"THE TRUE MEANING OF 'SUICIDE' IS TO TURN AGAINST THE NEXT LEVEL WHEN IT IS BEING OFFERED."

The Heaven's Gate victims did more than leave suicide notes; they left suicide press kits. One of the first to receive the materials was a former cult member using the name Rio D'Angelo (police say he is really Richard Ford), who got a Federal Express package containing two videotapes, a letter and two computer discs. He took the tape home last Tuesday night and watched it. On Wednesday he came to work at the Interact Entertainment Group in Beverly Hills, California, which had employed Higher Source, the cult's Web-page design service. Rio told his boss, Nick Matzorkis, that he was convinced his former associates were all dead. Rio and Matzorkis drove to the house, and Rio went inside. When he came out, says Matzorkis, he was "white as a sheet." They notified the San Diego sheriff's office, whose deputies came in expecting a minor emergency at most and found themselves removing 39 corpses in what was about to become a media circus.

When Matzorkis and Rio finally watched the video together with the sheriff's deputies in the middle of the night, they were stunned by what they saw. The cult members were not just unthreatening in life, they were mild in death. Says Matzorkis: "They were sharing their joy and glee. The excitement really showed." (In the meantime, Matzorkis has tied up the rights to a TV movie of the week.)

The farewell tape looks like a garden party of the apocalypse, with the California sun shining and the trees in the mansion's backyard blowing in a gentle breeze. The speakers talked as if they were looking forward to a holiday, not a vodka-phenobarb cocktail. Said one woman: "We couldn't be happier about what we're about to do." Said a man in his 40s: "I've been looking forward to this for so long." Said a woman, laughing slightly: "People in the world who thought I'd completely lost my marbles--they're not right. I couldn't have made a better choice."

One of the confusing things about this tape was actually telling the victims apart: all with close-cropped hair and unlined skin, it was easy to see why sheriffs originally thought all the dead were young men. But shedding any signs of sexuality was integral to the cult, and six of the men, including Applewhite, went so far as to get castrated years ago, which may help explain the odd passivity or gentleness the victims exhibited. "In order to be a member of that Kingdom, one had to overcome his humanness, which included his sexuality," said a former cult member, Michael.

The victims' kin, though, had little trouble recognizing their long-lost, but suddenly gone, relatives. Mary Ann Craig, whose husband John, 62, left her and their six children in Durango, Colorado, in 1975 to join the cult, says she had been waiting for the news of his death for 22 years. "How can you explain something like this?" she asks. On Friday, Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek, went on CNN's Larry King Live to discuss the death of her brother Thomas Nichols. Nichelle said that her brother "made his choices, and we respect those choices."

The presence among the dead of the brother of a Trekkie demigoddess was only the most startling intersection of reality and science fiction. The cult's work space in Rancho Santa Fe was decorated with posters of alien beings from The X-Files and E.T. On the farewell tape, a cultist even brings up Nichols' oeuvre in explaining his decision to leave behind his human "container": "We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars, it's just, to us, it's just like going on a holodeck. We've been training on a holodeck...[and] now it's time to stop. The game's over. It's time to put into practice what we've learned. We take off the virtual-reality helmet...go back out of the holodeck to reality to be with, you know, the other members on the craft in the heavens."

Most surviving families, however, felt differently, not quite able to see the new dimension their relatives had vanished into. "We are going through a tough time," said a relative of Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, a 39-year-old Cincinnati woman who left her five children (the youngest of whom were infant twins) to join the cult last August. "It's not the closure we wanted," said Alice Maeder, whose daughter Gail, 28, started following the cult in 1994 after her Santa Cruz, California, T-shirt shop failed, "but now we know where she is." Added Gail's father Robert: "She's finally coming home."

At least one woman who died in Rancho Santa Fe offers a hint in the farewell videotape that all these people may not have been quite as happy as they seemed: "I don't have any choice but to go for it, because I've been on this planet for 31 years, and there's nothing here for me."