DEATHPOINT
Marshall Goldberg, MD


Part One: the present
Chapter One

Deathpoint. Though there obviously existed such a moment, a final, irreversible passage from life to death, the word itself was a neologism, appearing in no English language dictionary. Yet once news of the Juliana deathpoint experiment leaked out--and because of its startling and macabre nature this was not long in coming--people the world over had no trouble grasping its meaning. They first wanted to know, was it true? and shown the proof in what would become one of the most watched videotapes of all time, their next question was, Whose idea was it? Who had the audacity, the resources, to carry out such a ghoulish project, and why in so remote a place as Juliana?

As far as anyone could determine, especially Lara Hellinger, the TV reporter who had an early lead on the story and dug deeply into its origins, its impetus arose out of a conversation two old men happened to have on a sunny summer's afternoon. Incredibly, that's how the deathpoint project, the most controversial of the last few years of the twentieth century, began.

Two men in their eighties, both in a sad, subdued mood over the loss of people close to them, were sitting in the shade of a porch in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, musing about the mystery of death as had virtually everyone who ever lived done before them. But with a telling difference: one had knowledge of the human brain and body gleaned from sixty years of experience and constant study; the other, enormous wealth and power: two essential ingredients to what they had begun to contemplate. The third, motivation, came from their advanced age, and the fourth in the form of an extraordinary instruction in a living will written by the kin of one of them--though it was never actually carried out.

The taller of the two men was Dr. Frank Blackman, patriarch of a remarkable medical family. Until the recent death of Frank's son-in-law, psychiatrist Ben Montgomery, nine of its members had been medical doctors. Now, there were eight, all affiliated in one way or another with their breeding ground, Jefferson Medical College.

Frank had been a pioneer surgeon in his day, and before that a disease-tracking epidemiologist for the U.S. Army during World War II, chasing outbreaks of hepatitis and typhus and other deadly infections from North Africa to Italy. Like most veteran surgeons, Frank could have populated a small cemetery with his failures--the gunshot wounds and cancers and pus-filled gall bladders--but only a tiny corner of it with his mistakes. It was in fact intuition as much as ability that set him apart. Frank had seen death in almost all its guises by now and one--a phantom of sorts he dubbed the Reaper--that he believed might be special to him because he'd somehow become attuned to it.

In a country where, according to a Time magazine poll, seventy percent of its citizens believed in the existence of angels, Frank Blackman didn't consider his locker room conversations with a taunting spirit, the representation of death as surgical odds-maker, all that schizoid. Except for certain family members, he had told no one about the Reaper, certainly none of his patients. He could just imagine their reactions, and fast exits, were they to know he depended on death itself to advise him during their operation. And as his cardiac surgeon son, Brian, had long argued, before becoming a believer himself, what Frank called the Reaper might be nothing more than a sixth sense he'd developed over the years to warn him of impending danger. Frank did not totally dismiss that possibility; he knew what a trickster the mind could be. But he had great difficulty believing it could conjure up something that seemed so real, especially since he never knew when the phantom would appear or what it would say.

Z.Z. Mellon, one of the world's wealthiest men and Frank's friend for most of his adult life, had no such supernatural beliefs, his preoccupation's being more earthbound. Until recently Mellon had wasted little time thinking about matters he could not affect, nor turn to his advantage, through the vast fortune he controlled. Even at eighty-three and knowing, through the doctors he'd consulted, that cancer cells had sprouted in his prostate gland, he had decided to let them be, refusing to take any of the steps necessary to determine how far they might have spread or allow any interventions, castration, in particular, to contain them. Though sex was now but a distant memory, Mellon felt he needed all the hormones his testicles could produce to conduct business. Nonetheless, the imminent death of his chief geologist and close friend for almost half a century, Barney West, a patient in Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and the reason why Mellon was now in Philadelphia, had forced him to concentrate more than he wanted to on his own mortality. Which was why he had decided to visit his old doctor-friend, Frank Blackman, on this warm July day.

Frank was sitting in his backyard, letting the heat from the mid-afternoon sun bake some of the soreness out of his arthritic old bones when Z.Z. Mellon appeared at the front door of his spacious suburban home. Mellon's visit came during a relatively peaceful period for the Blackman clan--no small respite for a family frequently involved in medical and other types of emergencies and rife with marital discord. Yet Frank's