Bob Nelson

Then they sealed the container back up.

It was that simple.

Bob told two confidants about the welder and the four bodies in the tank.

Otherwise, he kept it a secret.

He'd done what he felt he had to do.

And for the moment, what he felt was relief.

He'd steered the car back onto the road, secured a working capsule for the four people in his care, and a legal vault to keep it in.

From here on out, he'd be practical and businesslike.

No more soft-hearted exceptions.

No more pro bono freezings.

But the capsule Bob had pinned his hopes on needed round-the-clock attention.

When you're dealing with equipment that's supposed to last hundreds of years, you want the kind of engineering that goes into building a space capsule.

This was not that.

After Bob opened up the tank, it was never quite the same.

The vacuum was shot, and the liquid nitrogen would boil away to nothing.

Bob was constantly refilling the tank with coolant at a few hundred bucks a pop.

Sometimes he wrote checks from his personal bank account.

Sometimes the checks would bounce.

Meanwhile, he was flying around the country giving lectures, showing off artists' renderings of the futuristic cryonics facility he planned to build, appearing on radio and TV talk shows, Regis Philbin, Phil Donahue.

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