And speaking of time, what time was it? Ten to one. Just enough time to go ask Vielle what similarities she’d found in the transcripts and then get over to Mandrake’s office.
He went down to third. The walkway had a big sandwich board with “Closed for Repairs” on it. They must have run out of yellow tape, he thought. He’d have to go down to the basement and outside. He started back down the hallway. The pager in his pocket began to beep, a high-pitched, urgent ringing. Maisie’s drill, he thought, pulling it out of his pocket. He pressed the red button. “Six-west,” it said, and under it, the time: 12:58.
Six-west. What’s she doing down there? he thought, and then, the readout sinking in, 12:58. “She said two-ten,” he said and took off running, up to third, across the walkway, up the service stairs.
He made it up to sixth in three minutes and nineteen seconds and flung himself, out of breath, against the nurses’ station. “Quick. Maisie Nellis. Where is she?”
“Down there, second door,” the surprised nurse said, and it still didn’t occur to him, tearing down the hall, that the nurse wouldn’t have been just standing there in an emergency, that there was no code alarm blaring.
He burst into the room, where Maisie lay quietly on a gurney, looking at her pager.
“Did you talk to Mr. Mandrake yet?” she asked eagerly.
“How—could—I?” he said, between panting breaths. “You paged—me. What’s the idea?” He slumped into a chair next to the wall.
“The drill,” she said.
“The drill was supposed to be at two-ten, not twelve fifty-eight.”
“The two-ten was a code,” she said. “They brought me here for some tests, and I thought it was a good idea to do the pager when you didn’t know where I was, to see if it worked or not.”
“Well, it worked,” Richard said, “so no more drills. I only want you paging me in a real emergency. Understand?”
“But shouldn’t we practice a few times?” she said, looking longingly at the pager. “So you could get faster?”
I was fast enough, he thought. I got here in under four minutes, from a point in the hospital almost as far away as there is. I made it in time. And had no way to save her when I got here. “No,” he said. “You page me if you code, and only if you code.”
“What if I think I’m going to code and then it turns out I don’t?”
“Then it had better not also turn out that you just wanted to see me to tell me about the Hartford circus fire. I mean it.”
“Okay,” she said reluctantly.
“Okay.” He looked at his watch. One-ten. “I’m late for my appointment with Mandrake. And don’t say, ‘You can’t go yet.’ ”
“I wasn’t going to,” she said indignantly. “I was going to wish you good luck.”
It was going to take a lot more than luck, Richard thought, looking at Mandrake seated behind a polished expanse of desk. “I expected you at one,” Mandrake said, looking pointedly at his watch. “Now, I’m afraid I have another—”
The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Mandrake said and picked it up. “Maurice Mandrake here. A book signing? When?”
Richard looked around the office. It was even more sumptuous than he would have guessed. Huge maroon leather chair, huge mahogany desk, nearly life-sized portrait of himself hanging behind it, bookcase full of copies of The Light at the End of the Tunnel, Persian carpet. It would fit right in on the Titanic, Richard thought.
Mandrake hung up the phone. “I’m afraid we’d better make it another day. At two, I have—”
“This won’t take long,” Richard said and sat down. “You said in your eulogy you spoke to Jo-Dr. Lander the day she was killed.”
Mandrake folded his hands on the desk. “That day, and many times since,” he said.
I can’t do this, Richard thought.
“I see by your expression that you do not believe the dead communicate with the living,” Mandrake said.
If they did, Joanna would have told me what she discovered in Carl Aspinall’s room. “No,” he said.
“That is because you persist in believing only in what you can see on your RIPT scans,” Mr. Mandrake said, and his expression was a smirk. “Dr. Lander, fortunately, came to understand that the near-death experience possessed dimensions that science could never explain. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another appointment—” He started to stand up.
Richard stayed seated. “I need to know what she said that day.”
“Exactly what I said in my eulogy, that she had realized the NDE—or rather the NAE, for that is what she had come to realize it was—was not merely a physical hallucination, but instead a spiritual revelation of the Other Side.”
