Passage

“Go and find Mr. Briarley,” the bearded man said. “He’ll be able to tell us.”

“Yes, sir,” the servant said. He disappeared into the light.

“Mr. Briarley will be able to explain things,” the bearded man said to the ladies. “In the meantime, you ladies should go back inside where it’s warmer.”

Yes, Joanna thought, back inside where it’s warmer, and was back in the lab, with Tish working reproachfully over her. “You were under forever,” Tish said, taking her blood pressure. She entered Joanna’s vitals on the chart, removed her electrodes, took out her IV, looking at her watch every few minutes.

“Okay,” she said finally. “You can sit up.”

Richard came over. “There definitely was a noise,” Joanna told him. “One of the women heard it. She said it sounded like cloth tearing.”

“Can you put the rest of this stuff away?” Tish said, stowing the IV equipment. “I’m already late.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “What about duration? How long were you there?”

“Ten minutes maybe,” Joanna said, “while the people outside the door talked, and it was outside. The man with the white beard said, ‘You ladies need to go back inside.’ They talked about the noise and then the bearded man told the servant to go find out what had happened.”

“The servant?” Richard asked.

“I’m off,” Tish said. “What time tomorrow?”

“Ten,” Richard said, and Tish went out. “One of them was a servant?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I could see the gold buttons on his uniform and the embroidery on the woman’s white dress, only it wasn’t a dress. It was a nightgown. She had a coat on over it…” She frowned, remembering the woman pulling it tighter around her. “No, not a coat, a blanket, because—”

She stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I know what it is.”

PART 2

“Do you think death could possibly be a boat?”

—Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

19

“Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”

—Last radio message from vulcanologist Dave Johnston on Mount St. Helens

“You know what it is?” Richard said blankly, thinking, Joanna can’t possibly know. Temporal-lobe feelings of recognition were just that, feelings, with no content behind them. But she clearly thought she knew. Her voice was full of suppressed excitement.

“It all fits,” she said, “the floor and the cold and the blanket, even the feeling that I shouldn’t have shut off my pager, that something terrible had happened I should have known about. It all fits.” She looked up at Richard with a radiant expression. “I told you I recognized it but had never been there, and I was right. I told you I knew what it was.”

He was almost afraid to say, “Well, what is it?” When he did, she would look bewildered or angry, or both, the way she had for the last two weeks whenever he’d asked her. It was amazing how strong the conviction of knowledge was with temporal-lobe stimulation, even in someone like Joanna who understood what was causing it, who knew it was artificially induced.

“I told you the sound wasn’t a sound,” she said, “that it was something shutting off, and it was. That was what woke them up, the engines shutting off. Hardly anyone heard the collision. And they went outside on deck to see what had happened—”

“On deck?”

“Yes, and it was bitterly cold. Most of them had just thrown a coat or a blanket on over their nightclothes. It was after midnight and they’d already gone to bed. But not the woman with the piled-up hair. She and her husband must still have been up. They were wearing evening clothes,” she said thoughtfully, as if she were puzzling all this out as she spoke. “That’s why she was wearing white gloves.”

“Joanna—”

“The third-floor walkway is recessed, with a step at the end that makes it look like it’s curving up,” she said. “And your lab coat.”

“Joanna, you’re not making any sense—”

“But it does make sense,” she said. “A stoker came up behind Jack Phillips and tried to steal his lifejacket right off him, and he didn’t notice. He was so intent on sending the SOSs, and—”

“SOS? Lifejackets?” Richard said. “What are you talking about, Joanna?”

“What it is,” she said. “I told you I knew what it was, and I did.”

“And what was it?”

“I knew the word palace had something to do with it. That’s what they called it, a floating palace.”

“What they called what?”

“The Titanic.”

He was so surprised by the answer, by any answer, that he simply gaped at her for a moment.

“I told you it was someplace I recognized but had never been,” she said.

“The Titanic”