Passage

“She sounded fine when I talked to her,” Richard said, “at three. And four. And four-thirty. And six. Did you know the inhabitants of Pompeii were suffocated by ash and poisonous gases? With, I might add, very impressive sound effects.”

“I can imagine,” Joanna said, smiling. “I need to go see her.” She glanced at her watch. Eight o’clock. It was late, but she’d better at least go say hi, or Maisie might insist on waiting up for her. “I don’t suppose she’d be willing to wait till tomorrow morning, would she?”

“I doubt it. She said she’d been trying to page you all afternoon.”

That’s who paged me when I was in the library, Joanna thought, and felt a flash of guilt and fear, like the one she’d felt in the walkway with Barbara. Like the one the captain of the Californian must have felt when he realized the Titanic had gone down.

“She told me to tell you that you were supposed to come see her immediately,” Richard said, “that she had something important to tell you.”

“Did she say what it was?”

“No. My guess would be that it has something to do with Mount Vesuvius. Did you know the archaeologists found the body of a dog? It had struggled all the way to the end of its chain before it died, trying to stay on top of the falling ash.”

“You’d think somebody would have unchained it instead of just leaving it there with a volcano erupting,” Joanna said.

“Maisie thought so, too,” he said. “She was pretty incensed about it, also that it didn’t have a dog tag.”

“A dog tag?” Joanna said, frowning.

“So we’d know what its name was,” he said. “I told her its name was Fido, that all Roman dogs were named Fido.”

“Did she believe you?”

“Are you kidding? This is Maisie we’re talking about.”

Joanna nodded. “I’d better go at least check in with her so she won’t think I’ve forgotten her.” She rubbed her forehead tiredly. She was getting a headache, probably because she hadn’t had anything to eat for hours. I’ll stop by for a minute, and then I’m going home, she thought.

“Before you go see Maisie, I want to show you something,” Richard said. He led the way up to the lab. “You were right about the Titanic. It wasn’t a random memory.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No,” he said, stopping at the door and unlocking it. “I’ve just been up conferring with Dr. Jamison. After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the NDEs not being varied enough to support a theory of randomness,” he opened the door and switched on the lights, “and I decided I should take another look at the synapse firings in the frontal cortex.” He walked over to the console and switched it on. “And when I did, I noticed something interesting.” He began typing in commands. “Are you familiar with Dr. Lambert Oswell’s work?”

Joanna shook her head.

“He’s done extensive research on long-term memory, mapping L+R patterns,” Richard said. “When you ask a subject a straightforward question, like, ‘Who won the Battle of Midway?’ you get a fairly simple L+R pattern.”

“Unless you’re Mr. Wojakowski,” Joanna said, “in which case it reminds you of a story.”

Richard grinned. “Or a whole novel. Anyway,” he said, typing, “the pattern looks like this.” He called up a series of scans. “See how the neural firings very quickly become localized? That’s the mind zeroing in on the target, as Mr. Wojakowski would say. Now, no two people would have the same pattern for ‘Who won the Battle of Midway?’ because not only is there no particular storage location for a given memory, but the same memory may be stored in any number of categories: World War II, islands, Pacific Ocean, or words beginning with M, to name just a few. The pattern’s not even always the same for a given question. Oswell asked identical questions at intervals of three months and got different L+R patterns each time. But,” he said, “he was able to come up with mathematical formulas for the patterns that make it possible for us to tell if a pattern is an L+R or something else.”

He typed some more, and the right-hand scan disappeared and was replaced by another one. “The pattern’s different, and so is the formula, for a question like ‘What is the Yorktown?’ ”

Or, “What was it Mr. Briarley said that day in class?” Joanna thought, watching the neural pathways wink on and off, red to green, yellow to blue, blossoming like fireworks and then fading out. He had been sitting on the edge of his desk, talking about what? Macbeth? Subjunctive clauses? “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?

“If I ask a question like ‘What is the Yorktown?’ — assuming you’re not Mr. Wojakowski — the L+R pattern involves the selection and discarding of possibilities and is much more complex. It’s also broader, since it’s searching through a whole variety of memories for the information. Is it a place? A battle? The name of a movie? A racehorse? The pattern has a much higher degree of apparent randomness.”