . or a clattering.”

  Or bullets hitting the wing of a Wildcat, Richard thought, wondering what the sound was that they all had so much trouble identifying. Was it a completely alien sound?

  “And when I got to the end of the tunnel, there was a gate barring the way. I wanted to get through, but I couldn’t,” Mr. Pearsall said, but without any anxiety in his voice, and when Joanna asked him to describe the light, he said, “It was brighter than anything I’ve ever seen, and it made me feel peaceful and warm and safe.”

  But when Richard reviewed the scans, fewer than half of the beta-endorphin sites were activated, and those showed either green or blue, the lowest level of activity, and there were only trace levels of the beta-endorphins and NPK. There were high levels of alpha-endorphins, though, and of GABA, an endorphin inhibitor.

  He called up the analysis of Amelia’s most recent set of scans. No beta-endorphins, no NPK, low levels of alpha-endorphins.

  And the cortisol level was off the charts.

  “This is funny.”

  —DOC HOLLIDAY’S LAST WORDS

  IF JOANNA HAD ANY ILLUSIONS about subjects in a controlled experiment being easier to interview than patients, the next two weeks stripped her of them. She couldn’t get Mr. Sage to talk, she couldn’t get Mr. Wojakowski to shut up, and Mrs. Troudtheim, in spite of Richard’s attempts to adjust her dosage, still hadn’t had an NDE.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong,” Richard said disgustedly after the third try. “I thought the problem might be the sedative, since she wakes up, so I raised the dosage last time, and this time I used diprital instead of zalepam, but nothing.”