The woman flushed slightly. “They just laughed. All of them.”
“Well, there you are.”
“But there is something there. You painted a picture of it.”
“Of course there’s something there. Death. That’s why we say that people who’ve seen it and survived have had a near-death experience. It’s not complicated, Doctor. For some people, all they have to do to get there is to die. Things are going to become complicated when you start sending living people off to find this place and they don’t come back.” Veil paused as Denny Whalen, looking thoroughly shaken, walked through the door. Then he turned to Sharon. “Now that everybody’s here, tell them what they want to know.”
Sharon nodded, said, “I’m a physician, as you know. What you may not know is that I’m a thanatologist — a specialist in death and the dying. For years it has been known that a small percentage of people who ‘die,’ as it were — that is, their hearts stop beating and they are clinically dead — revive and tell a story about being in a corridor and seeing at the end of it a blinding white light and a shadowy figure beckoning to them. At this moment they report feeling completely at peace, with no fear of death. Every single one of them reports desperately wanting to fly into the arms of this figure and be washed in the white light. Those who don’t, who turn back at the last moment from the cusp of death and revive, uniformly do so because of some compelling personal reason, a sense of unfinished business which can be anything from a belief their family can’t survive without them to an unpaid utility bill. The experience has been reported by people from all cultures in societies all over the world, by those who are religious and others who are atheists. The vision is seen by about two percent of the people who’ve had a near-death experience, and we refer to them as Lazarus People. All report feeling remarkably changed, and all had an identical reading on their EKGs a moment or two before they revived. That’s what we call the Lazarus Spike, and we say that they’ve been to the Lazarus Gate.”
The man with the withered arm pointed to Veil’s mural. “That’s what they see? That’s the Lazarus Gate?”
“That’s it,” Veil replied curtly. “Go on, Sharon.”
“Years ago I was in Monterey doing secret research — the Lazarus Project — for an ex-astronaut named Jonathan Pilgrim who’d had a near-death experience and believed he’d found heaven; he was looking for a way to control the experience. I worked in a hospice that was separate from Jonathan’s main operation, where researchers studied individuals with highly developed talents or unusual traits. Veil had been invited to come there as a test subject, and he wound up with me at the hospice because—”
“That’s irrelevant,” Veil interrupted.
Denny Whalen shook his head impatiently, said, “But you said you’d tell us what we wanted to know!”
“There’s nothing of any value for you to learn from my experience. I ended up in Dr. Solow’s hospice by accident because of some funny business with a KGB operative who was monitoring the whole situation at Pilgrim’s Institute. My experience is irrelevant to your purposes because I wasn’t dying when I wound up in the hospice, and I’m not a Lazarus Person.”
The three researchers exchanged puzzled glances, then looked back at Veil. The white-haired woman said, “But there’s your painting...”
“How do you know I didn’t work from some Lazarus Person’s description of the experience?”
“Did you?”
“No. Listen up, folks, because I’m only going to go over this once — and I’m not going to answer any personal questions. Denny here will tell you just how jealously I guard my privacy. The problem is that you’ve already shoved your noses so far into my private business that I have to give you this information to push you back out. By definition, a Lazarus Person is a child or adult who has suffered a very particular near-death experience. A consciousness of the world and a sense of self had been formed in the individual, and it is this perception of the world and self that is so profoundly changed when a person sees the Lazarus Gate and then returns to life. That isn’t what happened to me. I almost died at birth, and a newborn infant has no sense of self or the world. I was born with a cawl, and my parents named me Veil as a kind of prayer. Obviously, I lived, but I suffered — suffer — brain damage. I was left a vivid dreamer, a condition that can best be described as a kind of rupturing of the protective membrane separating dreams from reality. I dream in technicolor and surround sound, and those dreams are every bit as coherent and vivid as what I experience when I’m awake. The condition can drive you insane, and not a few vivid dreamers die in their sleep of heart attacks; vivid dreamers not only get chased by ogres, sometimes they get eaten. Denny here may harbor suspicions that I’m a violent person. I became one because of my vivid dreaming, and I eventually learned to control both the violence and the dreams through painting. Now I can go virtually anywhere I like and do anything I want in my dreams — but I’m still just tucked in bed, dreaming. There’s no astral projection, no telepathy, no precognition, and none of those other wet dreams the Russians were having. Just dreams, with absolutely no practical application — unless you want to count my work as an application. It’s just imagination. That’s how I discovered the Lazarus Gate, which seems to be a kind of shared racial consciousness some people experience as they die. It probably has to do with endorphins and hard-wiring those people have in their brains. The point is that I got there through the back door, in a manner of speaking. I was able to go to the Lazarus Gate and return, literally without losing any sleep over it, because I wasn’t dead, just dreaming. I’d learned to control my vivid dreaming, so I just checked out the neighborhood, then turned around and went home. When I woke up, I started this mural. Anyone you try to send there by artificial means, with your machines and your drugs, isn’t going to be so fortunate. You can manipulate their brain waves to match that pattern, all right, but anybody you kill and try to send there is going to stay dead. That’s all the Lazarus Gate is — death. The drugs you need to use to artificially create that brain-wave pattern block the way back. Your test subjects aren’t going to be sending messages from submarines, or anywhere else, to other test subjects because they’ll very quickly become biologically as well as clinically dead. End of story.”
Again, the researchers exchanged glances. It was Denny Whalen who finally spoke. “What’s on the missing panel in the mural?”
“Jesus, Denny,” Veil said, then sighed and shook his head. “What a great question; it shows how impressed you are by what I just told you. My work is totally irrelevant. We’ve told you everything you need to know. You can interview all the Lazarus People you want about those crackpot KGB theories, and they’ll laugh at your questions like the others have done. You think they’re all involved in some conspiracy? They’ve all survived a similar, profoundly moving experience that has left them with mixed emotions about returning to life, and they’re looking forward to repeating the experience when the time comes. They’re not about to be bothered trying to describe the experience or explain themselves to a bunch of science wonks working for the CIA.”
Now there was a prolonged silence, which was finally broken by Sharon. “The Russians, of course, knew about Lazarus People, and they’d been conducting their own experiments, probably for years. Because of the well-known phenomenon of Lazarus People who are strangers instinctively recognizing what the other is, they theorized that some kind of crude telepathy was taking place, and that this telepathic power was greatest in the few moments before death — as certain people approach the Lazarus Gate. One of their many zany notions was to take two people in different parts of the world, stop their hearts, use drugs to get Lazarus Spikes on the subjects’ EKGs, have them exchange secrets at the Lazarus Gate, then revive them and recover the information. Voilà. An intelligence-gathering system that is instantaneous, and can’t be penetrated. This seems to be your Holy Grail as well. Forget it. As Mr. Kendry has explained, you can’t duplicate the experience in a lab and have the test subject or subjects survive. The KGB probably tried to do it many times, and kept losing people. That’s why they penetrated Jonathan Pilgrim’s operation when they found out I was doing similar research. But I was working with people who were already dying and who fit a profile predicting they might be candidates for experiencing the Lazarus Gate. We never tried the experiment you’re contemplating, because we’d already done computer simulations telling us it couldn’t be done successfully.”