Connie Willis - Passage

It didn’t work. When she hit “fast-forward,” it produced a high-pitched squeal. She tried hitting “fast-forward” and “play” at the same time. The “fast-forward” button clicked off and there was a deafening whine. A man’s voice said, “Turn off that damned alarm.”

A sudden silence, then the same voice saying, “Let me see a rhythm strip.”

Greg Menotti coding, Joanna thought, I must have left the recorder on; she reached to hit “rewind.”

“She’s too far away,” Greg said, his voice distant and despairing, and Joanna took her finger off the “rewind” button and listened. “She’ll never get here in time.”

Joanna grabbed the shoe box of untranscribed tapes and rummaged through them as the tape played, looking at the dates. February twenty-fifth, December ninth.

“She’ll be here in just a few minutes,” Vielle’s voice said from the tape, and the cardiologist’s, “What’s the BP?” January twenty-third, March—here it was. “Eighty over sixty,” the nurse said, and Joanna hit “rewind,” let it run, hit “play.” “Fifty-eight,” Greg said, and Joanna stopped the tape. She popped it out of the recorder, stuck the other one in, fast-forwarded to the middle.

“It was beautiful,” Amelia Tanaka said. Too far. Joanna rewound, listened, rewound again, hit “play.”

“She’s coming out of it,” Richard’s voice said. Joanna leaned forward. “Oh, no,” Amelia said, “oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

Joanna played it twice, then popped the tape out and the other one back in, even though she already knew what it would sound like, already knew why Amelia’s voice had been so troubled. She had heard it before. “Too far for her to come,” Greg had said, and his voice had held the same terror, the same despair.

She hit “rewind” and played it again, but she was already certain. She had heard the identical tone twice today, the first time reading the Bible, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.”

And if she had gotten Mrs. Woollam’s voice on tape, all three voices would have sounded exactly the same. Just like Maisie’s, saying, “Do you think it hurts?”

Mr. Wojakowski was right on time the next morning. “That’s one thing they teach you in the navy, being on time,” he told Richard and launched into a story about GeeGaw Rawlins, a perennially tardy gunner’s mate. “Killed at Iwo. Tracer bullet right through the eye,” he finished cheerfully and trotted off into the dressing room to put on his hospital gown.

Richard called up his scans from Mr. Wojakowski’s last session. He hadn’t had a chance to look at the endorphin levels in them yet. He’d spent the last two days analyzing Amelia Tanaka’s scans from her two previous sessions for endorphin activity. As he’d expected, the level of activity was significantly lower for her most recent session, and fewer receptor sites were involved, even though she’d received the same dose of dithetamine. Did subjects develop a resistance to the drug’s effects after repeated exposures?

He split the screen and did a side-by-side of Mr. Wojakowski’s sessions, looking for a decrease of endorphin activity in the second one, but, if anything, it had increased. He did a superimpose and looked at the receptor sites.

“Hi,” Tish said, coming in. “I missed you last night at Happy Hour.”

“Did you see Dr. Lander on your way in?” he asked her, and when Tish shook her head, he said, “I’ll go get her.”

Joanna was just coming out of her office. “I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I was trying to schedule Mrs. Haighton’s interview, but she’s never home. I do nothing but talk to her housekeeper. I’m seriously thinking of asking her to come in and interview. Speaking of which, I put out a new call for volunteers, with new wording and a different contact phone number that Mrs. Bendix and her buddies won’t recognize.”

They went into the lab. Mr. Wojakowski was lying on the examining table, watching Tish start the IV. “Hiya, Doc,” he said, and to Joanna, “I plan to find out what that sound is for ya this time, Doc,” he said to her.

“Can you do that?” Joanna asked, sounding interested.

“I don’t know,” he said, and winked at her. “You never know if you don’t try. Olie Jorgenson used to say that. He was the supply officer on the Yorktown. Always figuring out ways to break the rules. This one time the captain—”

“We’re ready to start,” Richard said. “Tish, can you put on Mr. Wojakowski’s headphones and his mask?” and caught Joanna grinning at him.

Blinded and with white noise coming through his headphones, Mr. Wojakowski was much easier to deal with. Next time he would have to tell Tish to put them on first. “Ready?” Richard said, told Tish to start the sedative and then the dithetamine, and went back to the console to watch the scans.

Mr. Wojakowski went into the NDE-state almost immediately, and Richard watched the orange-and-red flare of activity in the temporal lobe, the hippocampus, the random firings in the frontal cortex. He focused in on the endorphin receptor sites. No decrease there. All the sites that had been activated in the previous sessions were orange or red, and there were several new ones.

Mr. Wojakowski’s session lasted three minutes. “I pinned that noise down for ya, Doc,” he said to Joanna as soon as the monitoring period was over and Tish had removed his electrodes.

“You did?”

“I told ya I would,” he said. “It reminds me of the time—”

“Start at the beginning,” Joanna interrupted, helping him sit up.

“Okay, I’m lying there with my eyes closed, and all of a sudden I hear a sound, and I stop and listen hard, I’m in the tunnel trying to think what it reminds me of, and after a minute it comes to me. It sounds like the time my wing got shot up, at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Did I ever tell you about that?” he said. “We were going after the Shoho, and a Zero came after me—”

“And the noise you heard in the tunnel sounded like a plane’s wing being hit with bullets? Can you describe the sound?” Joanna asked hastily, trying to stop him, but he was already well launched on his story.

“My copilot and my gunner both bought it in the attack, and my left wing’s all shot up. I’m trying to nurse her back to the Yorktown, but I’m low on gas, and when I finally spot her, there are Zeroes everywhere, and the Old Yorky’s got a fire in her stern. Well, hell, I don’t have enough gas to come in on, let alone take on a bunch of Zeroes, and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to land when, blam!” He clapped his age-freckled hands together sharply. “The Yorktown takes one right down the middle, and I stop worrying about how I’m going to land because in a couple of minutes, there isn’t going to be a carrier to land on. Smoke’s pouring out of her midsection, and she’s starting to list, so I get as far away as I can and ditch her in the water, and when I make it ashore on Malakula the next day, the natives tell me they heard the Japs saying she sank during the night.”

“I thought you said the Yorktown sank at Midway,” Joanna said.

“She did. She hadn’t sunk. She’d limped back to Pearl for repairs, but I didn’t know that. That was some deal, I’ll tell you. She goes limping in, leaking oil like a sieve, and they put her in dry dock and—”

Oh, no, Richard thought, he’s off on another story. He looked at Joanna, trying to signal her to ask another question, but her eyes were on Mr. Wojakowski.