Bob Nelson

This is where all Bob's secrets and lies about the bodies finally led.

To Terry Harris making phone calls, writing letters, combing through legal documents.

Somewhere, he figured, there had to be a record, a clue that would tell him what had become of his parents.

He's never found it.

Cryonics carried on without Bob Nelson.

And all these years later, when people in the field tell Bob's story, they call it the Chatsworth disaster.

On Cryonics' discussion boards, he's been labeled a murderer, though of course, all the people he supposedly killed were dead to begin with.

When Bob talks about those years, he says he's gotten a bad rap.

He genuinely seems to feel bad about failing Geneviève and her family and for dragging the mortician, Joe Klockether, through the trial.

But just as emphatically, he'll tell you that his main mistake was caring too much, that the secrets he kept were necessary to keep the project going, and, above all, that the people he froze had donated their bodies under the Anatomical Gift Act.

Bob says a lot depends on your perspective.

If the science of cryonics pans out, it'll be possible to look at Geneviève and Mildred Harris and Helen Klein as casualties of progress, or as Bob calls them, frozen heroes.

Bob's not a rich guy, but he's managed to save $28,000 to pay for his own freezing at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan.

He thinks his odds of reanimation are pretty good.

And in the end, that's the thing that sustains him.

The hope that someday, in 50 years, or 100, or 1,000, he'll wake up in a world he barely recognizes.

A world where Chatsworth wasn't a disaster, but the first imperfect battle in the war that saved us all.