Frozen future.

"THE stroke of death," claimed Cleopatra, "is as a lover's pinch." Well, perhaps: if you are about to be desposed and taken captive. But for most people the arrival of the grim reaper is a tragedy, a disaster, and, in this most advanced of countries, something of an insult. We eat broccoli, we transplant hearts, but in the end people just keep on dying -- more than two million of them each year. Other civilizations have claimed that nothing can be done, but for us to accept this seems, well, un-American. Each death (other than those of the executed, of course) represents a technological failure, a rebuke to Uncle Sam.

But it ain't over till it's over and, some say, an answer is at hand. Yankee ingenuity has done it again and come up with cryonics. Put simply, this involves deep-freezing the recently deceased in the hope that some cure for what killed them will be found in the future. The idea is not new. Benjamin Franklin wanted to be "immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, till that time [when he could] be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country."

It was not to be, but Franklin's dream, at least, lived on, to be revived as "cryonics" in the early 1960s. Cryonics: It's a goofy name and a wildly optimistic idea, but one suited to its era. It was the age of the Jetsons and the transistor, a time when science seemed to be sweeping all before it. Freeze people? Why not? James Bedford agreed, and on January 12, 1967 this 73-year-old psychology professor was frozen ("suspended") shortly after his death. Cryonics had found its Henry Hudson, perhaps even its Columbus. Doctor Bedford is, after all, still with us and "apparently" in good shape, ending up with the cryonicists of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation after many years in a mini-warehouse.

This is only appropriate. Alcor is the industry leader. Its Scottsdale, Arizona, facility is home to 32 "patients," almost as many, it estimates, as are held by its three competitors combined. These numbers exclude the occasional freelancer as well as the two Canadians interred in the permafrost, but that, says Steve Bridge, Alcor's likable president, "is just cold burial."

Cryonics is much more than that. To start with, it's a lot less sedate. There is no time to linger weeping around the deathbed. Instead, an Alcor Emergency Response Team will spring into action with CPR support to maintain blood flow to your brain in an attempt to reduce ischemic damage. Your body is rapidly cooled down and unless you have chosen to die in Scottsdale (which is best) you will be put into a special traveling pack (make sure it doesn't leak -- this can cause trouble with the authorities) after a procedure involving preservatives, ice, and Maalox. On arrival, a glycerol-based solution will be pumped through your system to reduce the tissue damage caused by freezing. Once you are thoroughly perfused you are ready to be cooled down to - 196* C. Oh, there's just one other thing. If you have elected for "neurosuspension" only, this is the moment that they cut off your head.

"Deep cooling" then follows, at the end of which you are lowered head first, or head only, into a large stainless steel cylinder. There, in a quiet back room in Alcor's suburban office block, you await your destiny, a cryonaut in an unmarked metal can, kept cold by occasionally replenished liquid nitrogen. Pcre-Lachaise it is not, but then it is not meant to be. Scottsdale is no final resting place, but a way station on the return to life. Or at least that is the idea.

But how good an idea is it? Conventional cryobiologists, the people who freeze sperm or the odd body part, are skeptical. They point to the extensive cell damage associated both with death and the degree of cooling required for a whole body or even a head. As their Darth Vader, Arthur Rowe of NYU's School of Medicine, has explained, "believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who has been frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a cow." In addition, even if enough cells can be revived, it is also far from clear, to say the least, that the patient's mind would have been preserved.

Well, if cryonics is another junk science, its practitioners differ from the parapsychology crowd in one crucial respect: the claims they make are fairly modest. As one Alcor leaflet is careful to say, "we don't know if what we are doing will work." They can, and they do, point to signs of real progress in cryo-preservation, while touting a future nanotechnology as the key to repairing damaged cells in, say, the next "5 to 150 years." Even today, they note, we regularly "revive" people who previous generations would have abandoned. Meanwhile, James Bedford sleeps on, and no frozen dogs have yet come back from the dead (that's an urban legend, as is, while we are on the subject, the freezing of Walt Disney). Will Alcor succeed in the end? Talking binarily, Steve Bridge reckons that the odds are "either one or nothing," which sounds better than the New York State Lottery.

The trouble is that betting on cryonics is rather more expensive. There are annual dues to pay and when the, ahem, moment comes, a neurosuspension will set you back $50,000; "whole body" will cost $120,000. Alcor's 390 living members don't seem to mind. Much of the money goes into a patient-care fund, which is essential. Illiquid cryonicists can, as history shows, lead to liquid patients. Alcor itself is not-for-profit and looks it. The facility is spartan, the decor basic (framed pictures of the suspended), the staff underpaid.

To understand what motivates them look no further than the USS Enterprise proudly displayed in one office. These people are science's samurai, gung-ho garage tinkerers in the Orville and Wilbur tradition. The only doctor on the premises is dead, although they do have a veterinary surgeon and a nurse or two to help out. Steve Bridge himself is a librarian by profession. "I know where to look things up," he says brightly. Rationalists by inclination, most cryonicists are not religious. Their faith is the future, an Asimovian dream of scientific progress, often accompanied (this may ring a bell with Newt watchers) by a strong libertarian streak, a blend, in short, of Ayn Rand and Captain Kirk.

Ayn Rand herself "knew about" cryonics (but, no, she's not frozen either). As she would have predicted, officialdom has done its best to be difficult, notably in Riverside, California, where a series of absurd events led to Dora Kent (or at least her head) becoming the movement's Rosa Parks. Meanwhile, right-to-die issues bubble ominously below the surface. The final stages of a disease can destroy the very cells that Alcor is trying to preserve. So, argued one cancer patient, why not end things more quickly and allow the cryonicists to get to work? He lost his case, which reached a California Appellate Court and, fictionalized, an episode of L.A. Law, but, happily, survived.

So, doubtless, will cryonics. And so it should. Its devotees may seem a little nutty, and so pro-life that they want another, but that's their call, even at $120,000 a throw. It will probably never work, but, as cryonicists see it, what is the alternative? As Steve Bridge puts it, "The nice thing about life is that you never know what is going to happen next. The problem with death is that you do know what is going to happen next. Nothing."

And then he smiles. Confidently.