Connie Willis - Passage

“Just a minute,” she said. She cleared the screen, laid Mr. Wojakowski’s file on top of the transcripts, and opened the door.

“Hi,” Richard said, “I just wanted to tell you I’m going to be out of the lab for a while. I’ll be up in Dr. Jamison’s office on eighth if you need me for anything. I’m hoping she’ll be able to look at Mrs. Troudtheim’s scans and see something I can’t.”

“Cortisol wasn’t present in Mrs. Troudtheim’s other NDEs?” Joanna said, leaning against the door so he wouldn’t come in.

“No, it was there in spades.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Unfortunately, it and DABA were also present in one of Amelia Tanaka’s, two of yours, and three of Mr. Sage’s, including his record-breaking twenty-eight-minute one.”

“So you’re not going to send Mrs. Troudtheim under?” Joanna asked hopefully.

“No, I’ve still got a couple of other ideas. One’s the theta-asparcine.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t an inhibitor?”

“It’s not, but it might abort the NDE some other way. And you kicked out when I lowered the dosage. That may mean Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDE threshold is higher than normal, so I’m going to raise the dosage and see if that keeps her in. That’s why I came down. I wanted to make sure two o’clock would work for you. I’m meeting with Dr. Jamison at one, but I’ll be back in plenty of time, and I told Tish to be here at one-thirty in case Mrs. Troudtheim shows up early. So,” he said, slapping the doorjamb with the flat of his hand. “See you at two o’clock.”

“Yes,” she said, “I should be finished by then,” and some of the regret in her voice must have come through because he leaned back in and said, “You know what? We’ve both been working way too hard. What do you say, when this is all over, we go out to dinner. Not Taco Pierre’s. A real restaurant.”

When this is all over. “I’d like that,” Joanna said.

“So would I,” he said, and smiled at her. “I’ve missed you these last few days.”

“Me, too,” Joanna said.

“Oh, and I’d keep your door shut if I were you. Mandrake was just up in the lab looking for you. I told him you were in the cafeteria.”

“Thank you,” Joanna said.

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” he intoned, grinning, and disappeared into the elevator.

Joanna shut and locked the door and went back to searching through Guadalupe’s reports. “…have to… can’t… patches…” Patches?

I need to look at Guadalupe’s actual notes, Joanna thought, and got out the sheaf of prescription-pad forms and scraps of paper that Guadalupe had jotted them down on. The first one, written on the back of a patient menu form, said, “Vietcong POW again. No intelligible words. Pulled IV out.” “…smoke…” The next one, on a sheet from a prescription pad, said, “…can’t… two…” Or “too,” as in “too far for her to come”? Or was he trying to say “have to…” again? Have to what?

Most of them were short. “Boating on the lake” or “mumbled a lot. Nothing intelligible,” or the ominous “very quiet all day.” Here was a long one, on the back of a pharmaceutical-company ad. “Nothing I could make out on my shift yesterday. Sub on the three-to-eleven and Paula forgot to tell her, so no record of that shift. I asked her today if he said anything, and she said no, just humming. She couldn’t make out the tune either, but said it sounded like a hymn.”

A hymn. Coma Carl droning, long, long, short, short, long. She flipped back to the computer and typed in “humming,” looking for her own notes. “Long, long, short, short,” she had written. “Descending scale.”

“Hmmm, hmmm, hm, hm, hm, hmm,” she hummed, trying it out. “Half note, half note, quarter note…”

“Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

On tape. Outside confirmation. She leaped up and grabbed the box of tapes. It was on the day she’d met Richard, when was that? January the ninth. She clattered through the pile of tapes, looking for the date. Here it was. She jammed it in the recorder and hit “play.”

“It was dark…” Mrs. Davenport droned. She fast-forwarded. “And then I saw myself at my eighth birthday party. I was playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and…” Fast-forward. “…my wedding…” Fast-forward. “And the angel handed me a telegram.”

She fast-forwarded again, too far, there was only silence. She rewound, and here it was. Coma Carl humming, agonizingly slowly. She played it through, making notations on a memo pad, lines for the length of the note, arrows for pitch—long, long, the pitch dropping with each note, short, long—wishing she could read music. Did the tune of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” go up or down?

She hummed the opening bars, trying to stretch the notes out to match Coma Carl’s glacial humming, but it was no good. The tune could have been anything. I need to speed it up, she thought. She rewound to the beginning and then fast-forwarded, but it was just a whir, and there was no way on her little recorder to control the speed.

I need a fancy stereo, she thought, and tried to think who might have one. Kit? If she had one, Joanna could go listen to the tape and pick up the book at the same time, but she couldn’t remember any stereo equipment in Mr. Briarley’s library, not even a record player. Kit might have one up in her room, though. She called Kit, but the line was busy.

All right, who here in the hospital? Maisie’s tape player was a pink plastic affair, probably worse than her minirecorder. Vielle? No, all they had in the lounge in the ER was an eight-track player, “because nobody’s been in here long enough to listen to any music since 1974,” Vielle had complained one hectic night.

She squinted at the minirecorder, trying to remember where she’d seen a tape recorder. In one of the offices, where they listened to music while they were working. Billing or Personnel. Records, she decided. She snapped the tape out of the minirecorder, jammed it in her pocket, and ran down to Records.

And her memory had been accurate. On the far wall, above the cubicles, was a bank of sophisticated-looking stereo equipment. But first she would have to get past the woman at the front desk, who looked solid and dedicated to following the rules. Almost before Joanna had gotten her name out, the woman had swiveled so she was facing a rack of printed papers and was holding her arm up in preparation for grabbing the appropriate form.

“I don’t think there’s a form for what I need… Zaneta,” Joanna said, reading the name off the sign on the woman’s desk. “I need a tape recorder that can play a tape at different speeds,” but Zaneta had already swiveled back to face her.

“This is Records,” Zaneta said. “You want Equipment next door.”

“No, I don’t want to requisition a tape recorder. I just want to borrow yours for a couple of minutes to listen to a tape,” she said, pulling the tape out of her pocket to illustrate. “My recorder doesn’t have a fast-forward that lets me control the speed, and I need—”

“Do you work here?” Zaneta said.

“Yes, my name’s Joanna Lander,” she said. “I work with Dr. Wright up in research,” and Zaneta swiveled to face her computer terminal. “All I want—”

“Lander?” Zaneta asked, typing. “L-a-n-d-e-r?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I need to transcribe this tape, but a section of it needs to be listened to at a faster speed, and I wondered if I could—”

Joanna’s beeper went off. No, she thought, and reached in her pocket to turn it off, but Zaneta was already pushing the phone toward her. “You’re being paged,” she said severely.