“Are you sure he said he was in Pearl Harbor while the ship was being repaired?” Richard asked. “Maybe he was just speaking generally—” but she was shaking her head violently.
“He also told me he was on board the Yorktown when he heard Pearl Harbor was bombed,” she said, “and that he was reading the funny papers back home. ‘The Katzenjammer Kids,’ ” she added bitterly. “You can’t tell me he doesn’t remember where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor. An entire generation remembers where it was when it heard about Pearl Harbor!”
“But why would he lie about something like that?”
“I don’t know,” she said unhappily. “Maybe he’s trying to impress us. Maybe he’s listened to so many war stories over the years he’s gotten them all confused. Or maybe it’s more serious than that, Alzheimer’s, or a stroke. All I know is—”
“That we can’t use him,” Richard said. “Shit.”
Joanna nodded. “I went back and checked the transcripts and then the tapes. They’re full of discrepancies. According to Mr. Wojakowski, he was”—she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and read from it—“a pilot, a gunner’s mate, a pharmacist’s mate on burial detail, a semaphore flagman, and an airplane mechanic. I also checked the movie he said was playing the Saturday night before Pearl Harbor was bombed. The Desperadoes wasn’t made until 1943.”
She wadded up the paper. “I feel so stupid I didn’t catch this sooner. Being able to tell whether people are telling the truth or confabulating is what I do for a living, but I honestly thought—his body language, the irrelevant details…” She shook her head wonderingly. “I am so sorry. You hired me to spot this kind of thing, and I was completely fooled.”
“At least you caught it when you did.” He looked at her. “Do you think he lied about what he saw in his NDEs, too?” and, at the look on Joanna’s face, “Don’t worry, I know he has to go. I just wondered.”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said, shaking her head, “and there’s no way to tell without outside confirmation. Some of the stories he told about the Yorktown were true. I checked them out before I came to talk to you. There really was a Jo-Jo Powers who ‘laid his bomb right on the flight deck’ and was killed doing it, and they really did repair the Yorktown and get it back to Midway in time for the battle. It was what saved the day, because the Japanese navy thought it had been sunk.”
“But there’s no way to get outside confirmation on an NDE,” Richard finished. “Except the scans, which can’t tell us what the subject saw.”
“I am so sorry,” Joanna said. “All I’ve done since I joined this project is decimate your subject list, and then, when I should have caught—”
“You did catch it,” Richard said. “That’s the important thing. And you caught it in time, before we published any resuits. Don’t worry about it. We’ve still got five subjects. That’s more than enough—” He stopped at her expression.
“We only have four,” she said unhappily. “Mr. Pearsall called. His father died, and he has to stay in Ohio to arrange the funeral and settle his affairs.”
Four. And that was including Mr. Sage, who even Joanna couldn’t get anything out of. And Mrs. Troudtheim.
“What about Mrs. Haighton?” he said. “Have you been able to set up an interview yet?”
She shook her head. “She keeps rescheduling. I don’t think we should count on her. We’re just one item on her very long list of social activities. How’s the authorization on the new volunteers coming?”
“Slowly. Records said six more weeks,” he said, “if the board votes to continue the project.”
“What do you mean?” Joanna said. “I thought you had funding for six months.”
“I did,” he said. “I got a call from the head of the institute this morning. It seems Mrs. Brightman has been telling everyone what high hopes she has for the project, that we’ve already found indications of supernatural phenomena.”
“Mr. Mandrake,” Joanna said through gritted teeth.
“Bingo,” he said. “So now the head of the institute wants a progress report that he can use to reassure the board we’re doing legitimate scientific research.”
“Didn’t you tell him—?”
“What? That half our subject list turned out to be cranks, plants, and psychics? That there’s something wrong with the process that keeps our best subject from responding?” he said bitterly. “Or did you want me to tell him about the imaginative Mr. Wojakowski? I didn’t know about him when the head called.”
“How long do we have?” Joanna said. “Before we have to file this progress report?”
“Six weeks,” he said. “Oddly enough.”
“You’ve got Amelia’s scans,” she said, “and Mr. Sage’s, and one set of Mr. Pearsall’s. Maybe it won’t take him very long to settle his father’s affairs.”
“Right, and, having just buried his father, he would definitely be an impartial observer,” Richard said, and then felt ashamed of himself. It wasn’t Joanna’s fault. He was the one who’d approved a list of unreliable people.
“I’m sorry.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I just… maybe I should go under.”
“What?” Joanna said. “You can’t.”
“Why not? One, it would give us one more set of scans and one more account for comparison. I’d have to be at least as good an observer as Mr. Sage,” he said, ticking reasons off on his fingers. “Two, I’m not a spy or a crank. And three, I could go under right now, today, instead of waiting for authorization.”
“Why wouldn’t you have to be authorized?”
“Because it’s my project, so it would qualify as self-experimentation. Like Louis Pasteur. Or Dr. Werner Forssmann—”
“Or Dr. Jekyll,” Joanna said. “Talk about something that would jeopardize the credibility of the project. Dr. Foxx experimented on himself, didn’t he?”
“I am not going to suddenly announce I’ve found the soul,” Richard said, “and there’s a long, legitimate tradition of self-experimentation—Walter Reed, Jean Borel, the transplant researcher, J. S. Haldane. All of them experimented on themselves for precisely the same reason, because they couldn’t find willing, qualified subjects.”
“But who would supervise the console? You’d have to train someone to monitor the dosage and the scans. Tish can’t do it.”
“You could—” he started.
“I won’t do it,” she said. “What if something went wrong? It’s a terrible idea.”
“It’s better than sitting around for the next six weeks trying to pry two words out of Mr. Sage and waiting for our funding to be cut,” he said. “Or do you have a better idea?”
“No,” she said unhappily. “Yes. You could send me under.”
“You?” he said, astounded.
“Yes. If one of us is going to go under, I’m the logical choice. One, I don’t need authorization either, since I’m part of the project. Two, I’m not going to see a bright light and assume it’s Jesus. Three, Mr. Mandrake can’t convert me,” she said, ticking off reasons just like he had. “Four, I’m not indispensable during sessions like you are. All I do is hold my tape recorder. I can just as easily turn it on before I go under. Or Tish could turn it on. Or you.”
“But what about afterward? The interview—”
“Five,” she tapped her thumb, “I don’t need to be interviewed. I already know what you want to know. And I’m sure I can do better than ‘It was dark,’ or ‘I felt peaceful.’ I could describe what I saw, the sensations I was feeling.”