“What did she say?” Richard asked sharply.
“ ‘Passed away,’ ” Tish said. “I think she’s awake.”
“She can’t be,” Richard said, and Joanna felt her sleep mask being removed.
She opened her eyes. “I am,” she said, “but I didn’t say ‘passed away.’ I said ‘passageway.’ I went in by mistake. I didn’t realize it was my passage.” She tried to sit up. “It was the other end of it. I was—”
“Lie still,” Tish said, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around Joanna’s arm. “I haven’t even taken your vitals yet.”
“I wouldn’t have gone in it if I’d realized—”
“Lie still,” Tish said. Joanna obeyed, waiting for Tish to finish monitoring her and begin unhooking the electrodes and the IV.
“Do you think it was because of the lowered dosage?” Tish asked, untaping the IV needle and sliding it out.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “It was well above the threshold level.”
“What happened?” Joanna asked, twisting her head around to see Richard.
“You kicked out,” Tish said. “Just like Mrs. Troudtheim.”
“Kicked out?” Joanna said, bewildered. “But I couldn’t have. I was all over the—” She looked at Tish. “I was all over. I was there a long time.”
Richard helped her to a sitting position. “How long?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said, trying to think. She’d gone up to the Boat Deck and talked to Greg Menotti and then had the conversation with Mr. Briarley. How long had that taken? And then they’d walked down to the Grand Staircase—
“Oh, I have something to tell you,” she said. “About what I saw. It’s definitely the… what we discussed before.”
“How long?” he repeated as if he hadn’t heard her.
“An hour at least.”
“An hour?” Tish blurted.
“You have a continuous memory of events?” Richard asked. “Not fragmented flashes?”
“No. It was just like the other times. Everything happened in sequence.”
“What about time dilation?”
She shook her head. “Nothing was speeded up or slowed down. It all happened in real time.” Only obviously it hadn’t. “How long was I under?”
“Eight seconds,” Richard said. “How long was it compared to the other times?”
“Longer,” she said promptly.
“Then that and Mr. Sage’s NDE confirm there’s no correlation between subjective time and elapsed time,” he said, and Joanna thought suddenly of Lavoisier. How long had he really been conscious? And how much time had elapsed for him between each blink?
“Was it a complete NDE or did it cut off in the middle?” Richard was asking.
“Both,” Joanna said, wishing Tish would finish unhooking her so she could explain. “I was trying to find Mr. Briarley. He was going to the post office, and I was trying to catch up with him, and I started down this passage—”
“Post office?” Tish said. “I thought you were supposed to see heaven.”
“—and I didn’t realize till I was already in it that it was the same one, and then it was too late. I was already back in the lab.”
“So the ending was different?” Richard said eagerly.
“Yes and no. I came back through the same passage, but it was more sudden than the other times. There was more of an abrupt cutoff.”
Richard went over to the console and typed rapidly, and then looked up at the screen. “Just what I thought. Your last scan is a dead-on match for Mrs. Troudtheim’s.” He began typing again. “I need you to get your account recorded and transcribed as soon as possible.”
“I will,” Joanna said, “and I want to talk to you about what I saw.”
He nodded absently, staring at the screens. Joanna gave up and went into the dressing room, pulled on her blouse and jacket and put on her shoes, and then came back out. Richard was still typing. Tish was winding up the monitor cords. She was nearly done putting things away. I’ll wait till she’s gone and then tell him about the Grand Staircase, Joanna thought, and pulled a chair over to the far corner of the lab, sat down, and switched the recorder on.
Of course he’ll probably say I confabulated it from the conversation we had, she thought, and began recording. “Joanna Lander, session six, March 2. I heard a noise, and I was in the passage,” she said softly into it. She described her attempts to find the Grand Staircase, her fruitless conversation with Greg Menotti, her going out onto the Promenade Deck. “I walked along the deck to where the light from the bar—” she said, and thought of something.
She had said an hour, and it had definitely seemed that long, but an hour after the collision the ship would have had a definite list. Maybe there had been time dilation, after all, or maybe that was another discrepancy that meant something.
I need to tell Richard that, she thought, and looked over at the console. He was taking papers out of the printer. “Joanna,” he said, “I want to show these readouts to Dr. Jamison and see what she thinks,” and walked out before she could turn off her recorder.
She had half stood up. She sat down again, frustrated, and began recording where she’d left off, describing the man dealing out cards, the library, seeing the man at the writing desk. “And when he looked up, I saw it was Mr. Briarley, my high school English teacher, but it wasn’t the Mr. Briarley I’d seen five days ago. He remembered my name and which class I was in, and he looked well and happy—”
Well and happy. “My mother looked well and happy,” Ms. Isakson had said, “not like the last time I’d seen her. She got so thin there at the end, and so yellow,” and Joanna had thought, That’s how NDEers always describe their dead relatives, with their limbs and their faculties restored.
Mr. Briarley remembered who Kit had been named for, he had been able to quote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
He’s dead, she thought, and a current of fear ran through her. He died. That’s why I saw him on board. The stories Mr. Mandrake told me about seeing someone in an NDE and then finding out they’d died are true.
No, they aren’t, Joanna thought, glaring at the recorder in her hand. You know perfectly well that none of those cases were documented, that the subjects never even mentioned having seen the person until after they’d had outside confirmation of the death, like those mediums who claimed they’d “seen” W. T. Stead at two-twenty on the night the Titanic went down. Not a single one had come forward with their claim until after they’d seen Stead’s name listed among the lost. Those stories aren’t true. Mr. Briarley’s not dead. You saw him because you were thinking about him, because you were worrying about him. Then why didn’t I see Vielle? Or Maisie? And why did I see Greg Menotti?
Because he’s dead, she thought, the dead are who’s on board, and felt the shiver of fear again. I have to find out. I have to call Kit.
But if she called, and something had happened to Mr. Briarley, she’d be in exactly the same situation as Mr. Mandrake’s NDEers. She’d have no proof she hadn’t had advance knowledge of his death, that she hadn’t talked to Kit first and then confabulated Mr. Briarley’s presence in the library.
I have to tell Richard about my NDE first, before I call Kit, she thought, but there was no telling when he’d be back. She could try to find him, but even if she did, he hadn’t been with her the whole time. For all he knew, she might have received a call from Kit while he was out of the lab.
Tish could attest to the fact that she hadn’t left the lab, or received or made any calls, but Richard didn’t want her to know about the Titanic. He’s right, Joanna thought. If Mr. Mandrake were to find out about this… she could see the Star headlines already: “I See Dead People! Scientist Receives Message from Afterlife.”