On my final day in Phoenix, Max More and the Alcor team were occupied with the matters of the urgent and unexpected cryopreservation, but there was still one person in Arizona I wanted to meet. So, I took a drive out to the desert to visit Dave Pizer, an entrepreneur and an original. In many ways the whole of the cryonics story is wrapped up in this one bear-shouldered man with the kempt hair and thick beard of a Civil War general. Once a breeder of rare Friesian horses, not to mention a world-class tournament poker player, these days he presides over a musty resort of cabins with heart-shaped hot tubs in the remote high desert town of Mayer and, upon finally grasping that my name was Josh and not Chuck or George, said, "That's kind of a juvenile name for a mature guy like you" (then asked what it was short for). "One day I decided I didn't want to die," Pizer began, once he'd adjusted his hearing aid and settled into a folding chair in a cluttered room upstairs from his resort's lobby that he plans to turn into the world's first-ever cryonics museum. "I was 11 or 12 and it struck me profoundly that I was going to die someday and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it." Cut to 1971, when Pizer, who had gotten his bachelor's degree in philosophy while also running a thriving automobile upholstery business he took over from his father, made a sales call at a big Phoenix car dealership. There, one of the shop guys was making fun of a story he'd just read in the paper. It was about a company in California that froze people when they died so that they could be stored away until technology came along to revive, cure them, and offer eternal life. In the eyes of the mechanic, the story was ridiculous. But to Pizer, it was a revelation. "The idea just instantly made sense," he said. "It was probably the most important thing a human could do at the time to have a chance to avoid being dead forever. That's a long time." When his insurance guy refused to write a policy to pay for the membership, Pizer threatened to take away his company's business and the agent found a way to work around his misgivings. Even in the days before Fedex, Pizer managed to get his forms signed and in the hands of Alcor in a matter of days. "I was the fastest signup in the history of cryonics," Pizer said, proudly. "I probably still hold that record." Pizer eventually became Alcor's Vice President, and served in that capacity for 11 years, during which time he was instrumental in moving the operation to Phoenix from Southern California. It got the company out of earthquake danger, and also a tenuous political environment, where the Riverside County coroner was a persistent threat. Being around Los Angeles, Pizer said, "was a very dangerous place to be, with earthquakes, civil unrest and terrorist attacks. You don't think of [the risk of a catastrophic event] in a normal lifespan, but if you have to be in a frozen state for three or four hundred years, the odds go up." Pizer has done as much thinking about cryonics as anyone on Earth. Back in 2006, he made the front page of the Wall Street Journal , above the fold and illustrated with one of those little cross-hatch drawings of his amply bearded head, for his efforts to create a "personal revival trust" that would protect his estate and set a legal precedent for other wealthy cryonics patients, to ensure they wake up to a flush bank account that had been shielded from descendents and governments. Pizer told thatthat, with the compounding interest on the $10 million in assets he planned to fritter away, he could wake up after a century as "the richest man in the world." As a student of philosophy, Pizer is reflexively cynical. He asked if I was familiar with Pascal's Wager, a line of reasoning concocted by the Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal that was used to push skeptical converts off the fence and onto Team Jesus. The basic idea was to say that, Hey, here's what we believe: If you're a good person, and you die, you go to Heaven, an awesome, beatific place where you live forever in bliss. Even if you suspect Pascal is full of shit, there's little downside. "If you accept Christianity and it's all just a story, you're dead anyhow," Pizer said. "You have nothing to lose." To Pizer, the question shouldn't be, Why take cryonics seriously? It's: Why not take a flyer on it? "It just costs a little bit, especially for young people — your dues and life insurance are probably less than a smoking habit — and if it ends up working, you can come back and live forever." As a man in his early seventies, Pizer has far fewer days ahead of him than behind, and I wondered if he was disappointed that the movement he'd supported for most of his adult life hadn't yet caught the public's imagination. "I'm disappointed, but on the other hand, there's no objective way to assume it's going slow," he answered. "Objectively it may be going faster than a speeding bullet when you compare what we had to start with and how complex the problem is." He could be right. Maybe it's only progressing slowly in current human lifespan context. Maybe one day they'll thaw people as simply as pot roasts and everyone will think, "I can't believe how quickly we accomplished that!" "I wish that they could improve the speed of aging reversal so I didn't have to spend a few hundred years in a can," Pizer said. "I'm not looking forward to that." I asked him the question I'd asked Max More, Aubrey De Grey, Todd Huffman, and pretty much everyone else I'd interviewed. What is the tipping point for cryonics? When do we start to see it as a legitimate alternative to death, with large numbers of people, and not just a few crackpots — pardon me, mavericks — signing up? He didn't hesitate. "When they bring the first guy back." The problem, as we just established, is that if this can actually be done, it might be hundreds of years in the future. Which means anyone who decides to take the leap of the faith in the meantime is left with what I'll call Pizer's Wager. He thinks you're nuts not to take it. "We knew before we went to the moon that it could be done. It wasn't against the laws of physics. Can you reverse aging so people can live forever, virtually, as long as they have a place to live in? Sure, why not? What is aging? It's just an engineering problem." Pizer is sensitive to the notion that some people view cryonics as a cult, and that Alcor is only interested in exploiting a fear of mortality for financial gain. He made a point to say that is no longer associated with Alcor in any official capacity. "I'm just a rank and file member. But for a guy that's been around for 40 years or so, studying and reading and going to college and working in the field, "I feel certain that cryonics can work. I didn't say it would work because there are other outside factors." Humans could destroy the planet. The government could ban cryonics. Or a group of religious zealots, fearing the growing influence of a competing movement, could do something rash. Back in Phoenix, the body of the delinquent nightclub owner was just settling into its new stainless steel capsule. After many hours of fingernail-gnawing at Alcor, the corpse was retrieved in the field, flown to Phoenix, and successfully cryopreserved, at least as far as anyone could tell. The mortuary in Las Vegas had helped matters by injecting heparin, and getting the body on ice, quickly. More than 24 hours passed, but Max More and his team had done the best they could under the circumstances, and so this nonagenarian from Nevada, a full body cryo, became the 112th person to take up residence in the stainless steel canisters at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Henceforth, he will be known as patient number A-2628. And considering that fewer than 250 people (including the idea's godfather, Robert Ettinger, who became the 106th person frozen at the Cryonics Institute in 2011, when he died at the age of 92, as well as his mother and two former wives) have chosen this path in the whole of human history, it seems fair still to call them cryonauts — they are the extremely few intrepid souls who have taken a path that might be slightly less final than death. Someday in the not-too-distant future Dave Pizer will join them, and in his final breaths, after taking in the world he hopes to one day see again, he might well say a little prayer. Near the end of our conversation, Pizer admitted that he's hedging the bet he already hedged, because, hey, we're talking about death here. "I'm not anti-religious," he said. In the occasion that he's read things completely wrong, Pizer has left room in his mind for more than one wager. "I hope there's a God," he said. "And that he's a nice guy, and very forgiving."