Passage

“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.”

“You could be more specific,” he said thoughtfully. It was a tempting idea. Instead of prying answers out of untrained observers, Joanna would know what to look for, how to describe it. She would be able to tell him whether what she saw was a superimposed vision or a hallucination and what subjects meant when they insisted it wasn’t a dream.

More than that, she’d recognize the sensations for what they were. She’d know that certain effects were due to temporal-lobe stimulation or endorphins, and she could provide valuable information about the processes causing the sensations. She would know—

And that was just the problem. “It won’t work,” he said. “You said yourself a subject shouldn’t have preconceptions about what he was going to experience. You’ve interviewed over a hundred people. You’ve read all the books. How do you know your experience wouldn’t be totally shaped by them?”

“It’s a possibility,” she said. “On the other hand, I’d have the advantage of being on guard. If I found myself in a dark enclosed space I wouldn’t automatically assume it was a tunnel, and if I saw a figure radiating light, I definitely wouldn’t assume it was an angel. I’d look at it—really look at it—and then tell you what I saw, without waiting for you to ask.”

Richard held his hands up in surrender. “You’ve convinced me. If one of us were going under, you’d be the best one,” he said, “but neither of us is going under. We still have four volunteers left, and what we should be doing is concentrating on how to make them more effective.”

“Or present,” Joanna said.

“Exactly. I want you to call Mrs. Haighton and get her in here for a session.”

“I haven’t even interviewed her yet,” Joanna said doubtfully.

“Do it over the phone if you have to. Tell her how much we need her. In the meantime, I’ll work on Mrs. Troudtheim.”

“What about Mr. Sage?”

“We’ll get a crowbar,” he said and grinned at her.

Joanna left to call Mrs. Haighton, and he went back to comparing Mrs. Troudtheim’s data with the scans of the other subjects just prior to the NDE-state, looking for differences, but they were identical. Joanna had said some patients didn’t have NDEs. He wondered which ones.

He went down to her office to ask her. She was just coming out, wearing her coat. “Where are you going?” he asked her.

“To the Wilshire Country Club,” she said in an affected, aristocratic voice. “I couldn’t get Mrs. Haighton on the phone, but her housekeeper told me she was setting up for the Junior Guild Spring Fling, whatever that is, so I’m going to see if I can catch her there.”

“Spring Fling?” Richard said. “It’s the middle of winter.”

“I know,” Joanna said, pulling on her gloves. “Vielle called. She says it’s snowing outside. I’ll be back in time for Mrs. Troudtheim’s session.” She started walking toward the elevator.

“Wait a minute,” Richard said. “I need to ask you a question about patients who have NDEs versus patients who don’t. Is there a pattern to it?”

“Not a reliable one,” she said, pressing the “down” button. “NDEs mostly occur in certain types of death— heart attacks, drownings, car accidents, childbirth complications—but that may be just because patients with those sorts of traumas are more likely to be revived than patients with, say, a stroke or traumatic internal injuries.” The elevator opened.

“And the patients who don’t have NDEs tend to have coded from other causes?”

She nodded. “But of course we don’t know if they didn’t have an NDE, or if they had one but simply didn’t remember it,” she said, and got in the elevator. “Remember, before techniques for recording REM sleep, it was thought that certain people didn’t dream.”

The door shut. Heart attacks, drownings, car accidents, Richard thought, staring blindly at the door. All traumatic events, with a high level of epinephrine. And cortisol.

He went back to the lab and called up Mrs. Troudtheim’s analysis and looked at the cortisol level. It was high, but no higher than Amelia Tanaka’s during her fourth session, the one in which she had been under nearly five minutes. The epinephrine was slightly lower, but no lower than Mr. Sage’s, and he’d had no trouble achieving an NDE-state, even if he was maddeningly vague about describing it.

Maybe the problem was a lack of receptor sites. He brought up Mrs. Troudtheim’s scans and started through them, focusing on the hippocampus. Yellow activity along the hippocampus edges, where there were large numbers of cortisol receptor sites. He went forward through the frames and then backward, mapping the areas of activity. The anterior hippocampus went from yellow to orange and then red. He clicked back another single frame, looking at the edges and then at the epinephrine receptor sites in the—

He stared at the screen, clicked on “stop,” made it go back three frames, and then forward again to the same frame, and stared at the screen again. He clicked on “side-by-side,” and called up the standard and then Amelia Tanaka’s scan.

There was no mistaking it. “Well, at least I know it’s not insufficient epinephrine,” he muttered. Because what he was looking at was unmistakably the brain in an NDE-state.

He did a superimpose with Mr. O’Reirdon’s scan to make sure, but it was already obvious. Mrs. Troudtheim