You’re lying, Richard thought. “What did she say? Her exact words.”
Mandrake leaned back in his chair, his hands on the padded arms. “Why? So you can dismiss her as a crank? I realize it must be difficult, having to face the fact that your partner had reached a different conclusion about the NAE from the one you tried so hard to convince her of.” Mandrake leaned forward. “Luckily, she was not fooled by your scientific,” he put an ugly emphasis on the word, “arguments and found the truth for herself.” He glanced at the door and then looked pointedly at his watch. “I’m afraid that’s all the time I have.” This time he did stand up.
Richard didn’t. “I need to know what she said.”
Mandrake glanced uneasily at the door again. I wonder who this appointment’s with, Richard thought. Obviously someone he doesn’t want me to see. Someone he’s trying to pump about the project? Mrs. Troudtheim? Tish?
“Joanna was on her way to the ER to tell me something,” Richard said. “I’m trying to find out what it was.”
“I should think it was obvious,” Mandrake said, but his eyes had flickered suddenly with something—fear? guilt?
He knows, Richard thought, and, although it made no sense, Joanna did tell him. “No,” he said slowly. “It’s not obvious.”
Mandrake’s eyes flickered again. “She was trying to tell you what she has since told me and Mrs. Davenport, speaking from that afterlife you refuse to believe in, that there are more things in heaven and earth, Dr. Wright, than are dreamt of in your RIPT scans.” He walked around the desk and over to the door. “I’m afraid I can’t give you any more time, Dr. Wright. A gentleman is scheduled—”
A gentleman? Mr. Sage? Good luck getting anything out of him about the project. Or anything else. “I need to know exactly what she said to you,” Richard repeated.
Mandrake opened the door. “If you’d care to make an appointment for another day, we could—”
“Joanna died trying to tell me what it was,” Richard said. “I need to know. It’s important.”
“Very well.” He closed the door and went back to his desk and sat down. “If it’s so important to you.”
Richard waited.
“She said, ‘You were right all along, Mr. Mandrake. I realize it now. The NAE is a message from the Other Side.’ ”
“You bastard,” Richard said, coming out of his chair.
There was a knock on the door, and Mr. Wojakowski leaned in, wearing his baseball cap. “Hiya, Manny,” he said to Mandrake, and then to Richard, “Well, hiya, Doc. Sorry to bust in like this, but I—”
“We’re all finished here,” Mandrake said.
“That’s right,” Richard said. “Finished.” He strode out of the office, past Mr. Wojakowski and down the hall.
“Wait up, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said, catching up to him. “You’re just the guy I wanted to see.”
“It doesn’t look like it,” Richard said, jerking his thumb in the direction of Mandrake’s door. “It looks like he’s the guy you wanted to see, Mr. Wojakowski.”
“Ed,” he corrected. “Yeah, he called me the other day, said he wanted to talk to me about your project. I said I hadn’t worked on it for a while, but he said that didn’t matter, he wanted to talk to me anyway, so I said okay, but I had to talk to you first
and see if it was okay, sometimes the docs don’t want you blabbing about their research, and I’ve been trying ever since to get in touch with you.”
He slapped his knee. “Boy, you sure are a hard guy to get ahold of. I been trying every way I could think of so I could ask you if it was okay. I know you’ve had other stuff on your mind, what with poor Doc Lander and all, but I was about to give up hope of ever getting ahold of you. Like Norm Pichette. Did I ever tell you about him? Got left behind when we abandoned the Yorktown, down in sick bay, and when he comes to, here he is on a ship that’s going down, so he hollers at the Hughes,” he said, cupping his hands around his mouth, “but she’s too far away to hear him, so he tries to think of some way to signal them. He waves his arms like crazy, he screams and whistles and hollers, but nothing works.”
Richard thought of Maisie, trying to signal him, trying to get Nurse Lucille to page him, to let her call, bribing Eugene to carry a message, finally telling her mother about the project as a last resort.
“So then he tries to use the radio,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “but the door to the radio room’s locked. Can you imagine that? Locking the doors on a sinking ship? Who do they think’s gonna get in?”
