Passage

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.

“—says, ‘How long to fix her?’ and the harbormaster says, ‘Six months, maybe eight,’ ” and the captain says, ‘You got three days.’ ” Mr. Wojakowski slapped his knee in glee. “Three days!”

“And did they fix her in three days?” Joanna asked.

“You bet they did. Fixed her bulkheads and welded her boilers and sent her off to Midway. Raised her from the dead in three days flat. Hell, those Japs looked like they’d seen a ghost when she showed up and sank three of their carriers.”

He slapped his knee again. “But I didn’t know any of that then. I thought she was sunk for sure, and so was I. The Japs were already on Malakula. I talked the natives into smuggling me across to Vanikalo, but the Jap navy was landing on all those islands, so I swiped a dugout canoe and some coconuts, and set out for Port Moresby. I figured dying at sea’s better than being caught by Japs. And that’s just about what I did. I ran out of food and water, and sharks started circling, and I was thinking, I’m done for, when I see something on the horizon.”

He leaned forward, pointing past Joanna. “It’s a ship, and at first I think I’m seeing things, but it keeps coming, and as it gets closer, I see it’s got an island. I can see the masts and the antennas on it. Well, the only thing with an island like that is an aircraft carrier, and if it’s a Jap carrier I better get the hell out of there. I try to make out if there’s a rising sun on her flag, but I can’t tell, the sun’s right behind her island, and I can’t see a damn thing except that she’s coming straight at me. And then I see her hull number, CV-5, and I know it’s the Yorktown, risen up right out of the grave. I knew right then nothing and nobody could sink her.”

“But she sank at the Battle of Midway, didn’t she?” Joanna asked.

He glared at her. “Not before she sank three carriers and won the war, she didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “All ships sink sooner or later. But not that day. Not that day. That day she looked like she was going to stay afloat forever. I never seen a more beautiful sight in my life.” He gazed past them, remembering, his freckled face alight.

“I thought she was sunk, that I was never going to see her again. I thought I was done for, and here she was, plowing through the water toward me, her flags flying and every sailor on board leaning over the railing of the flight deck, all in their dress whites, waving their hats in the air and hollerin’ for me to come aboard. It was the best day of my life!” He beamed at Joanna, and then at Richard. “The best damned day of my life!”

It took Joanna another ten minutes to get Mr. Wojakowski back on track enough to tell them the tunnel was really a passageway and that there was a door at the end of it, with a bright light and people dressed in white when he opened it. “The light kept bouncing off ’em till I couldn’t see a damn thing.”

Joanna asked him how he’d felt during the NDE. “Felt? I don’t know that I felt anything. I was too busy looking at things. It was like when the Japs hit us that first time at Coral Sea. I remember thinking I should be scared outta my pants, only I wasn’t. Mac McTavish was standing next to me, and—” It took all of Joanna’s skill and another ten minutes to stop him from going off into another story, and they never did get an answer.

“Sorry,” she apologized after Mr. Wojakowski finally left. “I didn’t want to risk asking him again.”

“It’s too bad his account of his NDE couldn’t be as colorful as that story about the Yorktown rescuing him,” Richard said.

“He actually told us quite a bit,” Joanna said. “His being reminded of being attacked by Zeroes indicates he did feel some fear, even though he said he didn’t.”

“He was also reminded of the best damned day of his life,” Richard said. “He commented that the light was brighter than last time. Did Amelia Tanaka say anything about comparative brightnesses or radiance in her NDEs?”