Freezing People is Easy

TV repairmen and astronomy enthusiast Bob Nelson discovers the new science of cryonics, which contends that by lowering the temperature of a person at the time of legal death to -320f, and storing it in capsule filled with liquid nitrogen, will someday allow him to be revived in the future, when science has advanced sufficiently. He learned of cryonics by reading the book The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger. He attends the first California meeting of the Life Extension Foundation. He wasn't sure that they would allow him in, let alone be voted president of the new Cryonics Society of California (CSC). In January 1967, Bob and his team performed the first cryonic suspension, a psychology professor named James Bedford. The freezing generated a great deal of media interest. Bob was overly ambitious. Even though he had no scientific background (in fact he only had a ninth grade education), he gave TV and radio interviews as the president of the CSC. He was a natural. He was young, charismatic, and confident. Older members of the CSC started dying off. Bob froze three of them even though two were unfunded, and kept them stored under dry ice in the garage of the mortician, Joe Klockgether, whom he was working with. Eventually Joe grew impatient, and wanted the bodies out of his mortuary's garage. The last CSC member he froze left $10,000 to the society, which Bob used to install a vault at the Oakwood Memorial Park cemetery in Chatsworth, CA. Bob was approached by a woman, Marie Towers, who's father was being stored in a cryonics capsule in Arizona, where the capsules were manufactured. She was unable to make the monthly payments for the capsule and storage. Bob agreed to pay off the capsule and store it and her father in his vault at a discount rate. What he didn't tell her was that he intended to have a welder open the capsule, and place his other three patients in it. Because of an imperfect weld on the capsule from opening it developed a leak, and the liquid nitrogen boiled off at more than twice the rate it should have. Also, the motor that maintained a vacuum in the capsule that acted as an insulator, kept failing. The repairs were expensive, and the CSC was taking very little money in. Eventually Bob was forced to unplug the capsule and abandon it, leaving the patients within to thaw and decompose. He kept the failure secret. Prior to the capsule failure, Bob picked up two more patients; Mildred Harris, the mother of two adult sons, Terry and Dennis, and a little French Canadian girl, Genevieve De La Poterie. As luck would have it, Bob picked up a second capsule the same way he got the first. It also came with a patient inside. Not learning from the first disaster, he opened this capsule and placed his other patients in it. Bob took a week long trip to Boston, leaving a cemetery groundskeeper keep an eye on the capsule. When he returned, he discovered that the capsule had failed. It was baking hot, and all hope was lost. Bob resigned President of the CSC. The Harris brothers and Marie Towers sued Bob and his mortician, Joe, for failing to maintain their loved ones in perpetuity as promised. The trial was an even bigger circus than the CSC operation, and Bob and Joe lost to the tune of $800,000. After the trial, Bob put everything he had from the trial and his cryonics years into a trunk in his storage facility, and walked away. Thirty years later, Bob, His Wife, and his friend open the trunk, needing the information within to write his memoir. The three take a trip to Arizona, and are given a tour of the Alcor Life extension cryonics facility, a modern facility where Bob's first patient, James Bedford is stored today. As it turns out, Bob's work was not in vane.