Locked. Himself, yanking frantically at the locked door, kicking at it, trying to get back to the lab, and Joanna, trying the door to the aft stairway and finding it locked, going down to the mail room to get the key to the locker with the rockets in it. The key. Amelia saying, “I had to find the key.”
“Pichette went all over that ship,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “looking for something he can get their attention with.”
All over the ship. Joanna going up to the Boat Deck, down to the Promenade Deck, along Scotland Road. Running all over. Up to the lab to tell him about Coma Carl, and, when he wasn’t there, up to Dr. Jamison’s office, down to the ER.
And he and Kit and Vielle, running all over, too. Up to Timberline and over to four-east, asking nurses and taxi drivers, mapping stairways, trying to find out where Joanna had gone, who she had talked to. Going over the transcripts and through Mazes and Mirrors, graphing the scans, searching the hospital and their memories and the Titanic, trying everything they could think of.
“Pichette tries everything he can think of,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “He even takes off his shirt and waves it like a flag, but that doesn’t work either, and the ship’s sinking. He’s gotta think of some way to signal ’em before it’s too late.”
Some way to signal them. Mr. Briarley sending up rockets. The quartermaster working the Morse lamp. The wireless operator tapping out messages to the Carpathia and the Californian and the Frankfurt. Messages. The bearded man sending the steward with a message to Mr. Briarley, and the mail clerk dragging sacks of wet letters up to the Boat Deck, and J. H. Rogers writing a note to his sister.
“Messages,” Richard murmured. “It’s about messages.” His NDE had been full of them: the wireless operator taking down the names of the survivors, and the secretary with the telephone to her ear and Joanna’s number on his pager.
Mr. Sage heard a telephone ringing, he thought suddenly. And Mrs. Davenport got a telegram, telling her to come back. “There’s got to be some common thread between all these NDEs,” Kit had said, and this must be it. Messages. The NDEs were all about messages.
But there hadn’t been any telegrams in Amelia Tanaka’s NDE, or rockets, or telephones. There weren’t any messages in it at all, just a test and a locked cupboard full of chemicals. And she had tried one key after another, one chemical after another, trying to find the one that would work.
Like Joanna-he had a sudden vision of the crash team working over her, trying CPR, paddles, epinephrine, trying technique after technique. Looking for something that would work, he thought, and had the feeling Joanna had described, of almost, almost knowing.
“I know it has something to do with the Titanic,” Joanna had said. The Titanic, which had sent up rockets, lowered lifeboats, tapped out Morse code, looking for something that would work.
“So, anyway, I’m standing on the deck of the Hughes, looking down in the water,” Mr. Wojakowski said, but Richard shut his voice out, trying to hold on to the knowledge he nearly had, that was almost within reach.
Morse code. Code. “It was like the labels were written in code,” Amelia had said. And Maisie, gleefully telling him why she’d set the time at two-ten, “I sent it in code.” Code. Chemical formulas and metaphors and “some strange language.” Dots and dashes and “Rosabelle, remember.” Code.
“Tell Richard it’s . . . SOS,” Joanna had said, and he had thought she’d tried to tell him something and failed. But she hadn’t. That was the message. “It’s an SOS.”
An SOS. A message sent out in all directions in the hope that somebody hears it. A message tapped out by the dying brain to the frontal cortex, the amygdala, the hippocampus, trying to get somebody to come to the rescue.
“Pretty damned ingenious, huh?” Mr. Wojakowski was saying.
“What? I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I didn’t hear how he finally got their attention.”
