Free Passage by Connie Willis Page B

afterlife was real, and I could just imagine what would happen if I showed up with photographic proof.” He moved his spread hand through the air, as if displaying a headline: “ ‘Scientist Says Near-Death Experience Real.’ ”
    “No, no,” Joanna said, “ ‘Scientist Takes Photo of Heaven,’ with an obviously faked picture of the pearly gates superimposed on a diagram of the brain.”
    “Exactly,” Richard said, “and besides, it didn’t have anything to do with the mapping project I was working on. So I documented the scans and Mr. O’Reirdon’s NDE account and stuck them in a drawer. Then, two years later, I was reading about a study showing the effects of psychoactive drugs on temporal-lobe activity. There was a photo of an fPET scan of a patient on dithetamine, and I thought, That looks familiar, and got out Mr. O’Reirdon’s scans. They showed the same pattern.”
    “Dithetamine?” Joanna said.
    “It’s a drug similar to PCP,” Richard said, fumbling in his lab coat pockets, and Joanna wondered if he was going to come up with a vial full of the drug. He pulled out a roll of spearmint Life Savers. “After-dinner mint?” he said, offering Joanna the roll. She took one.
    “It doesn’t produce PCP’s psychotic side effects,” Richard said, peeling back the paper covering the Life Savers, “or its high, but it does cause hallucinations, and when I called the doctor who conducted the study and asked him to describe them, he said his subjects reported floating above their bodies and then entering a dark tunnel with a light at the end of it and a radiant being standing in the light. And I knew I was on to something.”
    To be able to find out what happened after death was something people had always been fascinated with, as witness the popularity of spiritualism and Mr. Mandrake’s books. Nobody’d ever figured out a scientific way to do it, though, unless you counted Harry Houdini, whose attempt to communicate with his wife from beyond the grave had failed, and Lavoisier.
    Sentenced to die on the guillotine, the great French chemist had proposed an experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis that the beheaded retained consciousness after death. Lavoisier had said he would blink his eyes for as long as he retained consciousness, and he had. He had blinked twelve times.
    But it might have been nothing more than a reflex action, like that of chickens running around with their heads cut off, and there had been no way to verify what had happened. Until now. “So your project involves giving patients dithetamine and putting them under a RIPT scan,” Joanna said. “And then interviewing them?”
    “Yes, and they’re reporting tunnels and lights and angels, all right, but I don’t know if they’re the same kind of phenomena NDEers experience, or if it’s a totally different type of hallucination.”
    “And that’s what you’d want me for,” Joanna asked, “to interview your subjects and tell you if I thought their accounts matched those of people who’d had an NDE?”
    Richard nodded. “And I’d want you to obtain a detailedaccount of what they’ve experienced. Their subjective experience is an indicator of which brain areas are being stimulated and which neurotransmitters are involved. I really need your NDE interviewing expertise on the project,” Richard said. “The accounts I’ve been able to get from my subjects haven’t been very enlightening.”
    “Then they must be NDEs,” Joanna said. “Unless Mr. Mandrake’s been telling them what to say, NDEers are notoriously vague, and if you try to press them for details, you run the risk of influencing their testimony.”
    “Exactly,” Richard said, “which is why I need you. You know how to ask questions that aren’t leading, and you have experience with NDEs. Except for the core elements, I have no way of knowing how the dithetamine hallucinations compare to real NDEs. And I think it would be useful to you, too,” he