The Mortal Coil

Tom Riley's plea at Whit's bedside goes unanswered, and suddenly the room is full of shouting - Doc Morton calls for oxygen, adrenaline, the paddles. But Whit himself feels fine. He is standing right there, asking Tom why everyone is panicking, and nobody can hear him. Then a gentle voice says, "Hello, John." It is Jenny, his wife, who died years ago. Whit cannot tell whether he is dreaming, still inside the Imagination Station, or dead, and Jenny will not say. When he asks if this is supposed to be heaven, she answers with the scripture he already knows: "Eye hasn't seen, nor has the ear heard, nor has entered into man's imagination what God has prepared for those who love him." She can tell him nothing he does not already know, but there is more for him to see.

At the hospital, Whit's heart has steadied, yet he stays unconscious - a coma, for lack of a better word. His grown children, Jana and Jason, arrive, and Doc Morton urges them to talk to him, since hearing their voices might draw him out. Jason keeps things light and speaks to his father as if he could answer. Jana cannot bear to look. She has always said the inventions would hurt him one day, and at his bedside her anger dissolves into something truer: she is sorry for their arguments, she does not care anymore about reasons or who said what. "Come back if only because I love you."

Eugene, meanwhile, has vanished. When Jason looks over the Imagination Station, its buttons are flashing and the display reads "System interrupt" - someone has run Whit's death program instead of erasing it as Tom instructed. Tom and Connie realize the truth at the same moment: Eugene tried it himself, and Eugene is not a Christian. Connie pounds on his dorm room door until he gives in. In the darkened room he describes what the program showed him - no reunion, no beauty, but a loneliness beyond anything he has ever felt: "I was alone, Connie, utterly alone in a burning blackness." Connie tells him the program was horrible for him for the same reason it seemed wonderful to Whit. For Whit, death means heaven. For someone who has never accepted Christ, it means isolation and separation. "If Whit got a tiny taste of heaven, then maybe you got a tiny taste of hell." Eugene asks if she really believes that. With all her heart, she says. Then, he decides, she had better explain it all to him in detail.

In the dream, Jenny leads Whit through their old house to the room of Jerry, the son they lost in Vietnam, and Whit gets to hold his wife and boy again. But soon Jenny tells him it is time to go - not for them, for him. Whit protests that it is beautiful here, and Jerry turns Whit's own teaching back on him: this world is just a dirty window, a dim reflection of what is to come. Why return to a reflection? "Because you're needed there, John," Jenny says. None of this is real, and the true reunion ahead will be better than even he can imagine.

Whit wakes up thirsty after twenty-four hours, to the joy of everyone around his bed. Jana wishes he would promise to dismantle the Imagination Station, but he refuses - the machine is only what people make of it, and he simply went too far, tampering with things that were not his business. Getting lost in imagination, memories, even dreams of the future is a limited experience; as he puts it, "There are greater adventures to be found in the real world," and he wants out of the hospital to get on with them. The last word belongs to Eugene. Back in his room, Connie asks what he is going to do now. "What indeed, Miss Kendall?" he says. "What indeed?"