“Sounds like you’re the one needs to sign up for that hearing study,” he said, and slapped Richard on the shoulder. “With a machine gun. See, I’m standing there on the Hughes looking down at the water for Jap subs, and all of a sudden I see these little fountains. ‘Sub!’ I shout, and the lieutenant comes over and looks at it and says, ‘A sub doesn’t make the water fly up like that. That’s a depth charge,’ but I’m looking at the splashes and they don’t look like a depth charge either, they’re in a straight line, and I look to see where they’re coming from, and there’s a guy up on the catwalk, leaning over the railing and firing a machine gun into the water. I can’t hear it, it’s too far, and he knows that, he knows he’s gotta—”
Too far, and the way’s blocked. Half of the synapses have already shut down from lack of oxygen, half the pathways are locked or have “Closed for Repair” signs on them. So the temporal lobe tries one route after another, one chemical after another, carnosine, NPK, amiglycine, trying to find a shortcut, trying to get the signal through to the motor cortex to start the heart, the lungs. “It was really late,” Amelia had said. “All I wanted was to find the right chemical and go home,” and Mrs. Brandeis’s angel had said, “You must return to earth. It is not yet your time.”
“The command to return is in over sixty percent of them,” Joanna had said, but it wasn’t a command. It was a message that had finally gotten through, a chemical that had finally connected, a synapse that had finally fired, like a key turning over in the ignition. The NDE’s a survival mechanism, Richard thought, a last-ditch effort by the brain to jump-start the system. The body’s version of a crash team.
He looked blindly at Mr. Wojakowski, who was still talking. “So we take a boat over to get him and throw him up a ladder,” he said, “but he won’t come, he keeps shouting something down at us, only we can’t hear over the motor. We think he must be in too bad a shape to climb down the ladder, so the first mate sends me up after him, and he is in bad shape, shot in the gut and lost a lot of blood, but that isn’t what he was trying to tell us. Seems there’s another guy down in sick bay, and he’s really in bad shape, unconscious from a skull fracture.” He shook his head. “He’d ’a been a goner if Pichette hadn’t thought of that machine gun.”
Down the hall, a door opened. Richard looked up and saw Mandrake coming. And knew suddenly what Joanna had said to Mandrake. The orderly had said Joanna had laughed, and of course she had. “You were right,” she’d told him. “The NDE is a message.”
But not from the Other Side. From this side, as the brain, going down, made a last valiant effort to save itself, trying everything in its arsenal: endorphins, to block out the pain and fear and clear the decks for action, adrenaline to strengthen the signals, acetylcholine to open up pathways and connectors. Pretty damned ingenious.
But the acetylcholine had a side effect. It increased the associative abilities of the
cerebral cortex, too, and long-term memory, struggling to make sense of the sensations and sights and emotions pouring over it, turned them into tunnels and angels and the Titanic. Into metaphors that people mistook for reality. But the reality was a complex system of signals sent to the hippocampus to activate a neurotransmitter that could jump-start the system.
And I know what it is, Richard thought in a kind of wonder. I’ve been looking right at it all this time. That’s why it was in all of Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDEs and the one where Joanna kicked out. I was looking for an inhibitor, and I was right, theta-asparcine’s not an inhibitor. It’s an activator. It’s the key.
“What are you telling my subject, Dr. Wright?” Mandrake demanded. “That NDEs aren’t real, that they’re nothing but a physical phenomenon?” He turned to Mr. Wojakowski. “Dr. Wright doesn’t believe in miracles.”
I do, Richard thought, I do.
“Dr. Wright refuses to believe that the dead communicate with us,” Mandrake said. “Is that what he was telling you?”
“He wasn’t telling me anything,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “I was telling the doc here about this time on the Yorktown—”
“I’m sure Dr. Wright will let you tell him some other time,” Mandrake said. “I have a very busy schedule, and if we’re going to meet—”
Mr. Wojakowski turned to Richard. “Is it okay if I talk to him, Doc?”
“It’s fine. You tell him anything you want,” Richard said and started for the elevator. He needed to set up tests to see if theta-asparcine could bring subjects out of the NDE-state on its own, or whether it was the combination of theta-asparcine and acetylcholine and cortisol. I need to call Amelia, he thought. She said she’d be willing to go under.
He punched the “up” button on the elevator. I need to look at the scans, and talk to Dr. Jamison. And Maisie’s mother, he thought, and looked back down the hall. Mr. Wojakowski and Mandrake were almost to his office. Richard sprinted after them. “Mr. Wojakowski. Ed,” he said, catching up to them. “What happened to him?”
Passage Page 81